taxes. Use in biology Pareto optimisation has also been studied in biological processes. In bacteria, genes were shown to be either inexpensive to make (resource-efficient) or easier to read (translation-efficient). Natural selection acts to push highly expressed genes towards the Pareto frontier for resource use and translational efficiency. Genes near the Pareto frontier were also shown to evolve more slowly (indicating that they are providing a selective advantage). Common misconceptions It would be incorrect to treat Pareto efficiency as equivalent to societal optimization, as the latter is a normative concept, which is a matter of interpretation that typically would account for the consequence of degrees of inequality of distribution. An example would be the interpretation of one school district with low property tax revenue versus another with much higher revenue as a sign that more equal distribution occurs with the help of government redistribution. Criticism Some commentators contest that Pareto efficiency could potentially serve as an ideological tool. With it implying that capitalism is self-regulated thereof, it is likely that the embedded structural problems such as unemployment would be treated as deviating from the equilibrium or norm, and thus neglected or discounted. Pareto efficiency does not require a totally equitable distribution of wealth, which is another aspect that draws in criticism. An economy in which a wealthy few hold the vast majority of resources can be Pareto-efficient. A simple example is the distribution of a pie among three people. The most equitable distribution would assign one third to each person. However, the assignment of, say, a half section to each of two individuals and none to the third is also Pareto-optimal despite not being equitable, because none of the recipients could be made better off without decreasing someone else's share; and there are many other such distribution examples. An example of a Pareto-inefficient distribution of the pie would be allocation of a quarter of the pie to each of the three, with the remainder discarded. The liberal paradox elaborated by Amartya Sen shows that when people have preferences about what other people do, the goal of Pareto efficiency can come into conflict with the goal of individual liberty. Lastly, it is proposed that Pareto efficiency to some extent inhibited discussion of other possible criteria of efficiency. As Wharton School professor Ben Lockwood argues, one possible reason is that any other efficiency criteria established in the neoclassical domain will reduce to