[Special Issue News] The Science of Inequality: Physicists say it's simple

The basic inequality that plagues economies the world over may have a simple explanation—according to econophysicists. Pick a country and you'll find multitudes earning next to nothing, a few raking in plenty, and a distribution between the extremes that falls exponentially as income increases, they claim. That distribution arises from an analogy to the concept of entropy, a measure of disorder in a physical system such as a gas, econophysicists argue. If so, then just as a gas evolves to a state of maximum entropy, random churning in the economy ensures that the income distribution tends to this inequitable form.
Author: Adrian Cho

Source: Science: This Week - May 23, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Adrian Cho Tags: The Science of Inequality Source Type: research