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...

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...

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....

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...

This paper presents a model of the dynamics of the wage income distribution.

Conventional methods of model construction and testing are not well suited to the features of large longitudinal survey data sets. Conventional methods assume (1) equal time intervals between observations, (2) simultaneous observations, and (3) that missing observations are rare. As a result,...

This paper examines two phenomena of the 1980s-the rapid divergence of state per capita incomes and the generally weak performance of the rural economy-to see if and how the two are related. First, states most responsible for income divergence are identified, and several popular notions...