Jim Devine wrote: > > Econophysicists point out that incomes and wealth behave suspiciously > like atoms. In the United States, for example, beneath the 97th > percentile (roughly $150,000), the dispersion of income fits a common > distribution pattern known as "exponential" distribution. Exponential > distribution happens to be the distribution pattern of the energy of > atoms in gases that are at thermal equilibrium; it's a pattern that > many closed, random systems gravitate toward. As for the wealthiest 3 > percent, their incomes follow what's called a "power law": there is a > very long tail in the distribution of data. (Consider the huge gap > between a lawyer making $200,000 and Bill Gates.) > > Other developed nations seem to display this two-tiered economic > system as well, with the demarcation lines differing only slightly. > > To an econophysicist, the exponential distribution of incomes is no > coincidence: it suggests that the wealth of most Americans is itself > in a kind of thermal equilibrium. To change it, "you will have to > fight entropy," Yakovenko says. That people aren't mindless atoms and > that governments try limited wealth redistribution doesn't really > matter, he adds: large, complex systems have their own statistical > logic that trumps individual, and state, decisions. In March, > Yakovenko told New Scientist that "short of getting Stalin," efforts > to make more than superficial dents in inequality would fail. Recent > increases in inequality in the United States, he adds, stem from the > rising fortunes of the top 3 percent; there has been little change in > the rest of the distribution.
Some years ago Sweezy & Magdoff argued that there was no economic science of a _socialist_ mode of production, because decisions would be consciously made and therefore not subject to "laws of economics." But at least in a rough and ready ways there are 'laws' that a capitalist system follows. Thus it is possible that these nuts are correct in respect to a capitalist economy -- there can never be an even remotely egalitarian distribution of wealth (or allocation of labor) within capitalism. A rising of the base level would only increase the difference between the upper 3% and the remainder of the population. But this would be true _only_ of a capitalist economy. It probably is not true of pre-capitalist orders -- though this would have to be determined (if it can be determined) by empirical study. Carrol
