Related papers: The Struggle with Inequality
The relevance of Adam Smith for understanding human morality and sociality is recognized in the growing interest in his work on moral sentiments among scholars of various academic backgrounds. But, paradoxically, Adam Smith's theory of…
The article examines how institutions, automation, unemployment and income distribution interact in the context of a neoclassical growth model where profits are interpreted as a surplus over costs of production. Adjusting the model to the…
Adam Smith's inquiry into the emergence and stability of the self-organization of the division of labor in commodity production and exchange is considered using statistical equilibrium methods from statistical physics. We develop a…
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…
Macroeconomics essentially discusses macroeconomic phenomena from the perspectives of various schools of economic thought, each of which takes different views on how macroeconomic agents make decisions and how the corresponding markets…
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…
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…
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…
The empirical literature on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth has produced highly heterogeneous and often conflicting results. This paper investigates the sources of this heterogeneity using a meta-analytic…
The first part of this paper is a brief survey of the approaches to economic inequality based on ideas from statistical physics and kinetic theory. These include the Boltzmann kinetic equation, the time-reversal symmetry, the ergodicity…
This paper reviews recent attempts at modelling inequality of wealth as an emergent phenomenon of interacting-agent processes. We point out that recent models of wealth condensation which draw their inspiration from molecular dynamics have,…
The growing disconnection of the majority of population from mathematics is becoming a phenomenon that is increasingly difficult to ignore. This paper attempts to point to deeper roots of this cultural and social phenomenon. It concentrates…
For Adam Smith, wealth was related to the division of labor. As people and firms specialize in different activities, economic efficiency increases, suggesting that development is associated with an increase in the number of individual…
I develop a simple Schumpeterian agent-based model where the entry and exit of firms, their productivity and markup, the birth of new industries and the social structure of the population are endogenous and use it to study the causes of…
This article is a supplement to my main contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Complexity Economics (2023). On the basis of three recent papers, it presents an unconventional perspective on economic inequality from a statistical physics…
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century puts forth a logically consistent explanation for changes in income and wealth inequality patterns. However, while rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its…
Neoclassical economics has two theories of competition between profit-maximizing firms (Marshallian and Cournot-Nash) that start from different premises about the degree of strategic interaction between firms, yet reach the same result,…
This book starts from the basic questions that had been raised by the founders of Economic theory, Smith, Ricardo, and Marx: what makes the value of commodities, what are production, exchange, money and incomes like profits, wages and…
Mathematical challenges punctuate the history of early modern mathematics. While cultural historians have attempted to contextualize these challenges among contemporary practices, in particular duels or advertisements in a competitive…
There is a science of science and an informal economics of economics, but there is not a cohesive sociology of sociology. We turn the central findings and theoretical lenses of the sociological tradition and the sociological study of…