The science of inequality.

The May 23 issue of Science Magazine has a large section devoted the origins and analysis of economic inequality. And, the general gist of virtually all the articles is that inequality is here to stay, predicted by social and also simple physical models of exchange. A weekly chaos and complexity discussion group that I attend just this past Tuesday discussed the economic Yard-Sale Model of wealth redistribution, in which power-law-like distributions result even when all individuals are identical and playing by the same rules. In a previous post, I have passed on a simple model illustrated by Clint Sprott, organizer of the seminars.