By Mark Buchanan
reprinted from The Australian Financial Review
September 2002
(originally in New Statesman)

Why is wealth so unevenly distributed among individuals? This is perhaps the most controversial and inflammatory of all topics in economics. As JK Galbraith noted, the attempt to explain and rationalize inequality "has commanded some of the greatest, or in any case some of the most ingenious, talent in the economics profession".

We all know that a few people are very rich and that most of us have far less. But inequality in the distribution of wealth has a surprisingly universal character. You might expect the distribution to vary widely from country to country, depending not only on politics and culture but also, for example, on whether a nation relies on agriculture or heavy industry. Towards the end of the 19th century, however, an Italian engineer-turned-economist named Vilfredo Pareto discovered a pattern in the distribution of wealth that appears to be every bit as universal as the laws of thermodynamics or chemistry.

Suppose that, in Britain, China, the US or any other country, you count the number of people worth, say, $10,000. Suppose you then count the number worth $20,000, $30,000 and so on, and finally plot the results on a graph. You would find, as Pareto did, many individuals at the poorer end of the scale and progressively fewer at the wealthy end. This is hardly surprising. But Pareto discovered that the numbers dwindle in a very special way: towards the wealthy end, each time you double the amount of wealth, the number of people falls by a constant factor.

Big deal? It is. Mathematically, a "Pareto distribution" implies that a small fraction of the wealthiest people always possess a lion's share of a country's riches. It is quite easy to imagine a country where the bulk of people in the middle of the distribution would own most of the wealth. But that is never so. In the US, something approaching 80 per cent of the wealth is held by 20 per cent of the people, and the numbers are similar in Chile, Bolivia, Japan, South Africa and the nations of western Europe. It may be 10 per cent owning 90 per cent, 5 per cent owning 85 per cent, or 3 per cent owning 96 per cent, but in all cases, wealth seems to migrate naturally into the hands of the few. Indeed, although good data are sadly lacking, studies in the mid-1970s, based on interviews with Soviet emigrants, suggested that wealth inequality in the Soviet Union was then comparable to that in Britain.

What causes this striking regularity across nations? The question is all the more urgent now that inequality seems to be growing. In the US, according to the economist Paul Krugman: "The standard of living of the poorest 10 per cent of American families is significantly lower today than it was a generation ago. Families in the middle are, at best, slightly better off. Only the wealthiest 20 per cent of Americans have achieved income growth anything like the rates nearly everyone experienced between the 1940s and early 1970s. Meanwhile the income of families high in the distribution has risen dramatically, with something like a doubling of real incomes of the top 1 per cent."

Something similar is taking place on the global stage. Globalisation is frequently touted - especially by those with vested economic interests, such as multinational corporations and investment banks - as a process that will inevitably help the poor of the world. To be sure, greater technological and economic global integration ought to have the potential to do so. Yet as Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist of the World Bank, notes in his recent book Globalisation and Its Discontents: "Despite repeated promises of poverty reduction made over the last decade of the 20th century, the actual number of people living in poverty has actually increased by almost 100 million. This occurred at the same time that total world income actually increased by an average of 2.5 per cent annually."
What is the origin of these distinct but seemingly related trends: the greater inequality within nations (which applies to Britain, and many other countries, especially in eastern Europe, as well as to the US) and the greater inequality between them? We can blame tax cuts, liberalization of capital markets, new communication technologies, the policies of the International Monetary Fund and so on. But might there be a general science that could illuminate the basic forces that lead to wealth inequity?

Conventional economic theory has never before managed to explain the origin of Pareto's universal pattern. But two physicists, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mezard of the University of Paris, venturing across the lines between academic disciplines, have recently done so.

Forget for the moment about ingenuity, intelligence, entrepreneurial skills and other factors that might influence an individual's economic destiny. Instead, take a step into the abstract, think of an economy as a network of interacting people, and focus on how wealth flows about in this network.
It will flow - causing individuals' wealth to go up or down - in one of two fundamental ways. The first is through the bread-and-butter transactions of our daily economic lives: your employer pays you for your work; you buy groceries; you build a fence to keep in the dog; you take a holiday. The second is though rises and falls in asset values: houses and shares, for example. The physicists have shown how the interplay of these two basic forces largely determines how wealth is distributed.
Bouchaud and Mezard formulated a set of equations that could follow wealth as it shifts from person to person, and as each person makes random gains or losses from his or her investments. They also included one further feature to reflect how the value of wealth is relative. A poor single parent might face near-ruin over the loss of a $50 note; in contrast, a very rich person wouldn't flinch after losing a few thousand. In other words, the value of a little more or less wealth depends on how much one already has. This implies that when it comes to investing, wealthy people will tend to invest proportionally more than the less wealthy.

The equations that capture these basic economic processes are quite simple. However, there is a catch.

For a network of many people - say, a thousand or more - the number of equations is similarly large. A model of this sort, therefore, lies well beyond anyone's mathematical abilities to construct (and this explains why it has not appeared in conventional economics). But the philosopher Daniel Dennett has for good reason called the digital computer "the most important epistemological advance in scientific method since the invention of accurate timekeeping devices". The work of Bouchaud and Mezard falls into a rapidly growing area known as "computational economics", which uses the computer to discover principles of economics that one might otherwise never identify.
Bouchard and Mezard explored their model in an exhaustive series of simulations. And in every run, they found the same result - after wealth flows around the network for some time, it falls into a steady pattern in which the basic shape of wealth distribution follows the form discovered by Pareto. Indeed, this happens even when every person starts with exactly the same amount of money and exactly the same money-making skills.

