Banerjee Suchismita, Biswas Soumyajyoti, Chakrabarti Bikas K, Ghosh Asim, Mitra Manipushpak
Economic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata 700108, India.
Department of Physics, SRM University-AP, Amaravati 522240, India.
Entropy (Basel). 2023 Apr 28;25(5):735. doi: 10.3390/e25050735.
Social inequalities are ubiquitous and evolve towards a universal limit. Herein, we extensively review the values of inequality measures, namely the Gini () index and the Kolkata () index, two standard measures of inequality used in the analysis of various social sectors through data analysis. The Kolkata index, denoted as , indicates the proportion of the 'wealth' owned by (1-k) fraction of the 'people'. Our findings suggest that both the Gini index and the Kolkata index tend to converge to similar values (around g=k≈0.87, starting from the point of perfect equality, where g=0 and k=0.5) as competition increases in different social institutions, such as markets, movies, elections, universities, prize winning, battle fields, sports (Olympics), etc., under conditions of unrestricted competition (no social welfare or support mechanism). In this review, we present the concept of a generalized form of Pareto's 80/20 law (k=0.80), where the coincidence of inequality indices is observed. The observation of this coincidence is consistent with the precursor values of the and indices for the self-organized critical (SOC) state in self-tuned physical systems such as sand piles. These results provide quantitative support for the view that interacting socioeconomic systems can be understood within the framework of SOC, which has been hypothesized for many years. These findings suggest that the SOC model can be extended to capture the dynamics of complex socioeconomic systems and help us better understand their behavior.
社会不平等现象普遍存在，并朝着一个普遍的极限发展。在此，我们广泛回顾不平等度量值，即基尼（Gini）指数和加尔各答（Kolkata）指数，这是通过数据分析用于各种社会领域分析的两种标准不平等度量。加尔各答指数，记为 ，表示由（1 - k）比例的“人群”所拥有的“财富”比例。我们的研究结果表明，在不受限制的竞争条件下（没有社会福利或支持机制），随着市场、电影、选举、大学、获奖、战场、体育（奥运会）等不同社会机构中竞争的增加，基尼指数和加尔各答指数都趋于收敛到相似的值（从完全平等的点开始，即g = 0且k = 0.5时，大约g = k≈0.87）。在本综述中，我们提出了帕累托80/20法则（k = 0.80）广义形式的概念，其中观察到不平等指数的巧合。这种巧合的观察结果与自调谐物理系统（如沙堆）中自组织临界（SOC）状态的 和 指数的前驱值一致。这些结果为以下观点提供了定量支持：相互作用的社会经济系统可以在SOC框架内得到理解，这一假设已存在多年。这些发现表明，SOC模型可以扩展以捕捉复杂社会经济系统的动态，并帮助我们更好地理解它们的行为。
