Mean Wealth Research Articles

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

The Significance of the Ethics of Respect

In this paper, the author examines the idea of respect and makes this the cornerstone of a new approach to ethics that is particularly well suited to addressing the challenges society faces in an age shaped so profoundly by technology. The author uncovers a wealth of meaning in the notion of ‘respect’ and shows how this relates to the gaze. The attentive gaze is seen as the essence of respect. This thought-provoking analysis is presented in a straightforward way and is certainly open to further development and refinement in fields such as ecology, medicine, education and the promotion of civic-mindedness.

Wealth condensation in a Barabasi–Albert network

We study the flow of money among agents in a Barabasi–Albert (BA) scale free network, where each network node represents an agent and money exchange interactions are established through links. The system allows money trade between two agents at a time, betting a fraction f of the poorer’s agent wealth. We also allow for the bet to be biased, giving the poorer agent a winning probability p . In the no network case there is a phase transition involving a relationship between p and f . In the networked case, we also found a condensation interface, however, this is not a complete condensation due to the presence of clusters in the network and its topology. As can be expected, the winner is always a well-connected agent, but we also found that the mean wealth decreases with the agents’ connectivity.

Why did Education Become Publicly Funded? Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century Growth of Public Primary Schooling in the United States

Why do voters publicly fund education? I examine two explanations: public funds may be a means for decisive voters to transfer wealth tothemselvesor voters may subsidize the education ofothersto raise social education levels and realize external benefits. I test these theories in the 1800s, when full tax support of primary schools emerged. States where median and mean wealth was closer together had higher fractions of education revenue from public sources. Attendance rates rose when the public share of education funding rose, especially for poor children. These facts are consistent with a model with external benefits of education.

Collapse of a Bourgeoisie? The Wealthy in Stockholm, 1915–1965

This article explores the decline of the propertied bourgeoisie in Sweden in the twentieth century by analyzing data from the Stockholm Directory of Wealth reporting on private wealth in the years 1914, 1928 and 1963. Wealth tax statistics are used as complementary sources. How did the overall level of wealth change among the affluent Stockholmers during this period? Who were the wealthiest people in Stockholm and how did the social stratification within the richest change over time? The main results are: first, strongly declining overall mean wealth (−58 per cent) among the richest with a dramatic drop already before 1945 (thus before the expansion of the welfare state); and, second, surprisingly stable social positions among the wealthiest between 1914 and 1963, despite radical changes in society and a dramatic decline in mean wealth.

