Nick Hanauer on who actually creates jobs

In the widely accessible media, at least in Lithuania, one can observe many discussions on the progressive tax and increasing taxation of business. Quite frequently during these discussions one can hear one very interesting argument - the rich and business create jobs. This means that the rich and business create a public good, thus being socially responsible. Thus demanding and increasing social responsibility is unjust and indecent!

Nick Hanauer's talk reminds us one of the most elementary lessons from the Economics 101 - without sufficient demand (consumers) there is no motivation to create more supply (utility). Only if the demand is increasing, only then the business has two choices - to increase the production (create new jobs) or to increase the price of the utility. If one increases supply without proper reasoning, then that one will almost surely suffer losses.

Modeling wealth distribution using kinetic exchange models

We have previously wrote about the elementary kinetic models. Now we would like to put them to a certain use - namely we would like to model wealth distributions. The problem is that the stationary distribution of the elementary kinetic models, as we have shown before, is Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution, while the empirical distribution of wealth has a power law tail (see Fig. 1). Therefore we will need some essential modifications to replicate the empirical distribution.

"You are much more predictable than you think..."

Recently while zapping over TV channels one program on the Discovery Science channel caught my attention. So have started watching "Weird connections" episode "Law of the Urinal" out of pure general interest. Yet after finishing watching it I thought that it should prove to be very interesting in a context of Physics of Risk. Thus I would like to encourage you to watch it on the Discovery Science channel (as far as I know it is being shown again from time to time) or on the vimeo.com website.

V. Gontis: "Animal Spirits" - the old term of economics forcing us to reevaluate contemporary theories

The book by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller "Animal Spirits, How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism" [1] has inspired me to share with you these thoughts. John Maynard Keynes introduced the term "Animal spirits" in 1936 to describe the instincts, proclivities and emotions that ostensibly influence and guide human behavior in business and so impact the economic outcome and development. G. A. Akerlof and R. J. Shiller provide in this book evidence that contemporary theory of economics based on the hypotheses of efficient market and rational expectation fails to explain economic processes in the periods of global crises. They further develop the term of Animal Spirits seeking to explain the evolution of global economy in the periods of crises and depression and looking for the appropriate measures how to overcome the economic slump.

Elementary kinetic exchange models

In the second half of the XIXth century physicists, of whom probably the most well known are Maxwell and Boltzman, worked on the explanation of empirically discovered laws of thermodynamics. While working on this problem they developed a simple model to reproduce the collisions of particles in the ideal gasses. This simple model allowed to analytically derive the distribution of energy and velocities in gasses and to lay foundations for the statistical physics. In the context of Physics of Risk it is worthwhile to mention that Maxwell and Boltzman relied not only on the empirical works by other physicists, but also on the demographic data! Boltzmann even wrote that "molecules are like so many individuals, having the most various states of motion" [1, 2]. Inspired by this quote we will briefly review, while relying on [2], some of the simplest kinetic models and their applications to modeling of socio-economic systems.