The Inequality Process (IP) is a particle system model similar to that of the Kinetic Theory of Gases. The IP is a parsimonious model of competition among people for wealth. The IP explains a wide scope of stable patterns in the distribution of personal income and wealth. Econophysicists have...

Most social scientists would reject the possibility of socio-economic analogues of the gas laws (Boyle’s and Charles’) on verisimilitude grounds. The gas laws relate the variables temperature, pressure, and volume. The possibility of socio-economic analogues of the gas laws and their...

Four economists, Mauro Gallegati, Steven Keen, Thomas Lux, and Paul Ormerod, published a paper after the 2005 Econophysics Colloquium criticizing conservative particle systems as models of income and wealth distribution. Their critique made science news: coverage in a feature article in Nature....

Much of the U.S. labor economics literature asserts that U.S. wage income inequality increased in the last half of the 20th century. These papers point to two trends: 1) the increasing dispersion in U.S. wage incomes, and 2) the rapid growth in the relative frequency of large wage incomes of...

The Inequality Process (IP) is a stochastic particle system in which particles are randomly paired for wealth exchange. A coin toss determines which particle loses wealth to the other in a randomly paired encounter. The loser gives up a fixed share of its wealth, a positive quantity. That share...

The Inequality Process (IP) and the Saved Wealth Model (SW) are particle system models of income distribution. The IP’s social science meta-theory requires its stationary distribution to fit the distribution of labor income conditioned on education. The Saved Wealth Model (SW) is an ad hoc...