Why? Transactions between people should spread wealth around. If one person becomes terrifically wealthy, he or she may start businesses, build houses and consume more products; in each case, wealth will tend to flow out to others in the network. Likewise, if one person becomes terrifically poor, less wealth will flow through links going away from him, as he will tend to purchase fewer products. Overall, the flow of funds along links in the network should wash away wealth disparities.
But it seems that this washing-out effect never manages to gain hold, because the random returns on investment drive a counterbalancing "rich-get-richer" phenomenon. Even if everyone starts out equally, and they remain equally adept at choosing investments, differences in investment luck will cause some people to accumulate more wealth than others. Those who are lucky will tend to invest more, and so have a chance to make greater gains still. Hence, a string of positive returns builds a person's wealth not merely by addition but by multiplication, as each subsequent gain grows ever bigger. This is enough, even in a world of equals where returns on investment are entirely random, to stir up huge disparities of wealth in the population.

This finding suggests that the basic inequality in wealth distribution seen in most societies - and globally as well, among nations - may have little to do with differences in the backgrounds and talents of individuals or countries. Rather, the disparity appears as a law of economic life that emerges naturally as an organizational feature of a network.

Does this mean that it is impossible to mitigate inequities in wealth? Pareto found (as many other researchers found later) that the basic mathematical form of wealth distribution is always the same. You find that, each time you double the amount of wealth, the number of people having that much falls by a constant factor. This is the pattern that always leads to a small fraction of the wealth possessing a large fraction of everything.

Nevertheless, the "constant factor" can vary: there is a huge difference between the richest 5 per cent owning 40 per cent of the wealth, and their owning 95 per cent. An additional strength of the Bouchaud-Mezard network model is that it shows how this degree of inequity can be altered.
The physicists found two general rules. First, the greater the volume of wealth flowing through the economy - the greater the "vigour" of trading, if you will - then the greater the equality. Conversely, the more volatile the investment returns, the greater the inequity. This has some curious practical implications, some obvious and some not so obvious.

Take taxes, for instance. The model confirms the assumption that income taxes will tend to erode differences in wealth, as long as those taxes are redistributed across the society in a more or less equal way. After all, taxation represents the artifical addition of extra transactional links into the network, along which wealth can flow from the rich towards the poor. Similarly, a rise in capital gains taxes will tend to ameliorate disparities in wealth, both by discouraging speculation and by decreasing the returns from it. On the other hand, the model suggests that sales taxes, even those targeted at luxury goods, might well exaggerate differences in wealth by leading to fewer sales (thus reducing the number of transactional links) and through encouraging people to invest more of their money.

The model also offers an excellent test of some arguments that politicians commonly use. For example, the pro-free market policies of Britain and the US in the 1980s and 1990s were defended on the grounds that wealth would "trickle down" to the poor. Everything was done to encourage investment activity, regardless of the risks involved. As we know, the wealth did not trickle down and wealth in both countries is now significantly less equally distributed than it was three decades ago. Under the network model, this is just what one would expect - a dramatic increase in investment activity, unmatched by measures to boost the flow of funds between people (such as higher taxes), ought to kick up an increase in wealth inequality.

What about globalisation? Our model suggests that, as international trade grows, it should create a better balance between richer and poorer nations: Western corporations setting up manufacturing plants in developing nations and exporting their computing and accounting to places such as India and the Philippines should help wealth flow in to these countries. But, as Stiglitz notes, Western countries have pushed poor nations to eliminate trade barriers, while keeping up their own barriers, thus ensuring that they garner a disproportionate share of the benefits. As the Bouchaud-Mezard model illustrates, free trade could be a good thing for everyone, but only if it enables wealth to flow in both directions without bias.

If we go back to the model, it reveals another, rather alarming prospect. Bouchaud and Mezard found that if the volatility of investment returns becomes sufficiently great, the differences in wealth it churns up can completely overwhelm the natural diffusion of wealth generated by transactions. In such a case, an economy - whether within one nation, or across the globe - can undergo a transition wherein its wealth, instead of being held by a small minority, condenses into the pockets of a mere handful of super-rich "robber barons". Some countries, particularly developing nations, may already by in this state. It has been estimated, for example, that the richest 40 people in Mexico own nearly 30 per cent of the wealth. It could also be that many societies went through this phase in the past.

In Russia, following the collapse of the USSR, wealth has become spectacularly concentrated; inequality there is dramatically higher than in any country in the West. The model would suggest that both the increased volatility of investment and lack of opportunities for wealth redistribution might be at work. In the social vacuum created by the end of the Soviet era, economic activity is less restricted than in the West, as there are few regulations to protect the environment or to provide safety for workers. This not only leads to pollution and human exploitation, but also generates extraordinary profits for a few companies (the politically well-connected, especially; a popular pun in Russia equates privatization with the "grabbing of state assets"). Economists have also pointed out that Russia has been slow to implement income taxes that would help to redistribute wealth.

The Bouchaud-Mezard model is not the last word in explaining the distribution of wealth, or how best to manage it. But it offers basic lessons. Though wealth inequity may indeed be inevitable, its degree can be adjusted. With laws to protect the environment and workers' rights, free trade and globisation should be forces for good, offering better economic opportunity for all. But we will do this only if global integration is carried out sensibly, carefully and, most important of all, honestly.

Mark Buchanan is the author, most recently, of Small World: Uncovering Nature's Hidden Networks (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $55)

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