Related papers: Dynamics of contentment
How should well-being be prioritised in society, and what trade-offs are people willing to make between fairness and personal well-being? We investigate these questions using a stated preference experiment with a nationally representative…
In contemporary society, the effective utilization of public resources remains a subject of significant concern. A common issue arises from defectors seeking to obtain an excessive share of these resources for personal gain, potentially…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
If wealthier people have advantages in having higher returns than poor, inequality will unequivocally increase, but is equal opportunity enough to prevent it? According to several models in economics and econophysics, no. They all display…
We study the wealth distribution of UK households through a detailed analysis of data from wealth surveys and rich lists, and propose a non-linear Kesten process to model the dynamics of household wealth. The main features of our model are…
Two critical questions about intergenerational outcomes are: one, whether significant barriers or traps exist between different social or economic strata; and two, the extent to which intergenerational outcomes do (or can be used to) affect…
Correlations between high life expectancy and low lifespan inequality are frequently observed. A recent article seeks to explain this phenomenon by proposing that a mortality improvement maps to life expectancy and relative lifespan…
What predicts the evolution over time of subjective well-being? We correlate the trends of subjective well-being with the trends of social capital and/or GDP. We find that in the long and medium run social capital largely predicts the…
We present a mathematical simplification for the evolutionary dynamics of a heritable trait within a two-sex population. This trait is assumed to control the timing of sex-specific life-history events, such as the age of sexual maturity and…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Wealth taxes are a frequently proposed policy within the post-growth literature, but evaluations of their alignment with post-growth goals, and empirical estimates of their potential effects, are lacking. We contribute to this literature by…
Taxes are an essential and uniformly applied institution for maintaining modern societies. However, the levels of taxation remain an intensive debate topic among citizens. If each citizen contributes to common goals, a minimal tax would be…
Many models of market dynamics make use of the idea of wealth exchanges among economic agents. A simple analogy compares the wealth in a society with the energy in a physical system, and the trade between agents to the energy exchange…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
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…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
Low total fertility rates throughout the world have lead to concerns about economic growth, military security, international political power, environment impacts, and quality of life. Overall total fertility rates of today's societies are…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
A model based on first-degree family relations network is used to describe the wealth distribution in societies. The network structure is not a-priori introduced in the model, it is generated in parallel with the wealth values through…