Contributors to This Issue

Reviewed by: Flora of Middle-earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium by Walter S. Judd and Graham A. Judd Lynn Forest-Hill Flora of Middle-earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium, by Walter S. Judd and Graham A. Judd. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 406 pp. £26.49/$34.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-19-027631-7. In 1982 Tom Shippey remarked that throughout Tolkien's work "there runs an obsessive interest in plants and scenery" (120). With the single exception of his created languages, there is arguably nothing more fundamental to Tolkien's vision of Middle-earth than his conceptualizing of landscapes and their flora. Together and independently they go beyond merely creating atmosphere to confer mythological and symbolic meaning and to define the familiar or alien nature of characters and cultures through their forms. In addition, as Patrick Curry remarks in the Tolkien Encyclopedia, in Tolkien's fiction: [End Page 215] the natural environment … is treated in a way that clearly conveys a concern for its integrity independent of human interests. … Furthermore, the instrumental exploitation and destruction of nature is identified as integral to moral evil in this world (163). Nevertheless, recognition of the multifaceted significance of plants in the legendarium has been slow to develop among Tolkien scholars. Dinah Hazell's charming Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation gives some consideration to their symbolism and historical and mythological significance. Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans' Elves, Ents and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien and Susan Jeffers' Arda Inhabited reflect the trend for ecologists and ecocritics to regard him as a pioneer in his treatment of the intimate connection among plants, landscapes, and their inhabitants. Apart from these books, critical analysis of Tolkien's flora remains limited to essays such as those in the collection edited by Martin Simonson, Representations of Nature in Middle-earth. The narrative significance of the natural world in the legendarium is such, however, that a new book on the flora of Middle-earth should be a welcome addition to the small but growing list of publications on the topic. Walter S. Judd and Graham A. Judd (father and son) are credited as joint authors of Flora of Middle-earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium, but Walter Judd is clearly the lead author of the text. A professor of biology whose professional work has focused on the systematics and evolution of flowering plants, he has in this book produced an extremely detailed survey of the plants that create the distinctive landscapes of Middle-earth. Each plant is treated with the same botanical precision. The scientific detail with which everything is described, from the delicate flowers of niphredil to the ominous trees of Mirkwood is, so Judd declares, intended to focus the reader's appreciation on the diversity of the primary world as this illuminates, and is illuminated by, Tolkien's created world. To this end, the book is intended to create "a visual reference—and legitimacy—for both the plants growing in our forests, meadows, and marshes, as well as those that we have received as gifts from Tolkien's imagination" (5). Why legitimation of either group should be necessary is not discussed, but this is an honest declaration of the focus of the book: it really is more interested in primary-world botany than in the wealth of symbolism, meaning, and narrative functions offered by the abundant plant-life of the legendarium. In its rigorously scientific approach Flora of Middle-earth will, no doubt, satisfy all those readers of The Lord of [End Page 216] the Rings of whom Tolkien himself observed: "Botanists want a more accurate description of the mallorn, of elanor, niphredil …" (Letters 248). Flora of Middle-earth goes far beyond Tolkien's own explanations, such as his observation that elanor would be "a pimpernel (perhaps a little enlarged) growing sun-golden flowers and star-silver ones on the same plant" (Letters 402). Flora of Middle-earth supplies botanical details for all these plants and for others which exist unnamed in the legendarium, through a process of speculation and extrapolation from primary-world species. Seven chapters...

Metas blandas y metas duras en el enfoque de Desarrollo Humano

The human development paradigm has been widely accepted. However, it has been more the soft approach -restricted to the implementation of social policies that contribute to the expansion of certain basic skills- than the hard approach -that involves redistributive reforms- the one that has been mostly taken into account. While equity in distribution of means (income and wealth) is not the most appropriate measure of economic justice, as it does not ensure fairness in achieving the goals of individuals, this does not mean it is not a necessary condition. A hard conception of human development is necessary in order to expand capacities such us to appear in public without feeling shame (Smith). The extreme nature of inequality in Latin America makes it even more necessary to recover the roussonian matrix of the difference principle of Rawls.

Generalized trust and wealth

The relation between economic inequality and trust is studied in a model where the ability to elicit trustworthiness from unrelated people depends on own wealth as well as the distribution and mean of population wealth. In equilibrium, the rich trust but betray while the poor do not trust but are trustworthy. Homogenizing wealth around its mean leads to a zero-trust outcome if mean wealth is sufficiently low, to full trust if mean wealth is large. More effective enforcement technologies increase, more effective counter-enforcement technologies decrease trust. Economic inequality reinforces itself through the trust and betray incentives it induces, suggesting a beneficial role for redistributive policies.

Pareto and Boltzmann–Gibbs behaviors in a deterministic multi-agent system

A deterministic system of interacting agents is considered as a model for economic dynamics. The dynamics of the system is described by a coupled map lattice with nearest neighbor interactions. The evolution of each agent results from the competition between two factors: the agent’s own tendency to grow and the environmental influence that moderates this growth. Depending on the values of the parameters that control these factors, the system can display Pareto or Boltzmann–Gibbs statistical behaviors in its asymptotic dynamical regime. The regions where these behaviors appear are calculated on the space of parameters of the system. Other statistical properties, such as the mean wealth, the standard deviation, and the Gini coefficient characterizing the degree of equity in the wealth distribution are also calculated.

