----- Original Message ----- From: "Jerry Monaco" <monacojerry at gmail.com>
Agreed. The use of the word "obey" is not felicitous, but that was not my original question. If the Gibbs distribution, meant to model an ideal gas, can also model wealth distribution in certain diverse societies -- 19th century Europe, 20th century India and Japan -- what does that say about the model and about wealth distribution. Sorry for the bad grammar.
Jerry
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The model says nothing about the *causes* of wealth distribution; it's a neopositivist attempt to find the invisible hand of one facet of human history, as though "behind the backs of the producers" they were being so led.... There is no invisible hand/deus ex machina.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner
So why should we be surprised about the mathematizability of social phenomena with all the attendant failures over the centuries?
Cue to Ted Winslow on the virtues of anti-formalism in political economy.
Ian