Related papers: Growth and inequalities in a physicist's view
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. I describe the quantum origin of density perturbations, giving a heuristic derivation of…
Models that explain the economical and political realities of nowadays societies should help all the world's citizens. Yet, the last four years showed that the current models are missing. Here we develop a dynamical society-deciders model…
The excessive compensation packages of CEOs of U.S. corporations in recent years have brought to the foreground the issue of fairness in economics. The conventional wisdom is that the free market for labor, which determines the pay…
This paper develops a theory of competitive equilibrium with indivisible goods based entirely on economic conditions on demand. The key idea is to analyze complementarity and substitutability between bundles of goods, rather than merely…
Central to the official "green growth" discourse is the conjecture that absolute decoupling can be achieved with certain market instruments. This paper evaluates this claim focusing on the role of technology, while changes in GDP…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
We introduce the logistic model of consumption growth, which captures a negative feedback loop preventing an unlimited growth of consumption due to finite biophysical resources of our planet. This simple dynamic model allows for derivation…
I summarize the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by…
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
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 purpose of the paper is five-fold: (a) Argue that the question in the title can be presented in a meaningful manner and that it requires an answer. (b) Discuss the conventional answers and explain why they are unsatisfactory. (c)…
Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…
Macroeconomic theories of growth and wealth distribution have an outsized influence on national and international social and economic policies. Yet, due to a relative lack of reliable, system wide data, many such theories remain, at best,…
A simple generative model of a foraging society generates significant wealth inequalities from identical agents on an equal opportunity landscape. These inequalities arise in both equilibrium and non-equilibrium regimes with some societies…
We present empirical evidence on the relationship between demand shocks and price changes, conditional on returns to scale. We find that in industries with decreasing returns to scale, demand increases (which raise costs) correspond to…
The growth of cities has traditionally been studied from a population perspective, while urban expansion-its spatial growth-has often been approached qualitatively. However, characterizing and modeling this spatial expansion is crucial,…
This paper analyzes the equilibrium distribution of wealth in an economy where firms' productivities are subject to idiosyncratic shocks, returns on factors are determined in competitive markets, dynasties have linear consumption functions…
It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
Knowing and modelling the migration phenomena and especially the social and economic consequences have a theoretical and practical importance, being related to their consequences for development, economic progress (or as appropriate,…