On the morning of June 21, 2019, Anwar Shaikh attended the 79th Session of Chen Daisun Theoretical Economics Lecture. As a well-known U.S. Marxist political economist, Anwar Shaikh delivered a speech themed “Adam Smith, Inequality and Econophysics”. The venue was packed with teachers and students from Tsinghua University, Peking University, Renmin University of China (RUC) and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), who actively participated in and responded fervently to the speech.
Shaikh looked back upon the thoughts of Adam Smith, expounded on inequality and indicated that Yakovenko and his co-authors had proven that the incomes of the bottom 97%-99% of the total population (labor income) were well described by an approximately exponential distribution, while the incomes of the top 1%-3% (property income) were described by a power-law distribution. Based on the basic economic principle of volatility and arbitrage, Shaikh built a drift-diffusion process model of mean reversion to explain the observed distribution of wages, return on assets and property income and found that in the methodology of econophysics, stationary distribution was derived from the entropy maximization hypothesis and in the methodology of economics, dynamic routes generated by the Fokker-Planck equation resulted in stationary distribution, which was proven to be a result of entropy maximization.
Motivated by Teachers Zhao Zhun, Long Zhiming and Cai Wanhuan from Tsinghua University, Teachers Qi Hao, Li Qiong and Sun Yongmei from RUC and Teacher Li Lianbo from CASS, the atmosphere on the scene was warm, students actively raised questions and Shaikh answered these questions with earnestness and patience. Everyone benefited a lot from in-depth discussions on specific issues and confrontations of ideas. Teacher Zhao Zhun, who chaired the lecture, and Teacher Qi Hao, who made comments, both gave excellent responses.
After the session, Teacher Zhao Zhun presented to Prof. Anwar Shaikh the souvenir sign of the Chen Daisun Theoretical Economics Lecture as a gift and thanked Prof. Shaikh for his wonderful speech and the teachers and students for their active participation.
(Contributed by Yang Qingmei)
