Trapped in the Casino
Physicists have developed a model to describe the distribution of we alth in economies. Despite its simplicity, it delivers amazingly accurate results and explains why inequality is inevitable in our world.
Social inequality is growing at an alarming rate in a wide variety of countries, be it in the USA, Russia, India, Brazil or many EU countries. According to the investment bank Credit Suisse, while in 2008 the richest one percent of the population owned 42.5 percent of global we alth, ten years later they even owned 47.2 percent. In other words: in 2010, 388 people together were as rich as the entire poorer half of all people - meanwhile, the association of several international aid organizations Oxfam estimates the number of these super-rich at 26. Such a trend can be seen in almost all countries that conduct household surveys. The statistics indicate that the majority of we alth is increasingly being held by a small number of people.
For decades, various experts have been discussing the causes of this, but without a unanimous result. A new approach by physicists and mathematicians, in which my group from Tufts University was involved, among others, now indicates that the unjust situation in our economic system is inevitable: it is caused by simple arithmetic laws…
