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Wealth Thermalization Hypothesis

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  • Klaus M. Frahm
  • Dima L. Shepelyansky

Abstract

We introduce the wealth thermalization hypothesis according to which the wealth shared in a country or the whole world is described by the Rayleigh-Jeans thermal distribution with two conserved quantities of system wealth and norm or number of agents. This distribution depends on a dimensional parameter being the ratio of system total wealth and its dispersion range determined by highest revenues. At relatively small values of this ratio there is a formation of the Rayleigh-Jeans condensate, well studied in such physical systems as multimode optical fibers. This leads to a huge fraction of poor households and a small oligarchic fraction which monopolizes a dominant fraction of total wealth thus generating a strong inequality in human society. We show that this thermalization gives a good description of real data of Lorenz curves of US, UK, the whole world and capitalization of S\&P500 companies at New York Stock Exchange. Possible actions for inequality reduction are briefly discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Klaus M. Frahm & Dima L. Shepelyansky, 2025. "Wealth Thermalization Hypothesis," Papers 2506.17720, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2025.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2506.17720
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    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17720
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