2/ The only one I can think of offhand is European social democracy. Do you know of any others?

1/ It mustn't, no. But not understanding the dynamics of complex interacting systems, let alone of the ideal gas, tends to result in interventions that invariably tank the mean. There are very few examples where equality-oriented interventions actually worked reasonably well.

4. One can also ask unproductive questions like "How do we make everyone equally successful?" and ignore the inherent unavoidable dispersion. This happens repeatedly and then you get a somewhat lower variance and a dramatically lower mean (communism).

3. Both views are valid and have different applications and domains of applicability. One can ask valid questions like, for example, "How do we reduce the variance without lowering the mean?" and study it in both frameworks, like it is done in physics.

2. you can trace an individual "molecule" (human) as they go through their life interacting with other humans and the environment. You can see what looks like a causal chain of one person born lucky to be born to a rich supportive connected family and go on to succeed, and another struggling a lot.

🧵1. There are multiple complementary layers of models here. From a bird's eye view, someone had to end up at the bottom and someone had to end up at the top, and everything in between. That is the statistical mechanics version. But from the "Economic Laplace's Demon" view

Wouldn't it be more like statistical mechanics? Someone is bound to end up on the slow end of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and the deviations from it (multiplicative vs additive, as you discussed before) give a long power-law tail. #physicsOfDemocracy