21 Jan 2012 vicious   » (Master)

When will the beheading start

It is always good to know when will other people want to cut off your head. Let us look at when were most heads cut off: that was probably the French revolution. OK, what made people want to cut off other people’s heads? Extreme inequality. OK, what was the Gini coefficient? Well, one estimate is 59 [1]. OK, so if we look at the US Gini coefficient it seems to be rising approximately linearly since 1980. In particular, US Census Bureau (via Wikipedia [2]) has the following data:

1980 40.3
1990 42.8
2000 46.2
2009 46.8

Let us do linear regression to obtain:

2020 50.0
2030 52.4
2040 54.8
2050 57.1
2058 59.0
2060 59.5
2070 61.9
2080 64.3

So, I guess people will start trying to cut other people’s heads off around 2058. We’re all safe till then.

[1] Christian Morrison, Wayne Snyder The income inequality of France in historical perspective, European Review of Economic History, 4, 59-83.

[2] Wikipedia.org, Gini Coefficient.


Syndicated 2012-01-21 22:40:35 from The Spectre of Math

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