Is Inequality Inevitable?

This article has several fatal flaws. The first one is that there is a loser in every transaction. Generally speaking, economic actors will only voluntarily engage in a mutually beneficial transaction. A person generally does not enter into a transaction where they are injured. To do so on a consistent basis is self-destructive. A shoe maker makes a shoe and sells it to me for a value greater than it costs to produce. I buy the shoe because the value of having my feet warm and protected is greater than the price of the shoe. We both win. The shoe maker would not sell a shoe for less than it costs to produce and stay a shoe maker for very long. I would not pay for a shoe that did not give me enough value.

The authors claim people make a "mistake". In a very small amount of transactions, this may be true, but you cannot base a model on every transaction containing a mistake. But let's look at the math. The authors use an example where every transaction that costs $1 nets either $1.2 or $.83. Over ten transactions, the net is less than $10. But this assumes that the person puts their whole net worth on every transaction. This is false. Each transaction costs a $1. So, the first one costs $1, and the second costs $1, etc. You cannot accumulate the past values of the previous transactions into the current one. This is the coin toss fallacy. If you flip a coin and get 99 heads in a row, the coin toss fallacy says the odds are greater the next flip will be tails. But, each flip is independent of the previous flips, so the 100th flip has a 50/50 chance of being tails, regardless of the results of the previous 99 tosses. So there is no "loser" in every transaction as the authors posit. Both parties win, or the transaction would not occur.

Their next claim is that becoming a billionaire is just "luck" and could happen randomly to anyone at any moment. Bill Gates is a billionaire because he created Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire because he created Facebook. John Smith a fast food worker in Hoboken, Nebraska doesn't just wake up a billionaire one day by luck.

And what is bad about being a billionaire. Gates and Musk are doing wonderful things with their money that disbursing it to a million people would not accomplish. The authors never give a reason why income equality is bad. In fact, inequality is the natural order. They never mention the Pareto Principle, popularly manifested as the Bell Curve, which is found everywhere in nature.

The authors claim income equality is destabilizing and must be corrected by redistributing all the wealth in equal amounts. However, as stated, income inequality is the stabilized form. It might be increasing slightly now due to faster movement of information, but class mobility is highly dynamic. Yesterday's billionaires are not today's, and today's billionaires might not be tomorrow's. Income inequality is the stable distribution of scarce assets in a free market economy.

Unless the job you get doesn't provide enough money to buy these tools, or there is a general lack of labor opportunities. This is a reality for a large portion of the current population.

So it's not an innate ability to create value really that matters, it's the ability to navigate a system with many gatekeepers who have entrenched interests, and where not everyone is starting from the same spot, but we should pretend they are, and pretend that all wealth accumulated is justified. Let's not question the means to that wealth or its ramifications on society as a whole.

I find the creation of physics-inspired sociological models distasteful. It's often a way of manufacturing certainty and authority through mathematical obsfucation.

It always runs the same way. First, you think of some political opinion you want to support. Then you come up with a mathematically trivial toy model that throws away 99% of the structure of the problem, whose few dynamical rules are artificially chosen so that they obviously will produce the result you want. (Though this part may look intimidating, it's not once you know how the game is played; I can easily cook up a toy model that "proves" any given political opinion upon request.) Then you put a lot of energy into solving the model in all kinds of cases, showing off your mathematical skills.

The end result of all such social models is a set of predictions that are only tenuously linked to reality. A common example of such a claim is "X follows a power law". But the models are usually too weak to actually calculate the power in the power law, and the data too tenuous to even show you have a power law at all. (Most of the time this is done by showing a fuzzy cloud of points on a log-log plot with a tiny range, drawing a line through it (ignoring the fact that literally anything can be fit with a line if you zoom in enough) and declaring victory.)

The point of mathematics is to make your postulates and predictions precise. If your postulates are obviously unrealistic, and your predictions are too vague to be meaningful, then the mathematics isn't serving any purpose -- except for giving your work a false authority.

Size of trees can't save them from the savannah.

THE low carb argument is ketosis. That's not even controversial. If you look it up on Wikipedia, it's described in a very aseptic way, it just a basic fact of metabolism. If you look at low carbs diets articles instead, a cloud of disinformation appears.