If you are going to start playing with silly analogies, the summary judgment standard only requires that the Court look at the evidence in the light most favorable to the party opposing the motion and draw all reasonable inferences in favor of that party. In this case, the inferences we are being asked to draw are not reasonable, and facts looked at in the light most favorable to the party proposing the theory are completely irrelevant
Wealth distribution is not the kind of thing that can "obey a model," if anything can be said to "obey" a model, of behavior of a gas; the terms that describe the behavior of the gas (such as the energy of the system don't even have the remotest application to a wealth distribution. There isn't even a correlation; there could not be, because an idealized gas is neither a dependent nor an independent variable of a wealth distribution. There is only, perhaps, the fact that a wealth distribution exhibits certain statistical properties also exhibited by ideal gases. But statistical properties are similar in lots of systems that have no relationship. Bell curves. Bimodal distributions. Etc. You find them all over the place.
It is total nonsense to suggest that there is some sort of social physics involved such that you are explaining social phenomena in physical terms, or that physical laws or models are somehow explanatorily illuminating merely because you find, if you do, common statistical properties in the idealized gas of stat mech and in some econometric measure of wealth distributions.
The abstract or quote from the research quote posted a bit later makes this quite clear. In fact what these guys have to offer is boring and conventional bourgeois economic commonplaces about the rich being richer because they are thriftier, which is false, uninteresting, and has no connection whatsoever to any part of physics.
I'm actually open-minded about reductionism as a program for psychological and social research. I wrote a doctoral dissertation and a number of papers defending the possibility before I got bored with the subject. This is the sort of claptrap, however, that gives reductionism a bad name. If there's nothing more useful to be said about physical bases for phenomena like the distribution of wealth than this, best to give it up for a bad job. As far as reductionist programs go, sociobiology is far more promising. (And yes, I think there's something to sociobiology.) Properly framed it is at least coherent, possible, and potentially explanatory. This stuff is just dreck.
--- Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/24/07, andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > The idea that income
> > distributions obey the laws of classical
> statistical
> > mechanics is ludicrous. In any event, there are
> far
> > more useful and comprehensible explanations in
> terms
> > of the behavior of capitalist markets and power
> > politics.
> >
> >
>
> Yes, well this is exactly my knee jerk reaction.
>
> But take the study on its own terms and assume for a
> moment that you
> view the evidence in the most favorable light
> against the party whom
> you just delivered summary judgment against assuming
> that all the
> facts as presented by the researcher are established
> and drawing all
> reasonable references from those facts. 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 at least in Japan, the U.S., the U.K.,
> India, and 19th
> century Europe. If this is so even for a few
> societies and for a
> limited amount of time, what does this say about the
> structure of
> human societies and/or power distribution within
> human societies?
> This is the limited question.
>
> It is possible that it is a coincidence that the
> Gibbs distribution
> and wealth distribution correlate, but even so it is
> a strange
> correlation even for a few societies.
>
> But a bigger _if_.... If it is so also true for
> societies that don't
> have market systems what would this say about the
> structure of complex
> societies in general? (Maybe you should leave out
> my "bigger" ifs....
> )
>
> Jerry
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>
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