Abstract
We study the statistics of human deaths from wars and similar man-made conflicts as well as natural disasters. The probability distribution of number of people killed in natural disasters as well as man-made situations show power law decay for the largest sizes, with similar exponent values. Comparisons with natural disasters, when event sizes are measured in terms of physical quantities (e.g., energy released in earthquake, volume of rainfall, land area affected in forest fires, etc.) also show striking resemblances. The universal patterns in their statistics suggest that some subtle similarities in their mechanisms and dynamics might be responsible.
Highlights
Social dynamics is being studied extensively, qualitatively and quantitatively, with the activity increasing at present. This is an interdisciplinary research area, which has been a traditional ground for social scientists, but has involved increasing participation of physicists in recent times, apart from mathematicians, computer scientists and others
As measured by the area of the land burned down, shows similar characteristics, with power law decay exponent ranging between 1:3 and 1:5.52 Both the man-made con°icts and natural disasters, whether their size or magnitude is measured by released energy, volume, land area a®ected or by the fatal consequences given by the number of deaths, the size distribution has a power law tail P ðsÞ $ sÀ with values roughly in the range 1.5À1.8
The overall similarities suggest that physical modeling e®orts may lend su±cient explanation for such statistical behavior of social event size distributions
Summary
Social dynamics is being studied extensively, qualitatively and quantitatively, with the activity increasing at present The corresponding values of the size exponent are about 1.8À2.2 for city size, 2 forrm sizes, 2:4 for company incomes and 2:1 forrm bankruptcy This is otherwise known as the Pareto law, as and wasrst observed for the land wealth of the rich by Pareto,[15] and subsequently known to hold for income and wealth distributions, with typically between 2 and 3 (see e.g., Ref. 16). Wars have often been studied in the light of self-organized criticality.[39] Clauset et al analyzed the probability distribution of terrorist attack deaths between 1968 and 2005 and found the decay exponent for the power lawt to be around 2.4À2.5,40 while within shorter spans, the exponent had a large variation, 1.75À2.75. The probability distribution of the number of human deaths in a single event is observed to have a broad distribution with a power law tail. We argue that there might be similar mechanisms at play for the two phenomena that result in similar power law exponents
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
