Book contents
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2010
Summary
Between their first explorations in econophysics and the writing of this book the authors have travelled a long and sometimes winding road. One of our earliest results was the landmark study of personal income distributions in 2000 (Aoyama et al., 2000), which convinced us that thorough empirical study, or ‘phenomenology’ as it is called in physics, was essential for an understanding of society and economics.
Since then, we have carried out research with an emphasis on the real economy, that is, people (workers), companies (corporations), banks, industrial sectors and countries. We have also studied the various markets that play a vital role in the activity and prosperity of actual businesses. As a result we began to think of writing a book focused on the real economy and based on the analysis of very large quantities of empirical data. Such work has been largely ignored by economists because that discipline does not, unfortunately, value the empirical search for regularities. Yet, it is this observation-based approach that lies at the root of the success so evident in physics. Kepler's laws of planetary movement, for example, were extracted from the vast quantity of astronomical data collected by Tycho Brahe and others. There is every reason to expect laborious but ingenious analysis of economic data to lead to progress, perhaps not as dramatic as that of Kepler, but progress nonetheless.
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- Econophysics and CompaniesStatistical Life and Death in Complex Business Networks, pp. xxi - xxiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010