> Can we talk about why things are bigger than other things instead of saying it's because of some law of nature?
It's the opposite of a law of nature: it generally doesn't apply to nature which is bounded by physical constraints.
It happens in artificial fields like economy, software engineering, etc. I'm not sure if there's a general principle, but I heard an intuitive explanation for why it happens in software engineering: it's a recursive field. Software is built from smaller software built from even smaller software and so on. This allows almost unbounded complexity (as opposed to e.g. houses, which are not built from tiny houses ad infinitum.)
With unbounded complexity comes fat tails, and therefore the Pareto principle.
Edit: well, thinking about it, it does apply to some things in nature, like the sizes of bodies of water.
It's the opposite of a law of nature: it generally doesn't apply to nature which is bounded by physical constraints.
It happens in artificial fields like economy, software engineering, etc. I'm not sure if there's a general principle, but I heard an intuitive explanation for why it happens in software engineering: it's a recursive field. Software is built from smaller software built from even smaller software and so on. This allows almost unbounded complexity (as opposed to e.g. houses, which are not built from tiny houses ad infinitum.)
With unbounded complexity comes fat tails, and therefore the Pareto principle.
Edit: well, thinking about it, it does apply to some things in nature, like the sizes of bodies of water.