Related papers: Growth and inequalities in a physicist's view
Economic growth and the growth of human population in the past 2,000,000 years are extensively examined. Data are found to be in a clear contradiction of the currently accepted explanations of the mechanism of growth, which revolve around…
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…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with 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…
Rising inequality is a critical concern for societies worldwide, to the extent that emerging high-growth economies such as China have identified common prosperity as a central goal. However, the mechanisms by which digital disruptions…
During its history, the ultimate goal of economics has been to develop similar frameworks for modeling economic behavior as invented in physics. This has not been successful, however, and current state of the process is the neoclassical…
The accelerating expansion of the universe presents an exciting, fundamental challenge to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. I highlight some of the outstanding challenges in both developing theoretical models and…
In the pursuit of ever increasing efficiency and growth, our economies have evolved to remarkable degrees of complexity, with nested production processes feeding each other in order to create products of greater sophistication from less…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
Recent developments in cosmology suggest that much of the universe is in a state of explosive, accelerated expansion, called inflation. We live in a "bubble" where inflation has ended, and other bubbles with diverse properties are…
Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…
One 'problem' with the 21st century world, particularly the economic and business worlds, is the phenomenal and increasing number of interconnections between economic agents (consumers, firms, banks, markets, national economies). This…
Economic activities favor mutual geographical proximity and concentrate spatially to form cities. In a world of diminishing transport costs, however, the advantage of physical proximity is fading, and the role of cities in the economy may…
Economy is demanding new models, able to understand and predict the evolution of markets. To this respect, Econophysics offers models of markets as complex systems, that try to comprehend macro-, system-wide states of the economy from the…
In a brief reflection on the principles of human society, P. A. M. Dirac articulated a structural tension between two widely affirmed norms: that it is good and natural for parents to improve the prospects of their own children, and that…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public goods, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the common good (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although…
Once carbon emission neutrality and other sustainability goals have been achieved, a widespread assumption is that economic growth at current rates can be sustained beyond the 21st century. However, even if we achieve these goals, this…
A simple heuristic model, including the multiple exchanges between economic agents, is used to explain the mechanism of emerging and maintenance of social inequality in the market economy. The model allows calculating a density function of…
Our conventional understanding of space-time, as well as our notion of geometry, break down once we attempt to describe the very early stages of the evolution of our universe. The extreme physical conditions near the Big Bang necessitate an…
We propose a stochastic map model of economic dynamics. In the last decade, an array of observations in economics has been investigated in the econophysics literature, a major example being the universal features of inequality in terms of…