The Daily Caller, The Physics of Wealth:
How do you explain the gap between rich and poor? The social scientists and Wall Street occupiers have taken their crack at the question. Now it’s the physicists’ turn.
An engineering professor at Duke University (Adrian Bejan) and a physics professor at Boston University (Eugene Stanley) are independently leading researchers to answer questions about income inequality. And their answers are fascinating. The “gap,” they argue in different ways, is natural — much like gravity or running water. …
“According to constructal theory,” writes Bejan, … “designs persist in time by changing into configurations that offer progressively better access to the currents that flow through the territories.” The short version? Systems evolve according to their ability to handle flow. And Bejan has demonstrated the constructal law at work time and again, in wildly diverse contexts.
So what does this have to do with the rich-poor gap? Bejan and collaborator Sylvie Lorente say these designs exhibit a property they call “few large and many small.” That means flow systems normally organize like river basins or veins in the body: big currents are connected to ever-smaller streams. If the law stands up across multiple areas — college rankings, well-paid jobs or wealth — all will exhibit a similar pattern.
More concretely, that’s why we have a few people with large net worth and many people with small net worth. Wealth distributes itself naturally this way — like a power law. But the distribution has a function. And function gives rise to form. Form, according to Bejan, is about how things flow. “Wealth is physics,” says Bejan. “Because wealth is in some sense flow and movement. And that is measurable. Wealth is not abstract.” Because wealth is connected to the physical world, Bejan thinks it underpins the evolved design of flowing economies. …
Some 2,000 years ago in the Gospel of St. Matthew, someone (presumably Matthew) wrote: “For to all those who have, more will be given.” Two thousand years later, people use this idiom to describe the dynamics wealth and status. More specifically, says Eugene Stanley, academics use it “to qualitatively describe the dynamics of individual progress and the interplay between status and reward.”
In other words, Stanley wants to explain why the rich get richer. With some sophisticated modeling, Stanley’s team claims to have proven the effect quantitatively — not just that it happens, but to some degree why it happens.
[W]e demonstrate testable evidence of the age-old Matthew “rich get richer” effect, wherein the longevity and past success of an individual lead to a cumulative advantage in further developing his or her career. We develop an exactly solvable stochastic career progress model that quantitatively incorporates the Matthew effect and validate our model predictions for several competitive professions. We test our model on the careers of 400,000 scientists using data from six high-impact journals and further confirm our findings by testing the model on the careers of more than 20,000 athletes in four sports leagues.
I am no mathematician. But if Stanley’s study is correct, he joins Adrian Bejan in showing that the accumulation of wealth among a few wealthy people is, well, a natural feature of an economy.
