Related papers: Growth and inequalities in a physicist's view
The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…
The article discusses the controversy over infinite growth. It analyzes the two dominant perspectives on economic growth and finds them based on a limited and subjective view of reality. An examination of the principal aspects of economic…
In the context of a large class of stochastic processes used to describe the dynamics of wealth growth, we prove a set of inequalities establishing necessary and sufficient conditions in order to avoid infinite wealth concentration. These…
Socio-economic inequalities are manifested in different aspects of our social life. We discuss various aspects, beginning with the evolutionary and historical origins, and discussing the major issues from the social and economic point of…
Functions or 'functionings' enable to give a structure to any activity and their combinations constitute the capabilities which characterize economic assets such as work utility. The basic law of supply and demand naturally emerges from…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this…
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…
Economic growth is unpredictable unless demand is quantified. We solve this problem by introducing the demand for unpaid spare time and a user quantity named human capacity. It organizes and amplifies spare time required for enjoying…
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…
Persistent economic competition is often justified as a mechanism of innovation, efficiency, and welfare maximization. Yet empirical evidence across disciplines reveals that competition systematically generates fragility, inequality, and…
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…
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…
This paper casts within a unified economic framework some key challenges for the global economic order: de-globalization; the rising impracticability of global cooperation; and the increasingly confrontational nature of Great Power…
The rising complexity of our terrestrial surrounding is an empirical fact. Details of this process evaded description in terms of physics for long time attracting attention and creating myriad of ideas including non-scientific ones. In this…
The quantitative aspirations of economists and financial analysts have for many years been based on the belief that it should be possible to build models of economic systems - and financial markets in particular - that are as predictive as…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…
A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem…
This paper presents a conceptual model describing the medium and long-term co-evolution of natural and socio-economic subsystems of Earth. An economy is viewed as an out-of-equilibrium dissipative structure that can only be maintained with…
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,…