Departamento de Física, ISEL - Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa, Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal.
Centro de Física Teórica e Computacional, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal.
PLoS One. 2021 Oct 27;16(10):e0259002. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259002. eCollection 2021.
We consider a simple theoretical model to investigate the impact of inheritances on the wealth distribution. Wealth is described as a finite resource, which remains constant over different generations and is divided equally among offspring. All other sources of wealth are neglected. We consider different societies characterized by a different offspring probability distribution. We find that, if the population remains constant, the society reaches a stationary wealth distribution. We show that inequality emerges every time the number of children per family is not always the same. For realistic offspring distributions from developed countries, the model predicts a Gini coefficient of G ≈ 0.3. If we divide the society into wealth classes and set the probability of getting married to depend on the distance between classes, the stationary wealth distribution crosses over from an exponential to a power-law regime as the number of wealth classes and the level of class distinction increase.
我们考虑了一个简单的理论模型，来研究遗产对财富分配的影响。财富被描述为一种有限的资源，在不同的世代中保持不变，并在后代中平均分配。忽略了其他所有的财富来源。我们考虑了不同的社会，其特征是不同的后代概率分布。我们发现，如果人口保持不变，社会就会达到一个固定的财富分配状态。我们表明，只要每个家庭的孩子数量不总是相同，就会出现不平等现象。对于来自发达国家的现实后代分布，该模型预测基尼系数 G ≈ 0.3。如果我们将社会划分为财富阶层，并将结婚的概率设置为取决于阶层之间的距离，那么当财富阶层的数量和阶层差异的水平增加时，固定的财富分布就会从指数分布转变为幂律分布。