Defining the problem: terminology and progress in ecology

A genre of papers has arisen around the premise that ecological progress and communication with non-specialists are impeded because (1) many ecological terms have multiple meanings and (2) many ecological terms have meanings similar to each other. There is a repeated call for ecological terminology to be standardized and for terms to be defined more concretely. These calls for the standardization of definitions are based on faulty premises about the way language conveys meaning. Most recommendations for definitional reform are unlikely to take hold due to properties of language and they are unlikely to stimulate increased ecological understanding. Precisely delimited definitions are necessary in very few instances, whereas extensive and prescriptive classification can hinder the development of a field by preventing some types of questions from being asked. Useful lexical reviews should focus on the development of ecological knowledge that is signaled by a wealth of terms and meanings, rather than critiqui...

A Boltzmann-Type Approach to the Formation of Wealth Distribution Curves

Kinetic market models have been proposed recently to account for the redistribution of wealth in simple market economies. These models allow to develop a qualitative theory, which is based on methods borrowed from the kinetic theory of rarefied gases. The aim of these notes is to present a unifying approach to the study of the evolution of wealth in the large-time regime. The considered models are divided into two classes: the first class is such that the society's mean wealth is conserved, while for models of the second class, the mean wealth grows or decreases exponentially in time. In both cases, it is possible to classify the most important feature of the steady (or self-similar, respectively) wealth distributions, namely the fatness of the Pareto tail. We shall also discuss the tails' dynamical stability in terms of the model parameters. Our results are derived by means of a qualitative analysis of the associated homogeneous Boltzmann equations. The key tools are suitable metrics for probability measures, and a concise description of the evolution of moments. A recent extension to economies, in which different groups of agents interact, is presented in detail. We conclude with numerical experiments that confirm the theoretical predictions.

Median‐voter Equilibria in the Neoclassical Growth Model under Aggregation*

AbstractWe study a dynamic version of Meltzer and Richard's median‐voter model where agents differ in wealth. Taxes are proportional to income and are redistributed as equal lump‐sum transfers. Voting occurs every period and each consumer votes for the tax that maximizes his welfare. We characterize time‐consistent Markov‐perfect equilibria twofold. First, restricting utility classes, we show that the economy's aggregate state is mean and median wealth. Second, we derive the median‐voter's first‐order condition interpreting it as a tradeoff between distortions and net wealth transfers. Our method for solving the steady state relies on a polynomial expansion around the steady state.

Balance sheets of early boomers: are they different from pre-boomers?

Nationally representative data are used to compare the magnitude, composition, and distribution of accumulated wealth of early boomers (born between 1946 and 1957) and pre-boomers (born between 1934 and 1945) at the same life cycle stage (ages 44–45, occurring in 1989 for pre-boomers and in 2001 for early boomers). Early boomers have accumulated greater mean wealth than pre-boomers at the same age, however median wealth did not change and net worth among lower-middle wealth groups declined. Multivariate analysis identified demographic change among those in the wealth distribution tails that indicates the increasing importance of education and race as predictors of wealth.

Mean-risk optimization for index tracking

SUMMARY This paper presents an analysis of the tracking problems of multiple indices with multidimensional performance criterion consisting of mean wealth and the tracking errors. We evaluate the performance of portfolios via the vector inequalities defined by convex cones, which enable us to describe various preference relations for investors. In Brownian market models with deterministic coefficients, we completely determine the set of efficient portfolios as well as the efficient frontier in our context. As a product of our analysis, we exhibit a version of Tobin's mutual fund theorem.

Self-Similarity and Power-Like Tails in Nonconservative Kinetic Models

In this paper, we discuss the large-time behavior of solution of a simple kinetic model of Boltzmann–Maxwell type, such that the temperature is time decreasing and/or time increasing. We show that, under the combined effects of the nonlinearity and of the time-monotonicity of the temperature, the kinetic model has non trivial quasi-stationary states with power law tails. In order to do this we consider a suitable asymptotic limit of the model yielding a Fokker-Planck equation for the distribution. The same idea is applied to investigate the large-time behavior of an elementary kinetic model of economy involving both exchanges between agents and increasing and/or decreasing of the mean wealth. In this last case, the large-time behavior of the solution shows a Pareto power law tail. Numerical results confirm the previous analysis.

