Regarding income inequality in China: this is almost unavoidable in market-based economies. Paul Cockshott has an amazing video talking about an economic paper by a post-Soviet economist relating the salary distribution in capitalist economies to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution (a distribution commonly appearing in physics, for example in the speed distribution of particles in a gas). For incomes in the working class, this works almost perfectly, whereas for the top 1% this deviates heavily from Maxwell-Boltzmann, indicating a change in the way these people make money: workers trade their labor for a wage for earnings, whereas capitalists earn money from revalorization of capital.
The implication that salaries obey the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is extremely powerful: the salary distribution for 99% of people in market economies maximizes entropy. This implies that the only way to avoid these levels of inequality is to abandon market determination of salaries.
For anyone interested, Cockshott’s video is called “Thermodynamics of money and capital”.
I’m really glad you liked it. Cockshott is a wonderful Marxian economist, and I haven’t seen anybody else advocate for such an experimental view on economics. His papers and videos on the labour theory of value and the empirical evidence supporting it have solidified my views on Marxism immensely.
Be warned: he’s an old fart with old fart caveats. His videos are mostly PowerPoint presentations, the audio is often too faint, and I’ve heard him called a TERF on hexbear (he’s Scottish so I believe that), and he has also some weird views on immigration. That said, the content of 95+% of his videos is brainworm-free and really solid.
Regarding income inequality in China: this is almost unavoidable in market-based economies. Paul Cockshott has an amazing video talking about an economic paper by a post-Soviet economist relating the salary distribution in capitalist economies to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution (a distribution commonly appearing in physics, for example in the speed distribution of particles in a gas). For incomes in the working class, this works almost perfectly, whereas for the top 1% this deviates heavily from Maxwell-Boltzmann, indicating a change in the way these people make money: workers trade their labor for a wage for earnings, whereas capitalists earn money from revalorization of capital.
The implication that salaries obey the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is extremely powerful: the salary distribution for 99% of people in market economies maximizes entropy. This implies that the only way to avoid these levels of inequality is to abandon market determination of salaries.
For anyone interested, Cockshott’s video is called “Thermodynamics of money and capital”.
That was an interesting video, thank you for linking it! I hadn’t checked out Cockshott before, despite having heard of him from time to time.
I’m really glad you liked it. Cockshott is a wonderful Marxian economist, and I haven’t seen anybody else advocate for such an experimental view on economics. His papers and videos on the labour theory of value and the empirical evidence supporting it have solidified my views on Marxism immensely.
Be warned: he’s an old fart with old fart caveats. His videos are mostly PowerPoint presentations, the audio is often too faint, and I’ve heard him called a TERF on hexbear (he’s Scottish so I believe that), and he has also some weird views on immigration. That said, the content of 95+% of his videos is brainworm-free and really solid.