Regulation and Pareto.

Two things are evident: The first is that thousands of years of experience has proved that you cannot regulate against poor behaviour. The tragedy in Melbourne last week shows that very clearly. The second is that strong regulation only slows up those with high moral standards, social psychopaths are not affected.

The other side of the story is from Pareto. The first 20% of regulations gives you 80% of the result. This was seen clearly in the exercise of flattening the curve. The initial restrictions worked well and immediately. Later tightening of the restrictions seems to have had little further effect. Taking that one step further, New Zealand has much stronger restrictions but does not seem to have performed that much better. Likewise, Queensland has been a lot looser than Victoria but the results are not that different.

Except for a few in Sydney that seem to worship their waters I believe you could lift all the restrictions except for the 1.5m social distancing and the vast majority of the community will comply. Effectively we have had the education and now the bulk will work with what they have learned and do what they need to do to protect their loved ones. 

Using COVID-19 regulations is a great example of what happens. Behaviour is changed in those where it is going to change, and as for the rest, they will never change anyway. Increasing the regulations only penalises the majority and does nothing to rope in the rest.

This same principle applies to all regulation. 

There is another side to Pareto. 20% of the population cause 80% of the problems. There was a well known management theory that insisted you fire the bottom 20% every year, it didn’t work. All the theories are great, but they cannot be taken in isolation.