{"id":2398,"date":"2010-11-19T03:31:25","date_gmt":"2010-11-19T03:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2010-11-19T03:32:16","modified_gmt":"2010-11-19T03:32:16","slug":"space_power_law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2398","title":{"rendered":"Space, Power Laws, and Inequality"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was trying to explain something to someone over dinner, and it seems interesting enough to be worth tossing up here for comment and exploration.<\/p>\n

The question was why the growing inequality today?<\/p>\n

And I had an idea. Basically, wealth has been unequally distributed since it’s been measured (see Pareto<\/a>). <\/p>\n

So within any economy, we have a power law distribution.<\/p>\n

What used to be, however, was that there wasn’t much of a ‘global’ or even ‘national’ economy – there were local economies. These were effectively ‘cells’ in the larger economic organism, and most of the activity stayed within the cell.<\/p>\n

The implication of this is a geographic field of small power law curves of wealth, with local car dealers, real estate developers, bankers, etc. at the top of the curve.<\/p>\n

So the people at the top of these curves were prosperous, but not in the Gulfstream private jet league.<\/p>\n

There were national and global networks with their own power laws, but they represented a relatively small component of the economy as a whole.<\/p>\n

Got the picture?<\/p>\n

Now dissolve the cells. And in the residual soup, build a new power curve, and make almost everyone part of that distribution.<\/p>\n

Looks a lot like what we’re living with now, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n

Now as an interesting question, in the past gilded ages, could we see similar transitions?
\n–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is inequality amplified by globalization?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}