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why are you startled? Have you never heard of the 20/80 rule? It appears in almost every dataset. The top 20% of any set do 80% of the work.

Example: The top 20% of a population owns 80% of the wealth.

And yes, this applies to other occupations as well.

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It's called the Pareto Principle(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle) and it does not need to be a symmetric 80/20 split. 1% of the people own 50% of the wealth is one other application of the same math.

Wikipedia doesn't do narrative justice to the interesting history behind Pareto. We tried to correct that in this blog post (http://www.emphatic.co/blog/know-stuff-think-shouldnt/).

Yes and even among the 80% who are useless, they are useful 20% of the time. I work with a few people like that... They either need a challenge, an end date or other creative ways of being motivated.

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