[lbo-talk] Wealth Distribution & Kinetic Theor

[Jerry Monaco]

On 4/24/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
>
> Jerry:
>
>
> Yes Carl, but what if the "You have arms, you take." also results in a
> wealth distribution in society that correlates with the statistical
> model of the Gibbs distribution, a model which was meant to apply to
> an ideal gas in equilibrium?
>
>
> [WS:] Jerry, I am pretty sure that prices of gasoline correlate rather
> well
> with my age, and one can probably correlate the shoe sizes with the GPAs
> of
> their wearers.  So fucking what?
>
> PS.  This compulsion to find correlations in everything is a sign of
> mental
> disorder, nicely portrayed the film "Pi" - the protagonist ended up
> drilling
> a hole in his head.
>
> Wojtek
>
> Oh Woj!.  We are not correlating distance and time, or some other kind of
straight arrow correlation, but a very specific kind of model of a physical
process (Gibbs distribution/ an ideal gas) with a token for wealth
distribution in a human society.  If I found a similar correlation between
ant colonies in a half dozen fields among one species of ants it would be an
interesting finding.  I wouldn't necessarily conclude that physical model
applies to the distribution of ant colonies but I would conclude that there
is some process going on that might deserve looking into...  To reduce this
kind of correlation to coincidence is just intellectual laziness on your
part.  Frak, sometimes you make so angry, in your rote-robot responses.

[WS:] However, it is foolish to claim that human behavior is fixed in
the same as thermodynamic properties of the particles are - hence the
application of the model to the human behavior problem is questionable.

Stated differently, the model is simply looking for mathematical
correlations without a clearly specified causal relationship.  Or perhaps it
implies that correlation equals causation by stipulating that humans behave
like particles.

JM: On a more serious and clam level, one does not have to posit anything
about human behavior, as your response previously indicated.  This is simply
a model of wealth distribution, and what human behavior produced or didn't
produce is not posited at all.  What if the wealth distribution or any
distribution of "goods" and "rights" and "privileges" is not a result of any
specific behavior but a result of the way certain complex systems find
equilibrium?  None of this is necessarily conscious, of course (and I am not
saying that you are saying that it is conscious), but in the case of it not
being a conscious element of the societies we "create", we would have to
find the boundaries of the system in order to change the distribution within
the system.....

[WS:] This argument is basically a drunkard's search - he lost hi wallet in
an
alley but is looking for it on the street because there are street lights
there.  Pointing out that the effort is misguided because it is applied to a
wrong area is a valid criticism.  Of course, an economist would answer
"let's assume that I lost it on the street" and continue his effort - these
guys are immune to reality just as the medieval theologians were.

JM:  Yes you are correct it is a drunkard's search, but there is an aspect
of science that is always like that.  You can only look where you have
light, or where your instruments reveal.  I don't think that economics is a
science, but the aspect of this study that amuses and interests me is not
the economic aspect anyway.  It is the aspect that suggest, if the study is
correct, that we construct societies that sometimes have certain aspects of
physical systems of which we are not conscious.

Jerry