The Human as Molecule—The Statistical Mechanics of Wage Earners

PhysOrg.com—A Purdue University professor of chemical engineering has used “econophysics” to show that under ideal circumstances free markets promote fair salaries for workers and do not support CEO compensation practices common today. The research presents a new perspective on 18th century economist Adam Smith’s concept that an “invisible hand” drives a free market economy to a collective good:

It is generally believed that the free market cares only about efficiency and not fairness. However, my theory shows that even though companies focus primarily on making profits and individuals are only looking out for themselves, the collective self-organizing free market dynamics, under ideal conditions, leads to fairness as an emergent property. In reality, the self-correcting free market mechanisms have broken down for CEOs and other top executives in the market, but they seem to be working fine for the remaining 95 percent of employees.

Venkat Venkatasubramanian

Venkatasubramanian proposes using statistical mechanics and econophysics concepts to gain some insights into the problem:

This is at the intersection of physics and economics. We are generalizing concepts from statistical thermodynamics—the branch of physics that describes the behavior of gases, liquids and solids under heat—to analyze how free markets should perform ideally.

Findings are detailed in a research paper that appeared in the online journal Entropy. Venkatasubramanian has already used the approach to determine that the 2008 salaries of the top 35 CEOs in the United States were about 129 times their ideal fair salaries—and CEOs in the Standard & Poor’s 500 averaged about 50 times their fair pay—raising questions about the effectiveness of the free market to properly determine CEO pay.

In the new work, the researcher has determined that fairness is integral to a normally functioning free market economy. A key idea in Venkatasubramanian’s theory is a new interpretation of entropy, used in science to measure disorder in thermodynamics and uncertainty in information theory. He shows, however, that entropy also is a measure of fairness, an insight that seems to have been largely missed over the years, he said. Andrew Hirsch, another Purdue professor adds:

Venkat’s insight goes beyond the simple grafting of the mathematics of information theory and statistical physics onto the question of fairness of salary distributions within a free market economy. He has recast the notion of entropy into a context that has meaning and relevance for this particular problem.

Venkatasubramanian calls his new theory, statistical teleodynamics, from the Greek telos, which means goal driven:

In statistical thermodynamics, we study the movement of large numbers of molecules. In economic systems, we have a large number of people moving around in a free market system, but instead of thermal energy driving the movement people are motivated by goals.

His theory describes how goal driven rational agents, normally people, will behave in a free market economic environment under ideal conditions.

The bottom line is that the free market does care about fairness. Clearly, the next step is to conduct more comprehensive studies of salary distributions in various organizations and sectors in order to understand in greater detail the deviations in the real world from the ideal, fairness maximizing, free market for labor.

The excessive pay of CEO's can be seen from a simple analysis of the wage distribution curve—too many have incomes way above the average that any defendable distribution curve predicts—showing that CEO's, who pay themselves, with only formal approval from the occasional stockholder meeting, rate themselves as superhuman, according to normal distribution measures. Venkatasubramanian seems to have come up with an ususual basis for a compensation distribution curve, which he claims is 95% fair, but attempts to use the mathematics of statistical physics in sociology and economics have failed in the past. It remains to be seen whether this approach is based on valid asumptions and not merely the desire to use a neat mathematical scheme outside its original frame of reference.