scholarly journals Wealth distribution and collective knowledge: a Boltzmann approach

Author(s):  
L. Pareschi ◽  
G. Toscani

We introduce and discuss a nonlinear kinetic equation of Boltzmann type that describes the influence of knowledge in the evolution of wealth in a system of agents that interact through the binary trades, an equation first introduced by Cordier et al. (2005 J. Stat. Phys. 120 , 253–277 ( doi:10.1007/S10955-005-5456-0 )). The trades, which include both saving propensity and the risks of the market, are here modified in the risk and saving parameters, which now are assumed to depend on the personal degree of knowledge. The numerical simulations show that the presence of knowledge has the potential to produce a class of wealthy agents and to account for a larger proportion of wealth inequality.

2020 ◽  
Vol 642 ◽  
pp. L4
Author(s):  
Dana A. Kovaleva ◽  
Marina Ishchenko ◽  
Ekaterina Postnikova ◽  
Peter Berczik ◽  
Anatoly E. Piskunov ◽  
...  

Context. Given the closeness of the two open clusters Collinder 135 and UBC 7 on the sky, we investigate the possibility that the two clusters are physically related. Aims. We aim to recover the present-day stellar membership in the open clusters Cr 135 and UBC 7 (300 pc from the Sun) in order to constrain their kinematic parameters, ages, and masses and to restore their primordial phase space configuration. Methods. The most reliable cluster members are selected with our traditional method modified for the use of Gaia DR2 data. Numerical simulations use the integration of cluster trajectories backwards in time with our original high-order Hermite4 code φ−GRAPE. Results. We constrain the age, spatial coordinates, velocities, radii, and masses of the clusters. We estimate the actual separation of the cluster centres equal to 24 pc. The orbital integration shows that the clusters were much closer in the past if their current line-of-sight velocities are very similar and the total mass is more than seven times larger than the mass of the most reliable members. Conclusions. We conclude that the two clusters Cr 135 and UBC 7 might very well have formed a physical pair based on the observational evidence as well as numerical simulations. The probability of a chance coincidence is only about 2%.


Author(s):  
Fabian T. Pfeffer ◽  
Sheldon Danziger ◽  
Robert F. Schoeni

The collapse of the labor, housing, and stock markets beginning in 2007 created unprecedented challenges for American families. This study examines disparities in wealth holdings leading up to the Great Recession and during the first years of the recovery. All socioeconomic groups experienced declines in wealth following the recession, with higher wealth families experiencing larger absolute declines. In percentage terms, however, the declines were greater for less advantaged groups as measured by minority status, education, and prerecession income and wealth, leading to a substantial rise in wealth inequality in just a few years. Despite large changes in wealth, longitudinal analyses demonstrate little change in mobility in the ranking of particular families in the wealth distribution. Between 2007 and 2011, one-fourth of American families lost at least 75 percent of their wealth, and more than half of all families lost at least 25 percent of their wealth. Multivariate longitudinal analyses document that these large relative losses were disproportionally concentrated among lower-income, less educated, and minority households.


2019 ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Alan Tapper

Thomas Piketty’s evidence on wealth distribution trends in Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows that – contra his own interpretation – there has been little rise in wealth inequality in Europe and America since the 1970s. This article relates that finding to the other principal trends in Piketty’s analysis: the capital/national income ratio trend, the capital-labor split of total incomes and the income inequality trend. Given that wealth inequality is not rising markedly, what can we deduce about the putative causes that might be operating upstream? Only the capital-labor split looks like a plausible explanation of the wealth inequality trend.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asım Şen

This paper argues that economic inequality is one of the major causes of the current economic crises and provides some appropriate leadership strategies for solving them. Inequality is defined as unequal opportunities for economical activities among the people of a nation and among the nations of the world. The major cause of most current economic crises is the income and wealth inequality which are generated mainly by the economic growth. Leaders in the past and currently could not utilize appropriate strategies to solve the inequality problems and consequently the economic crisis grew and reached the current levels. In order to solve the current economic crises it is necessary to eliminate the economic inequality problems and establish fair and sustainable economic growth. The leadership strategies play crucial role for this process. These strategies included in this paper are establishing the local and global shared vision for all; balancing the income and wealth distribution; providing the equal opportunities for education and employment; sharing the production and consumption; and maintaining the fair and sustainable globalization and economic growth.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spandan Pathak ◽  
Prateek Verma ◽  
Sumit K. Ram ◽  
Supratim Sengupta

