80% of financial resources in US are controlled by 10% of its population.

Our admirably good-hearted Iranian despot was anticipated in his observation by Vilfredo Pareto, who in 1906 noticed that about 20% of Italians held 80% of Italy's wealth. Similar proportions have since been noticed in many societies around the world throughout the past century, among them the United States today. (In 2007, the wealthiest 20% of Americans owned 84.6% of the nation's total wealth, as opposed to just financial wealth, says a UC-Santa Cruz sociologist. [1])

The phenomenon of 20% of a population accounting for 80% of a quantity is quite widespread, and not only in economics. For example, in classifying life-forms with binomial nomenclature, about 80% of all species are in "largest" 20% of genera; about 80% of the world's oil reserves are in the largest 20% of oil fields; about 80% of the grains of sand on a beach are in the lowest two deciles by size; etc. This feature is so common that it's called the "80-20 rule." [2]

Though the mechanism behind this phenomenon remains in most cases a bit of a mystery, in statistical terms the 80-20 rule arises in populations described by a Pareto distribution. [3] The Pareto distribution belongs to the family of power-law distributions, whose functional forms have an in-built self-similarity; the 80-20 rule applies even to itself. So the wealthiest 4% (20% of 20%) of the population owns about 64% (80% of 80%) of America's wealth, and so on.

1. See esp. Table 1 at http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

I find these kind of statements pointless. Given any thing that is not distributed equally, it is mathematically necessary that the top N% of the people who have that thing have more than N% of that thing.

For instance, the fattest 10% of the population have more than 10% of the total weight of the population. The top 10% promiscuous women have more than 10% of the total sex. The top 10% of authors by number of books published have more than 10% of the books published. And so on and so on.

Best explanation I've ever read:

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

financial industry has the capacity for 10 facebook like startups - currently its all Five big banks, five big IB/trading, wall.st banks etc.

There is huge opportunity here for innovation in finance industry, as all(most) of its functionalities can be reduced to computation.

Obviously the Wall.St insiders dont want any innovation, they are glad earning avg 500K-to-mil total compensation for starters. (3 years in, you could potentially make min. mil total compensation)

Dont understand why all the startups/ventures in silicon valley go after social networking - how many groupons, or photo/message/social do we need ?