Related papers: Universal patterns of inequality
This Chapter is written for the Festschrift celebrating the 70th birthday of the distinguished economist Duncan Foley from the New School for Social Research in New York. This Chapter reviews applications of statistical physics methods,…
This article is a supplement to my main contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Complexity Economics (2023). On the basis of three recent papers, it presents an unconventional perspective on economic inequality from a statistical physics…
We study the global probability distribution of energy consumption per capita around the world using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) for 1980-2010. We find that the Lorenz curves have moved up during this time…
The first part of this paper is a brief survey of the approaches to economic inequality based on ideas from statistical physics and kinetic theory. These include the Boltzmann kinetic equation, the time-reversal symmetry, the ergodicity…
We present the data on wealth and income distributions in the United Kingdom, as well as on the income distributions in the individual states of the USA. In all of these data, we find that the great majority of population is described by an…
This Colloquium reviews statistical models for money, wealth, and income distributions developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. By analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy in physics, it is shown that…
Economic competition between humans leads to income inequality, but, so far, there has been little understanding of underlying quantitative mechanisms governing such a collective behavior. We analyze datasets of household income from 67…
Personal income distribution in the USA has a well-defined two-class structure. The majority of population (97-99%) belongs to the lower class characterized by the exponential Boltzmann-Gibbs ("thermal") distribution, whereas the upper…
The evolution of global income distribution from 1988 to 2018 is analyzed using purchasing power parity exchange rates and well-established statistical distributions. This research proposes the use of two separate distributions to more…
Power-law distributions are common, particularly in social physics. Here, we explore whether power-laws might arise as a consequence of a general variational principle for stochastic processes. We describe communities of 'social particles',…
Mounting evidences are being gathered suggesting that income and wealth distribution in various countries or societies follow a robust pattern, close to the Gibbs distribution of energy in an ideal gas in equilibrium, but also deviating…
In this paper, we attempt to derive the expression of ensemble average internal energy in long-range interaction complex system. Further, the Shannon entropy hypothesis is used to derive the probability distribution function of energy. It…
General equilibrium equations in economics play the same role with many-body Newtonian equations in physics. Accordingly, each solution of the general equilibrium equations can be regarded as a possible microstate of the economic system.…
Several problems arising in Economics and Finance are analyzed using concepts and quantitative methods from Physics. Here is the abridged abstact: Chapter 1: By analogy with energy, the equilibrium probability distribution of money must…
We briefly review statistical models for the probability distribution of money developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. In these models, economic transactions are modeled as random transfers of money between the agents…
In this paper, we propose an optimization-based mechanism to explain power law distributions, where the function that the optimization process is seeking to optimize is derived mathematically, then the behavior and interpretation of this…
This paper offers a two-pronged critique of the empirical investigation of the income distribution performed by physicists over the past decade. Their finding rely on the graphical analysis of the observed distribution of normalized…
We analyze the cumulative distribution of total personal income of USA counties, and gross domestic product of Brazilian, German and United Kingdom counties, and also of world countries. We verify that generalized exponential distributions,…
The analysis of the USA 2001 income distribution shows that it can be described by at least two main components, which obey the generalized Tsallis statistics with different values of the q parameter. Theoretical calculations using the gas…
The distribution of money is analysed in connection with the Boltzmann distribution of energy in the degenerate states of molecules. Plots of the population density of income distribution for various countries are well reproduced by a Gamma…