Related papers: The Struggle with Inequality
Over the last decades, the distribution of income and wealth has been deteriorating in many countries, leading to increased inequalities within and between societies. This tendency has revived the interest in the subject greatly, yet it…
Social inequality is a topic of interest since ages, and has attracted researchers across disciplines to ponder over it origin, manifestation, characteristics, consequences, and finally, the question of how to cope with it. It is manifested…
I discuss economic and social sources of inequality and elaborate on the role of social networks in inequality, economic immobility, and economic inefficiencies. The lens of social networks clarifies how the entanglement of people's…
This article is a response to the recent Worrying Trends in Econophysics critique written by four respected theoretical economists. Two of the four have written books and papers that provide very useful critical analyses of the shortcomings…
These notes discuss several topics in neoclassical economics and alternatives, with an aim of reviewing fundamental issues in modeling economic markets. I start with a brief, non-rigorous summary of the basic Arrow-Debreu model of general…
Inequality and its consequences are the subject of intense recent debate. Using a simplified model of the economy, we address the relation between inequality and liquidity, the latter understood as the frequency of economic exchanges.…
Growing economic inequalities are observed in several countries throughout the world. Following Pareto, the power-law structure of these inequalities has been the subject of much theoretical and empirical work. But their nonequilibrium…
The last half-dozen years have seen The American Statistician publish well-argued and provocative calls to change our thinking about statistics and how we teach it, among them Brown and Kass (2009), Nolan and Temple-Lang (2010), and Legler…
We investigate, at the fundamental level, the questions of `why', `when' and `how' one could or should reach out to poor and vulnerable people to support them in the absence of governmental institutions. We provide a simple and new approach…
Social and economic inequality is a plague of the XXI Century. It is continuously widening, as the wealth of a relatively small group increases and, therefore, the rest of the world shares a shrinking fraction of resources. This situation…
Economic inequality emerges from the interplay between regional growth-rate differences and the interaction network that couples regions. We propose a minimal income-dynamics model, where heterogeneity is governed by growth-rate…
Many economic theories have been introduced over the course of history to articulate our understanding of the economy. Classical theories by Adam Smith and David Ricardo's Comparative Advantage have been foundational for the last century's…
The central problems of Development Economics are the explanation of the gross disparities in the global distribution, $\cal{D}$, of economic performance, $\cal{E}$, and the persistence, $\cal{P}$, of said distribution. Douglass North…
The last twenty-five years have seen the development of a significant literature within the subfield of econophysics which attempts to model economic inequality as an emergent property of stochastic interactions among ensembles of agents.…
The recent book by T. Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) promoted the important issue of wealth inequality. In the last twenty years, physicists and mathematicians developed models to derive the wealth distribution using discrete…
We propose in this work a kinetic wealth-exchange model of economic growth by introducing saving as a non consumed fraction of production. In this new model, which starts also from microeconomic arguments, it is found that economic…
The impact of rising consumption on wealth inequality remains an open question. Here we revisit and extend the Social Architecture of Capitalism agent-based model proposed by Ian Wright, which reproduces stylized facts of wealth and income…
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…
Classical Marxism and the algebra of revolution were formulated within the ontological constraints of 19th-century Newtonian materialism-a world of discrete, predictable, billiard-ball interactions. However, the 20th-century transitions in…
Economists often define the middle class based on income distribution, yet selecting which segment constitutes the `middle' is essentially arbitrary. This paper proposes a definition of the middle class based solely on the properties of…