The Principle of Social Scaling
WORKING PAPER
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This paper motivates the content and analytical significance of processes of “social scaling” in competitive economic settings.
The paper shows how processes of social scaling in capital and labor markets can help account for the observed frequency distributions of wage income and Tobin’s q, suggesting such processes may be a pervasive in economic systems. Finally, the paper’s discussion illustrates and motivates the distinctive usefulness of statistical-mechanical methods in Economics, both in defining new conceptualizations of the relationship between individual agencies and aggregate regulations in economic systems, and in the development of logically robust observational methods in economic analysis.