about the genesis of this

theory I suppose is the right way of putting it

when I was about your age

that was back in the

early 80's

or thereabouts

and this was particularly true around 1984 but it was true before that too

every generation has its worries

real or imagined

the primary worry

for people of my generation was nuclear war

and you know it was a genuine worry

at one point many years later

I went down to Arizona

to visit an ICBM, a decommissioned ICBM

nuclear missile silo

and ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missile were, very large rockets

right they

flew at, they could fly half way around the world

it was deep underground and behind very thick

steel doors, it was light green you know that pastel green

that everyone seemed to like in the 1950's

it was like pastel green Star Trek console

that's what it looked like

and ah,

so we went down

out in the yard, it was in the desert, out in the yard there was a very

I would say

magical object

for lack of a better word

and that was the nose cone

for the ICBM

and it was quite big

about that big, about that high, pointed like the point of a bullet

about ¾'s of an inch thick, plastic

you know kind of a resin

and it was designed to melt on re-entry

so that was just sitting there

so that was fairly

thought provoking, let's put it that way

and then we went into

the missile silo

interestingly enough

appended to the front of it, it had been decommissioned under Regan, by the way

in the front of it there was a museum

with

artifacts from the 1980's featuring Reagan

and Gorbachev meeting multiple times

and it was staffed by these

Southern

these Americans from the South who were grandparent age and they were

and they were just super friendly

and you know , they were happy to be in the museum, and it was like going to visit

your grandma's nuclear missile silo

and so it was jarring you know, because it was obviously a portentous

place, and yet it was conjoined with hospitality and welcoming

it was surreal in that manner

anyways we went into the

into the silo

and they ran us through a

simulated launch, so imagine

a panel like this made out of metal except twice as long with another one of these things at the other end 16 feet across or so

basically 1950's technology

but updated and then imagine what you had to do to launch it

was that there was a guy with a key and there was another guy with a key and if I remember correctly the keys were around their necks

although I don't think that they were stored around their necks permanently but

and so to launch the missile you had to put the key in the lock

both of you that was the safety

precaution, had to be two of you

put the key in the lock and hold it for 10 seconds and then

away the missile goes and it wasn't as big, the missile wasn't as big as the rockets that went to the moon

but

but it was plenty big you know the silo itself would have easily been

as wide as this room is

and perhaps larger and many, many, story's tall, you know because it was nested underground

so they ran us through a simulated launch which was

surreal, I would say and then they told us that

someone asked, that the keys were in once

now, they wouldn't tell us when but

you know that would have been during the Cuban missile crisis

because, we were that close

and we were close again at other times, although perhaps not that close

and there seemed to be another peak of

conflict, in 1984

when there was a movie showed at that time called

“The Day After”

which at that time

garnered more views than any movie ever had on TV, and it was

a story about

the aftermath of a nuclear war and the people that were left and it was

pretty realistic and

and pretty frightening, it, it turned out

as I found out later that

that movie was one of things that influenced Ronald Reagan to

put pressure on or negotiate with the Soviets depending on how

you look at it

and so

well then you know 5 years later

the Soviet union collapsed, no one saw that coming

and it really didn't collapse in 1989 in some sense, you know, like

a huge machine like that

doesn't fall apart all at once, it falls apart over time and then at some point it just

becomes unsustainable and topples

and you know, it's like they lost faith in their doctrine

and for good reason

you know that

the system in Russia

the Soviet Union, which was a collection of states,

an empire

and the system that Mao establish in China and

the system that still exists in Korea

as a remnant of the cold war

and systems in South East Asia and in Africa

were all predicated on

Marxist presuppositions

presuppositions that were Utopian in nature

and that

and that posited a Utopian future where

property was held in common and everyone had

enough

and everyone was called upon to do what they could

ight, from each according

to his ability, to each according to his need

which is a lovely sentiment and you can imagine

how it would be attractive

even intellectually, because of course

other systems, all other systems

produce vast disparities in income

it's like a natural law, that's actually

governed by, you can model it

with a distribution called the Pareto distribution, and the Pareto distribution looks like this

