* From: Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 ^^^^ CB; Yes, and _if_ it is true, it is not true because economics can be reduced to atomic level physics as thermodynamics laws were reduced to mechanical laws. "Exponential" phenomenon at different levels of organization of reality are demonstrative of the dialectical principle of the transformation of quantity into quality, even as the different levels, by definition cannot be reduced to each other.
