"Money, get away. / Get a good job with good pay and you're okay. / Money, it's a gas." (Pink Floyd)

We have considered kinetic models in our few most recent texts, And we still have couple of thoughts on this topic remaining. But this time we invite you to listen to Victor Yakovenko, one of the most prominent econophysicists working on this topic. His works have attracted attention from Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). In this video he is interviewed by Perry Mehrling of INET...

Human behavioral patterns are fascinating, we are able to behave both as individuals and as a part of society at the same time. Apparently by using human herding tendencies we could achieve significant breakthroughs! In the short talk for the ted.com website Alex Laskey describes how the behavioral science can be used to support a campaign for the energy consumption reduction.

Kinetic exchange models are very simple and powerful tool to understand the processes in the ideal gasses. These simple models enabled Boltzmann to formulate the principles of statistical physics [1, 2]. In previous text we already talked about some of the simplest models, but we did not write about a very important topic - their analytical treatment. It appears that analytical treatment is one of the most serious drawbacks of these models - in certain cases the equations become very complex or even analytically unsolvable. While, our usual approach, one-step processes (previously discussed on Physics of Risk from the point of view of the Kirman model) can be treated analytically with ease in most of the cases [3, 4]. In this text we will discuss two main techniques used to analytically obtain statistical features of the kinetic exchange models.

Few weeks ago Robert J. Shiller, laureate of Nobel prize in economics, was in Lithuania and even gave an open lecture at ISM ("openness" is rather doubtful in this case, because ordinary mortals were unable to attend). The good thing was that the lecture was broadcasted over the internet. Another good thing was that creators of "Pinigų karta" (one of the more serious TV shows about money and economics in Lithuania) invited this famous person for a brief interview and he accepted. We invite you to watch it (don't be discouraged - only first few seconds are in Lithuanian!).

Worldwide and in Lithuania, due to historical context, there is one very popular topic for the economic-based discussion. It is based on the standard political conflict between the "right" and "left" - capitalism vs socialism. This ideological debate might be rather interesting, but it is not quite clear who is right and who is wrong. It would rather interesting to see if and how these general ideas work. In my opinion these generalized ideas might be easily introduced into some simple agent-based models. Previously considered kinetic exchange models appear to be one of the best candidates for the job. Thus in this text I will discuss the implementation of the simplistic sketches of these economic ideologies into the kinetic exchange models.