The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? It seems so wrong. It seems so tragic. It seems like some interested party is standing in the way of Justice in the distribution of wealth.
If you think any of those suspicions are right then you'd be wrong. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because it's a law of nature. There's no practical way around it. Wealth distribution is like gravity for the rich and getting thrown out of an airlock for the poor. It's completely beyond anyone's control.
This law of nature is championed by economists and physicists that have joined forces in an AT&T/Cingular marriage-of-incompetency kind of way to promote Econophysics.
Econophysics uses the behaviors of gaseous matter and energy to describe people and money. First, we start with the idea that economics is an assclown pseudoscience. Then we look at physics which, as a field serving humanity with useful information, is woefully descending to pseudoscience levels at the speed of light. Next, we enter the tenth dimension using Dr. Who's phone booth so we can adequately suspend our disbelief. When all the aforementioned steps are completed, we are ready to for indoctrination into econophysics.
While it's attractive to compare the behavior of gases to economic decisions and energy to money, they cannot realistically be compared. While there are superficial similarities between the conservation of energy and the money supply, the similarities end in the abstract. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed. Wealth and money is liable to destruction. There is no law of conservation in economics.
Physicists need to stay out of social sciences because they are incapable of seeing shades of gray. When you need something that I have and we agree to exchange using money as the medium, that is not a random interaction by any measure. The motives of each individual cannot be reduced to a random act simply because it looks random among millions of transactions.
Physicists, like most “hard” scientists, like chaos to be explained away in simple laws that can never change under any circumstances. That's fine as long as such thoughts are restricted to the hard sciences. When we try to explain the chaos of human interaction with “scientific” laws, we produce fascism and exacerbate social injustice that can occur on its own without the prodding of MIT losers that can't get anyone to pay attention to their ideas on physics.
A shining example of this “all or nothing” Nazi mentality among physicists that venture into social science was shared by J. Doyne Farmer of New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute in New Scientist, “Many economic theories don't even come close to producing the wealth distribution we see, and if you can't produce that you're dead in the water.”
Many? I'm sure most experts agree. How about this? Many scientific theories don't come close to reproducing the formation of the universe according to Genesis and if you can't produce that you're dead in the water.
If you're upset that finding out how one rock swings around another rock pretty much ends all chances of universal insight, don't take your bad decisions out on the world. Why economists would get in league with physicists is beyond me. It's more than a mere “loser syndrome.” Perhaps econophysicists are gay.