AbstractSocieties rely on individual contributions to sustain public goods that benefit the entire community. Several mechanisms, that specify how individuals change their decisions based on past experiences, have been proposed to explain how altruists are not outcompeted by selfish counterparts. A key aspect of such strategy updates involves a comparison of an individual’s latest payoff with that of a random neighbour. In reality, both the economic and social milieu often shapes cooperative behaviour. We propose a new decision heuristic, where the propensity of an individual to cooperate depends on the local strategy environment in which she is embedded as well as her wealth relative to that of her neighbours. Our decision-making model allows cooperation to be sustained and also explains the results of recent experiments on social dilemmas in dynamic networks. Final cooperation levels depend only on the extent to which the strategy environment influences altruistic behaviour but are largely unaffected by network restructuring. However, the extent of wealth inequality in the community is affected by a subtle interplay between the environmental influence on a person’s decision to contribute and the likelihood of reshaping social ties, with wealth-inequality levels rising with increasing likelihood of network restructuring in some situations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 459-483
Author(s):  
Jenny Chesters

Abstract Although economic growth is regarded as an indicator of the success of an economy and, therefore, an indicator of rising living standards, there is no guarantee that living standards will improve for all members of society unless the benefits derived from economic growth are shared equally. If the wealth generated by economic growth accrues to those at the top of the wealth distribution, levels of inequality will increase. In this paper, I use publicly available data from the World Bank, Credit Suisse, and Forbes Magazine for 11 countries in East Asia/ South East Asia: Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam, to examine whether increases in GDP/capita were accompanied by increases in wealth/adult and levels of wealth inequality between 2000 and 2016. In China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam, wealth inequality increased substantially despite, or perhaps due to, the rapid expansion of their economies. In other words, it would appear that the rising tide lifted some boats but swamped others.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Robert Connor ◽  
Daniel Stancato ◽  
Ugur Yildirim ◽  
Serena CHEN

This article details a registered report for a well-powered (N = 1500) experiment examining the influence of wealth inequality between groups on ingroup bias, as well as the potential moderating role of justification for the wealth distribution. Using the Minimal Group Paradigm, in which participants are assigned to groups with anonymous others and asked to allocate resources to ingroup or outgroup members, we randomly assigned participants to a relatively disadvantaged or a relatively advantaged group. Group assignments were ostensibly based on chance (weak justification), performance on a financial decision-making task (strong justification), or an ambiguous combination of the two (ambiguous justification). As expected, we found evidence for an inequity aversion hypothesis, with disadvantaged participants displaying heightened ingroup bias compared to their advantaged counterparts. Interestingly, however, our predictions regarding the moderating role of justification were not supported, with disadvantaged participants displaying the highest ingroup bias when the inequality was ambiguously justified. We discuss implications of these results for understanding the causal factors underlying ingroup bias.


Author(s):  
Thomas Hauner

This paper asks if two, otherwise identical, economies were distinguished only by their distributions of wealth, are they equally stable in response to a random shock? A theoretical financial network model is proposed to understand the relationship between wealth inequality and financial crises. In a financial network, financial assets link individual asset and liability holders to form a web of economic connections. The total connectivity of an individual is described by their degree, and the overall distribution of connections in the network is imposed through a degree distribution--equivalent to the wealth distribution as incoming connections represent assets and outgoing connections liabilities. A network's topology varies with the level of wealth inequality and total wealth and together, simulations show, they determine network contagion in the event of a random negative income shock to some individual. Random network simulations, whereby each financial connection is randomly placed, reveal that increasing wealth inequality makes a wealthy network less stable--as measured by the share of individuals failing financially or the decline in financial asset values. These results suggest a unique architectural role for accumulated assets and their distribution in macro-financial stability.


Author(s):  
Ryosuke Yano ◽  
Hisayasu Kuroda

In this paper, we consider the wealth distribution obtained by trading (buying–selling) stocks whose prices follow the geometric Brownian motion (GBM), when both number of the ticker symbol of the stock and maximum number of the traded stock are limited to unity. The binary exchange of the cash and stock between two agents is expressed with the Boltzmann-type kinetic equation. The distribution function of the number of the agents with the specific number of the stock or specific amount of the cash can be demonstrated, theoretically, when the price of the stock is constant. The distribution function of the number of the agents with the specific amount of the total asset can be approximated by [Formula: see text]-distribution, when the price of the stock follows the GBM. Finally, the rule in the binary-exchange-game approximates the distribution function of the number of the agents with the specific amount of the total asset to the Feller–Pareto-like distribution at the high wealth tail.


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