[lbo-talk] Wealth Distribution & Kinetic Theor

Eubulides paraconsistent at comcast.net
Tue Apr 24 21:17:24 PDT 2007


----- Original Message ----- From: "Jerry Monaco" <monacojerry at gmail.com>

Starting from here the evidence is that wealth distribution can be found to obey the models of statistical mechanics and specifically the model of the Gibbs distribution [snip]

============

To reiterate; the above is just bad grammar. Asserting that a model is consistent with some domain of phenomena is an utterly different kettle of fish from saying the phenomena occurred because they obeyed some rule. A similar error frequently occurs in many a pop science book; asserting physical systems are computable does not justify asserting that the universe is a computer, for example. One need only think about what occurred with the whole clockwork universe metaphor after 1905 to understand how/where language "goes on holiday" with the above sorts of claims.

Ian



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list