ICTS

A brief overview of the data analyses of socio-economic variables – income, wealth and consumption, will be presented. It has been found empirically that the distributions of income, wealth and consumption possess fairly robust features: the bulk is log-normally distributed, followed by a power law tail. The mechanisms leading to such inequalities and invariant features for the distributions of the socio-economic variables are not well-understood. We will present some simple models inspired from physics and demonstrate how the models can be adapted to study socio-economic ‘complex’ systems, or explain some of the empirical findings and their consequences.