Hello people,
We are turning the Paper Shredder (our journal paper reading group)
back on this semester after a year of shredding other things
(cabbage, the gnar, etc.).
Our first meeting will be this Monday. We're going to take a look at
the big claims in this paper:
"Inequality in nature and society"
Scheffer, Bavel, van de Leemputa, and van Nesa
(Edited by Simon Levin.)
Vol 114, pp. 1315413157
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Download:
Journal page:
http://www.pnas.org/content/114/50/13154.abstract.html
Locally:
http://vermontcomplexsystems.org/share/papershredder/scheffer2017a.pdf
The paper's Significance (because abstracts don't do the job
apparently):
Inequality is one of the main drivers of social tension. We show
striking similarities between patterns of inequality between species
abundances in nature and wealth in society. We demonstrate that in
the absence of equalizing forces, such large inequality will arise
from chance alone. While natural enemies have an equalizing effect in
nature, inequality in societies can be suppressed by
wealth-equalizing institutions. However, over the past millennium,
such institutions have been weakened during nperiods of societal
upscaling. Our analysis suggests that due to the very same
mathematical principle that rules natural communities (indeed, a “law
of nature”) extreme wealth inequality is inevitable in a globalizing
world unless effective wealth-equalizing institutions are installed
on a global scale.
Shredworthy or spreadworthy?
We will sort it all out (maybe) on:
Monday, January 22
10:50–11:40am
The Theater of The Deciders, Farrell Hall
A few more things:
- General plan for the Paper Shredder will be to meet every other
Monday.
- The Paper Shredder's mission statement and paper archive is here:
http://vermontcomplexsystems.org/community/papershredder/
- Cowls are optional.
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