The Decameron: First Day in Perspective edited by Elissa Weaver (review)

REVIEWS109 anaylsis ofthe pre-Galfridian Arthurian texts. When Warren writes 'every category becomes a border' (16), this will appeal to many adherents of postcolonial literary criticism, and make some historians nervous. Similarly, the drawn out sword metaphor—swords write borders and borders write swords—at times seems forced. But overall, this is a novel and needed approach to the Arthurian historiographie texts that offers much for both historian and literary critic alike. CHRISTOPHER A. SNYDER Marymount University Elissa weaver, ed., The Decameron: First Day in Perspective. Volume One of the Lectura Boccaccii. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2004. Pp. viii, 270. isbn: 0-8020-4454-9. $60. The present volume, edited by Elissa Weaver, is a long awaited collection of critical readings of Boccaccio's masterpiece sponsored by the American Boccaccio Association. The series, called the Lectura Boccaccii, takes its name and format from the academic tradition of reading and lecturing on individual cantos of Dante Alighieris Divine Comedy. Applying this practice to the Decameron alreadypresumes a certain critical supposition, namely, that each of the ten days may be treated like a canticle, as a thematic entity and, more specifically, that the Proem, Introduction, and ten tales ofDay One, constitute a thematic unitysimilar to a canto. The present volume treats each ofthe tales as part ofa complex structure as well as individually. Each ofthe essays addresses the Decameron as a whole, as an integral work, while acknowledging how its extraordinary complexity makes it difficult, and perhaps not advisable, to draw any totalizing generalizations. Readers of the Decameron have in various ways acknowledged the special importance of Day One as a metanarrative that may serve as an interpretive key to unlocking the rest of the work. Boccaccio's steady concern throughout the work with the act of reading and with his critics' reaction to his works, along with his theoretical musings on narrative strategies, in particular, allegory, and his sustained, although never explicit, dialogue with Dante ask us to gauge self-consciously our interpretations against his narrative process, which aims to remain free ofany absolute interpretive system. In addition, the author's ironic distance from his storytellers and from his readers would seem to deny us any one exegetical code breaker. The essays in this collection manage to illuminate, without limiting our understanding of the tales, by considering the stories in the context of the entire work, highlighting structural parallels, inter-textual connections, and textual associations both verbal and thematic. By juxtaposing tales in the fitst day, as well as to other days, we see how each functions in the larger narrative; and by following context preparations and extensions from one story to another through close readings, we gain a fresh perspective on tales that have been the subject of critical study for decades. Several ofthe essays carefully trace the context and function ofthe narrators' comments with respect to the tales they tell and reveal their careful strategy. These comments are structural rather than interpretive and may also be compared to Boccaccio's descriptive headings. This sort ofcareful reading, ofeach tale in relation HOarthuriana to what preceeds and follows it, the day in which it is told, its structural similarities to other days, as well as the teller and his audience and the teller's comments, along with Boccaccio's own synopsis and his narrative and literary concerns is thorough but not exhaustive. The Decameron's special appeal, its true character as a masterpiece, is its ability to yield a wealth of meaning and pleasute to the most demanding critical examination. Many of the scholars begin with summaries of previous studies relevant to the tale and, thus, locate their own particular readings within the tradition ofBoccaccio scholarship. The bibliography provides extensive reference to Boccaccio scholarship in both English and Italian. Ofspecial interest to this reader is Robert Hollander's reading ofthe Ovidian and Dantean subtext ofthe Proem and Thomas Stillinger's essay, which once and for all claims the Introduction's importance to the whole of the work. Of special pleasure, those essays that soberly and carefully examine rhe lesser known stories of Day One, often overlooked because of their apparent simplicity, brevity, or transparency. These diligent and fresh readings not only...

La mort de Samson : Dieu bénit-il l’attentat suicide?

Using the texts of the Bible to defend or attack ideas or practices usually takes place at the price of a unilateral or simplistic reading. A more attentive reading shows that the text has a subtlety and wealth of meaning which forbid simple ideas; the text requires from the reader forceful and discriminating reflection which respects the text and the reality it evokes. On the basis of a narrative reading of the death of Samson (Judg 15,21-31), the authors of this article show how the story, far from justifying suicide attacks, in fact provides a profound reflection on violence and on what it implies for man and for God.

Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture: The Otho Lazamon by Elizabeth J. Bryan

422 Reviews narrator. It also explores questions of authority,truth,and interpretation, and implicitlyalso of instabilities of patriarchal power, signalled in Henry son's famous question used in Pearsall's title. Intriguingly, this wide-ranging paper sometimes ventures into neo-New Critical methodology, and the critical values of 'intensity', unity in the form of 'connectivity' (meaning a 'composition full of echoes and anticipations' (p. 172)), and the primacy of 'the poem' and 'poetic representation', as objects of study separable from cultural discourses (pp. 179-82). Janet Cowan shows how the Middle English version of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus responds with some complexity to the original'smisogynist ambiguities. Performance is central to Ralph Hanna's explo? ration of the themes of feasting and minstrelsy, mutability, and absence and presence in written and spoken texts in alliterative poetry, concluding with a demonstration of how the distinctly 'writerly' Destruction of Troy also 'parades its orality'. Characteristically proceeding by taking nothing for granted, and carefully negotiating his way through complex textual and codicological territory,getting beyond existing impasses, and finallyadvancing forward to what look like firmnew positions, Norman Blake's 'The Links in the Canterbury Tales' argues convincingly that extant links include authorial revisions. Similarly Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards's * Middle English Verse in Chronicles' draws from a mass ofvaried data interesting and sound conclusions, including the frequency with which verse inserts are used for elegy and eulogy in later chronicles, the nationalistic tensions and xenophobia often ex? pressed through vernacular rhymes, and the possibility that transitions into different metres, or between verse and prose, for inserted songs may indicate modal shifts, including exemplary, summarizing functions, celebration, and reflection, and should not automatically be assumed simply to indicate prior popular existence forthe songs. This is a commendable collection, worthy of its dedicatee in its fund of good schol? arship, serious intellectual festiveness, and demonstration of the potential for fruitful interconnectedness in the analysis of aspects of texts, linguistic, literary,editorial, and codicological, that, as Waldron's work has always shown, yield most benefit to the subject when not pursued in isolation from each other. University of Liverpool Helen Phillips Collaborative Meaning inMedieval Scribal Culture: The Otho La^amon. By Elizabeth J. Bryan. (Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2000. xx + 238pp. $49.50; ?31. ISBN 0-472-10949-9. La3amon's Brut is the earliest substantial surviving Middle English poem. Fate decreed that both surviving manuscripts, which date from the second half of the thir? teenth century, should enter the Cotton Library and sufferdamage in the Cotton fire of 1731. One of these, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A. ix, has generally been afforded a considerably greater degree of scholarly attention than the other, British Library MS Cotton Otho C. xiii, since it has been left substantially more complete. Elizabeth Bryan, however, feels that Otho has been unduly neglected and that it reveals 'a wealth of meaning in the cultural accretions that make up this manuscript text' (p. 59), that has not hithertobeen appreciated. The articulation of this 'meaning' forms the main subject of her book. The physical state of the Otho manuscript has considerable bearing on Bryan's study. Otho now comprises 146 vellum leaves, all to a greater or lesser degree damaged by fire,some of them very greatly. Bryan does not explain what led her to seek as an object of study a manuscript in which the evidential potentialities have been so crucially obscured, but perhaps the most striking point to make about her evidence is its paucity. The forms of 'cultural accretion' she finds significant are decorated initials MLR, 98.2, 2003 423 (78 instances), notae (11), rubricated words (6, together with a slightly larger number of letters touched in red). In quantitative terms these data do not seem a sufficient basis for useful conclusions at all, let alone to possess the 'wealth of meaning' Bryan asserts they contain. Indeed, apart from an evident interest in the history of King Arthur, the forms of decoration do not seem to offermuch clear insight into anything. The design of her book seems tacitly to acknowledge this evidential shortfall. For, in spite of the...

