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The Surplus Theory of Social Stratification and the Size Distribution of Personal Wealth
Abstract
The Surplus Theory of Social Stratification explains inequality of wealth in terms of(1) the fugitivity of wealth not needed to sustain the production of more wealth, (2) the tendency of wealth to flow into the hands of those who are already disproportionately wealthy, and (3) the ability of workers in an industrial society to retain a greater share of the wealth they produce than workers in societies with more primitive technologies. Size distributions of wealth from societies at different levels of technology can be fitted by a family of gamma distributions, whose shape parameter is related to a society's level of technology. The Surplus Theory implies a stochastic process that generates gamma-like distributions. Analysis of this process, the Inequality Process, explains many facts about size distributions of personal wealth.
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Cited by
Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences
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Wealth Inequality in the United States
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Agent-based models of financial markets
Samanidou, E., Zschischang, E., Stauffer, D., & Lux, T. (2007) · Reports on Progress in Physics · doi:10.1088/0034-4885/70/3/r03 · Cited by 310
Metadata
- Authors
- Angle, J.
- Venue
- Social Forces
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Published
- 1986-12-01
- Volume
- 65
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 293-293
- ISSN
- 0037-7732 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2116691920
- Cited by
- 262
- References
- 36
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.