NSE Seminar

Economic Inequality from a Statistical Physics Point of View

Time：16:00-17:30, Dec 29, 2017

Venue：Room 359S, Oversea Exchange Center, Peking University

Speaker：Victor Yakovenko (Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, USA)

【Abstract】

Inequality is an important and seemingly inevitable aspect of the human society. A unified approach to various manifestations of inequality can be derived from the concept of entropy in statistical physics. In a stylized model of monetary economy, with a constrained money supply implicitly reflecting constrained resources, the probability distribution of money among the agents converges to the exponential Boltzmann-Gibbs law due to entropy maximization.  Empirical data analysis shows that income distributions in the USA, European Union, and many other countries exhibit a well-defined two-class structure.  The majority of the population (about 97%) belongs to the lower class characterized by the exponential ("thermal") distribution. The upper class (about 3% of the population) is characterized by the Pareto power-law ("superthermal") distribution, and its share of the total income expands and contracts dramatically during booms and busts in financial markets.  Time evolution of income distribution in China since 1978 exhibits similar trends.  Globally, energy consumption (and CO2 emissions) per capita around the world shows decreasing inequality in the last 30 years and convergence toward the exponential probability distribution, in agreement with the maximal entropy principle. This observation may have important consequences for global economic development. All papers are available at http://physics.umd.edu/~yakovenk/econophysics/.

【Speaker】

Victor Yakovenko is a Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was a recipient of the prestigious David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a theoretical physicist with more than 25 years of research experience in studying electronic properties of various materials. In addition, he joined the emergent econophysics movement around year 2000 by publishing his first econophysics paper. Over the next ten years, his ideas became increasingly popular and initiated an expanding wave of follow-up papers by many researchers around the world. The work of Yakovenko has also been covered in popular media, such as the New York Times Magazine, American Scientist, New Scientist, Australian Financial Review, and the UK Engineering and Technology Magazine. Yakovenko has given about 100 invited talks on this subject. He received his M.S. in Physics and Engineering from the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute in 1984 and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Moscow in 1987, where he was also employed as Research Scientist. In 1991 he began a Postdoc at the Department of Physics, Rutgers University. In 1993 he joined the University of Maryland, College Park as Assistant Professor and became Associate Professor in 1999 and Full Professor in 2004.