Arthurian Literature, Vol. 18 by Keith Busby

MLR, 98.2, 2003 423 (78 instances), notae (11), rubricated words (6, together with a slightly larger number of letters touched in red). In quantitative terms these data do not seem a sufficient basis for useful conclusions at all, let alone to possess the 'wealth of meaning' Bryan asserts they contain. Indeed, apart from an evident interest in the history of King Arthur, the forms of decoration do not seem to offermuch clear insight into anything. The design of her book seems tacitly to acknowledge this evidential shortfall. For, in spite of the claim of the title that this work is concerned with 'medieval scribal culture', the longest single chapter (pp. 128-76) is actually concerned with post-medieval annotations, with an attempt to identify the Elizabethan annotator who underlined or otherwise marked a number of passages in the Otho manuscript. Bryan's candidate is the seventeenth-century collector Joseph Holland. Even if this were so, and the evidence seems at best meagre, itis hard to see how it contributes to an argument ostensibly concerned with the manuscript construction of a medieval text. For the arguments advanced here to be significant or even very meaningful there would have to be a more extended analysis of early medieval vernacular book pro? duction and the place of the Otho manuscript within the geographical and temporal pressures that helped to shape its construction. For example, it is symptomatic ofthe inability of this book to consider fruitfulquestions of 'scribal culture' that there is no discussion ofthe factthat the manuscript is not copied as verse, a form oftranscription that invites comparison with modes ofcopy ing ofother vernacular texts and, ofcourse, with the copy ing of Old English verse texts. Overall, Bryan offersa lot of detail about the Otho manuscript but not many conclusions of value. Those that are reached here hardly justify their expansion to generate the form, let alone the substance, of a book. There are some errors and omissions: neither of the versions of Hardyng's Chron? icle is in prose (p. 205); I do not think the 'York and Lancastrian rivalry moved into the complexity of Tudor politics in the late fifteenthand early sixteenth centuries' (p. 143; my emphasis), nor am I clear on what this observation means; it is curious that the chapter on Elizabethan annotation makes no mention of the still useful study by R. Willard, 'La3amon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', University of Texas Studies in English, 27 (1948), 239-78. London A. S. G. Edwards Arthurian Literature, Vol. 18. Ed. by Keith Busby. (Arthurian Literature) Cam? bridge: Brewer. 2001. viii + 255pp. ?45; $75. ISBN 0-85991-617-0. In the words of the editor, this volume 'initiates an alternation of miscellanies with theme issues'. This miscellany contains fivearticles on, respectively, Beroul, Tristan de Nanteuil, La Curne de Sainte Palaye, the Brut and Le Morte Darthur, and the Anglo-Norman prose Brut. It concludes with a survey of Arthurian literature pub? lished between 1995 and 1999, with a few earlier items which were omitted from the New Arthurian Encyclopaedia (New York: Garland, 1995), to which this is a supplement . The compilers of this supplement (Norris Lacy and Raymond H. Thompson) list well over 150 titles,mainly short stories, although there is also a considerable num? ber of full-length novels, many of them linked to science fiction. Poetry and drama are in short supply but film and television have both shown considerable interest in Arthurian themes. Clearly Arthur and his court continue to be a major and profitable source of inspiration, and most Arthurians should find something to interest them here. The longest article by far (75 pages) is the late Richard Illingworth's dense and detailed study of Beroul, in which he argues that the text, as we have it, is the work of a reviser who elaborated Beroul's version of the original legend. This would explain the differences between Beroul's text and Eilhart's, which would pre-date the work 424 Reviews of the reviser. Illingworth is convinced that the text as we have it is the work of one author and explains the inconsistencies as the result of the reviser introducing his own...

Wealth condensation in pareto macroeconomies.

We discuss a Pareto macroeconomy (a) in a closed system with fixed total wealth and (b) in an open system with average mean wealth, and compare our results to a similar analysis in a super-open system (c) with unbounded wealth [J.-P. Bouchaud and M. Mézard, Physica A 282, 536 (2000)]. Wealth condensation takes place in the social phase for closed and open economies, while it occurs in the liberal phase for super-open economies. In the first two cases, the condensation is related to a mechanism known from the balls-in-boxes model, while in the last case, to the nonintegrable tails of the Pareto distribution. For a closed macroeconomy in the social phase, we point to the emergence of a "corruption" phenomenon: a sizeable fraction of the total wealth is always amassed by a single individual.