it doesn't look like a normal distribution, a lot of you guys have been told about, not, normal distributions and how

many things

many things follow on normal distribution, most things, but that's really

a limited case

you can understand a Pareto distribution if you

you've all played Monopoly I presume

at the beginning

everyone has the same amount of money

we will include property, the same amount of wealth

and then what happens as the game progresses, and really as a function of chance

I mean, I know that you have to use a head a little bit in Monopoly but

the basic rule is just buy everything you can get your hands on

and then trade meanly, something like that

so at the beginning everybody has the same amount

and then as you begin to play

if you had enough players you would develop a normal distribution

because some people would win

relatively consistently and some players lose relatively consistently

and so the money starts to be distributed

in a normal distribution, but

the thing about money, and the thing about lots of things

is that zero is involved

and zero is a weird place

because if you are playing a trading game and you hit zero

then you're done

and so, and it is very hard to recover from zero, and you know

it's really hard to recover, you know when you are doomed in Monopoly

you know, you, you can tell, you've got some resources but

there is going to be some crisis when you land on some hotel

and you are going to get wiped out, you know it, so

there is a point at which you're headed for zero even if you have

something

you know and you might be rescued by,

luck,

but you know when you are doomed

So what happens as you continue to play Monopoly,

more and more people stack up at zero

and fewer and fewer people

have more and more money

and when the game is over

every person has no money and one person has all of it,

now the funny thing about that is

in some sense that is how trading games work,

you know, you got, you might wonder why there is inequality in a society

and it is easy to consider that it's because the society is corrupt

and perhaps,

you know, society is somewhat or horribly corrupt,

that is the variation, there is no

society that is not without its criminal

element, its fixed element

anyways

trading games tend to produce a Pareto distribution so that very many have very little

and a tiny minority have a tremendous amount

that's the 1% that you hear about, right,

and the thing about the 1% is that

it has happened in every society that has ever been studied,

it doesn't really matter what the governmental system is, it certainly

happened under the Soviets, that's for sure

and there was enough people that had enough zero that they just died,

so,

you know, the,

the Utopian dream

was completely un-implementable

for a variety of very complex reasons, one

is that it is very hard to fight against that distribution pattern

when people are trading because

mere statistics will do that, and then there are other things, and

I should tell you as well that the Pareto distribution governs a lot of things, so,

if you look at books, if I remember properly

last year there was something like a million English language books published

and I think that 500 of them sold more than 100,000 copies

which is none, right, that is none, and of that 500 you can be sure

that one of them was by Stephen King

and he took half the money

because like there is 5 authors in the English language who are

on every airport

paperback stand occupying the top

rung and that's massive real estate, right, because it is replicated everywhere,

and because they are so

prominent and because they are no names

when people are in a hurry and want something to read,

they just grab that, and more money goes to those people, so you know,

success breeds success

and failure breeds failure, and it not necessarily linear

and that is a really difficult thing to deal with,

and it is hard on societies, because,

one of the things we do know is that,

you know, as you stretch out the inequality,

you make men, particularly, on the lower end of the distribution,

more and more likely to be aggressive,

it's sort of like, you imagine every man has a threshold for violence,

um, and status is important to men,

not that it isn't important to women but,

it's different,

it's a different kind of status, it's status that is important to

men because it's one of the things that makes them

marketable as partners to women so it actually turns out to be quite important to men

men tend to compete

with one another for status, hierarchy position, and

in a really unequal society,

if you are like a low

rung guy,

then, and you don't have any opportunity to rise because

the society isn't structured

so that there's mobility, then

the more aggressive guys,

tend to turn to criminality, and you know and so you could say

there is a threshold for

criminality,

and the more inequality pressure you put on

a particular area, geographic or political area,

the more inequality pressure you put on it,

the more men slip past that threshold and

into criminality, and you know there have been some pretty good studies done of

drug gangs