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Sociological and Economic Inequality and the Second Law

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Author Info
Kafri, Oded
Abstract

There are two fair ways to distribute particles in boxes. The first one is the Casino’s way, namely an equal chance to any box. The second one is the thermodynamic way, namely an equal chance to any different configuration of particles and boxes. The second way, calculated here, yields an uneven distribution of the particles in the boxes. It is shown that this distribution fits well to sociological phenomena, such as to the distribution of votes in polls and the distribution of wealth. This distribution yields the Benford law (the distribution of digits in numerical data), as a private case.

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File URL: http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/9175/
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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 9175.

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Date of creation: 07 May 2008
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Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:9175

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Related research
Keywords: wealth distribution Power law Zipf law Thermodynamics

Find related papers by JEL classification:
C16 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Econometric and Statistical Methods; Specific Distributions
D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
C46 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Specific Distributions
A12 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines
A14 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Sociology of Economics

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This page was last updated on 2008-11-18.

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