Thermodynamics 2.0 | 2022 Program: Sessions and Abstracts

Mon - Wed, July 18 - July 20 , 2022 , Boone, North Carolina

Session T06: Econophysics

15:15-16:30. Monday July 18, 2022

Chair: Cal Abel

Title: Two-class Income Distribution in the USA in 1983-2018

Presenter:

  • Victor Yakovenko

(University of Maryland, College Park, USA)

Bio-sketch

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 35 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 twenty 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, Science magazine and the UK Engineering and Technology Magazine. Yakovenko has given about 150 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 Marlyland, College Park as Assistant Professor and became Associate Professor in 1999 and Full Professor in 2004.

Author(s):

  • Victor Yakovenko

(University of Maryland, College Park, USA)

Abstract:T06.164

Abstract

The first part of our paper [1] is a brief survey of the approaches to economic inequality based on ideas from statistical physics and kinetic theory. These include the Boltzmann kinetic equation, the time-reversal symmetry, the ergodicity hypothesis, entropy maximization, and the Fokker-Planck equation. The origins of the exponential Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution and the Pareto power law are discussed in relation to additive and multiplicative stochastic processes.

The second part of the paper analyzes income distribution data in the USA for the time period 1983-2018 using a two-class decomposition. We present overwhelming evidence that the lower class (more than 90% of the population) is described by the exponential distribution, whereas the upper class (about 4% of the population in 2018) by the power law. We show that the significant growth of inequality during this time period is due to the sharp increase in the upper-class income share, whereas relative inequality within the lower class remains constant. We speculate that the expansion of the upper-class population and income shares may be due to increasing digitization and non-locality of the economy in the last 40 years.

Keywords: econophysics, entropy, inequality

References:

[1] Danial Ludwig and Victor M. Yakovenko, “Physics-inspired analysis of the two-class income distribution in the USA in 1983-2018” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. 380, 20210162 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2021.0162 , https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03140