IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v401y2014icp148-158.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On social inequality: Analyzing the rich–poor disparity

Author

Listed:
  • Eliazar, Iddo
  • Cohen, Morrel H.

Abstract

From the Old Testament to the Communist Manifesto, and from the French Revolution to the Occupy Wall Street protests, social inequality has always been at the focal point of public debate, as well as a major driver of political change. Although being of prime interest since Biblical times, the scientific investigation of the distributions of wealth and income in human societies began only at the close of the nineteenth century, and was pioneered by Pareto, Lorenz, Gini, and Pietra. The methodologies introduced by these trailblazing scholars form the bedrock of the contemporary science of social inequality. Based on this bedrock we present a new quantitative approach to the analysis of wealth and income distributions, which sets its spotlight on the most heated facet of the current global debate on social inequality—the rich–poor disparity. Our approach offers researchers highly applicable quantitative tools to empirically track and statistically analyze the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

Suggested Citation

  • Eliazar, Iddo & Cohen, Morrel H., 2014. "On social inequality: Analyzing the rich–poor disparity," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 401(C), pages 148-158.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:401:y:2014:i:c:p:148-158
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2014.01.033
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437114000442
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2014.01.033?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alfarano, Simone & Milaković, Mishael & Irle, Albrecht & Kauschke, Jonas, 2012. "A statistical equilibrium model of competitive firms," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 136-149.
    2. Chakrabarti,Bikas K. & Chakraborti,Anirban & Chakravarty,Satya R. & Chatterjee,Arnab, 2013. "Econophysics of Income and Wealth Distributions," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107013445.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Viktor Stojkoski & Petar Jolakoski & Arnab Pal & Trifce Sandev & Ljupco Kocarev & Ralf Metzler, 2021. "Income inequality and mobility in geometric Brownian motion with stochastic resetting: theoretical results and empirical evidence of non-ergodicity," Papers 2109.01822, arXiv.org.
    2. Inoue, Jun-ichi & Ghosh, Asim & Chatterjee, Arnab & Chakrabarti, Bikas K., 2015. "Measuring social inequality with quantitative methodology: Analytical estimates and empirical data analysis by Gini and k indices," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 429(C), pages 184-204.
    3. Palestini, Arsen & Pignataro, Giuseppe, 2016. "A graph-based approach to inequality assessment," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 455(C), pages 65-78.
    4. Chatterjee, Arnab & Chakrabarti, Anindya S. & Ghosh, Asim & Chakraborti, Anirban & Nandi, Tushar K., 2016. "Invariant features of spatial inequality in consumption: The case of India," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 442(C), pages 169-181.
    5. Fontanari, Andrea & Taleb, Nassim Nicholas & Cirillo, Pasquale, 2018. "Gini estimation under infinite variance," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 502(C), pages 256-269.
    6. Aydiner, Ekrem & Cherstvy, Andrey G. & Metzler, Ralf, 2018. "Wealth distribution, Pareto law, and stretched exponential decay of money: Computer simulations analysis of agent-based models," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 490(C), pages 278-288.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gregor Semieniuk & Ellis Scharfenaker, 2014. "A Bayesian Latent Variable Mixture Model for Filtering Firm Profit Rate," SCEPA working paper series. 2014-1, Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), The New School.
    2. Eliazar, Iddo, 2014. "From entropy-maximization to equality-maximization: Gauss, Laplace, Pareto, and Subbotin," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 415(C), pages 479-492.
    3. Kiran Sharma & Subhradeep Das & Anirban Chakraborti, 2017. "Global Income Inequality and Savings: A Data Science Perspective," Papers 1801.00253, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2018.
    4. Theodosio, Bruno Miller & Weber, Jan, 2023. "Back to the classics: R-evolution towards statistical equilibria," ifso working paper series 28, University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute for Socioeconomics (ifso).
    5. Hutzler, S. & Sommer, C. & Richmond, P., 2016. "On the relationship between income, fertility rates and the state of democracy in society," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 452(C), pages 9-18.
    6. Scharfenaker, Ellis, 2020. "Implications of quantal response statistical equilibrium," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).
    7. Venkatasubramanian, Venkat & Luo, Yu & Sethuraman, Jay, 2015. "How much inequality in income is fair? A microeconomic game theoretic perspective," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 435(C), pages 120-138.
    8. Maia, Adriano & Matsushita, Raul & Demarcus, Antonio & Da Silva, Sergio, 2023. "Scalability in a two-class interoccupational earnings distribution model," SocArXiv 23brg, Center for Open Science.
    9. Ion Santra, 2022. "Effect of tax dynamics on linearly growing processes under stochastic resetting: a possible economic model," Papers 2202.13713, arXiv.org.
    10. Smerlak, Matteo, 2016. "Thermodynamics of inequalities: From precariousness to economic stratification," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 441(C), pages 40-50.
    11. Eliazar, Iddo, 2017. "Inequality spectra," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 469(C), pages 824-847.
    12. Leila Davis & Joao Paulo A. de Souza, 2022. "Churning and profitability in the U.S. corporate sector," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 73(3), pages 924-957, July.
    13. Reiner Franke, 2015. "How Fat-Tailed is US Output Growth?," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 66(2), pages 213-242, May.
    14. Ghosh, Asim & Chakrabarti, Bikas K., 2021. "Limiting value of the Kolkata index for social inequality and a possible social constant," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 573(C).
    15. Jacques Tempere, 2018. "An equilibrium-conserving taxation scheme for income from capital," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 91(2), pages 1-6, February.
    16. Aur'elien Hazan, 2017. "Stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model with nonuniform distributional constraint," Papers 1708.00645, arXiv.org.
    17. Kayser, Kirk & Armbruster, Dieter, 2019. "Social optima of need-based transfers," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 536(C).
    18. Giacomo Livan & Simone Alfarano & Mishael Milaković & Enrico Scalas, 2015. "A spectral perspective on excess volatility," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(9), pages 745-750, June.
    19. Malevergne, Y. & Saichev, A. & Sornette, D., 2013. "Zipf's law and maximum sustainable growth," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 37(6), pages 1195-1212.
    20. Istvan Gere & Szabolcs Kelemen & Geza Toth & Tamas Biro & Zoltan Neda, 2021. "Wealth distribution in modern societies: collected data and a master equation approach," Papers 2104.04134, arXiv.org.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:401:y:2014:i:c:p:148-158. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.