Related papers: Socio-economic inequalities: a statistical physics…
Social inequality is a topic of interest since ages, and has attracted researchers across disciplines to ponder over it origin, manifestation, characteristics, consequences, and finally, the question of how to cope with it. It is manifested…
The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the means to…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
We review the possibilities and difficulties for statistical physicists if they apply their methods to biology, economics, or sociology.
Econophysics embodies the recent upsurge of interest by physicists into financial economics, driven by the availability of large amount of data, job shortage in physics and the possibility of applying many-body techniques developed in…
The conventional economic approaches explore very little about the dynamics of the economic systems. Since such systems consist of a large number of agents interacting nonlinearly they exhibit the properties of a complex system. Therefore…
It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…
A brief overview of the models and data analyses of income, wealth, consumption distributions by the physicists, are presented here. It has been found empirically that the distributions of income and wealth possess fairly robust features,…
This is an invited article for the Discussion and Debate special issue of The European Physical Journal Special Topics on the subject "Can Economics Be a Physical Science?" The first part of the paper traces the personal path of the author…
I discuss economic and social sources of inequality and elaborate on the role of social networks in inequality, economic immobility, and economic inefficiencies. The lens of social networks clarifies how the entanglement of people's…
Econophysics is a new area developed recently by the cooperation between economists, mathematicians and physicists. It's not a tool to predict future prices of stocks and exchange rates. It applies idea, method and models in Statistical…
The fluctuations in nonequilibrium systems are under intense theoretical and experimental investigation. Topical ``fluctuation relations'' describe symmetries of the statistical properties of certain observables, in a variety of models and…
This editorial opens the special issues that the Journal of Statistical Physics has dedicated to the growing field of statistical physics modeling of social dynamics. The issues include contributions from physicists and social scientists,…
Methods of statistical physics have proven valuable for studying the evolution of cooperation in social dilemma games. However, recent empirical research shows that cooperative behavior in social dilemmas is only one kind of a more general…
A critical examination of some basic conceptual issues in classical statistical mechanics is attempted, with a view to understanding the origins, structure and statuts of that discipline. Due attention is given to the interplay between…
The origins of Sociophysics are discussed from a personal testimony. I trace back its history to the late seventies. My twenty years of activities and research to establish and promote the field are reviewed. In particular the conflicting…
We review an emerging body of work by physicists addressing questions of economic organization and function. We suggest that, beyond simply employing models familiar from physics to economic observables, remarkable regularities in economic…
An heuristic model of the society, as an assembly of weakly interacting individuals, is discussed. The model allows to connect macroscopic phenomena with features of relations between individuals. Addressing to the problem of inequality, a…