Dougist Notes

Quick posts from Douglas Barone
The piggy-back page to my main site, Dougist.com

November 4, 2011 at 8:03am
home

Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality. In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

— Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality