CONTEMPORARY CONFUCIAN AND ISLAMIC APPROACHES TO DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Both Confucian and Islamic traditions stand in fraught and internally contested relationships with democracy and human rights. It can easily appear that the two traditions are in analogous positions with respect to the values associated with modernity, but a central contention of this essay is that Islam and Confucianism are not analogous in this way. Positions taken by advocates of the traditions are often similar, but the reasoning used to justify these positions differs in crucial ways. Whether one approaches these questions from an intra-traditional, cross-traditional, or multi-traditional perspective, the essay shows that there is great value in getting clear on the ways in which ones textual canon may constrain one. In the end, we will see that while there are creative Islamic approaches to taking human rights seriously, the looser constraints under which Confucians operate today may make things easier for Confucian advocates of human rights and democracy

THE MINIMAL DEFINITION AND METHODOLOGY OF COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY: A REPORT FROM A CONFERENCE [abstract]

In June of 2008, the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP) convened its third Constructive Engagement conference, on the theme of Comparative Philosophy Methodology. During the opening speeches, Prof. Dunhua ZHAO, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Peking University, challenged the conferences participants to put forward a minimal definition of comparative philosophy and a statement of its methods. Based on the papers from the conference and the extensive discussion that ensued, during my closing reflections at the end of the conference I offered a tentative synthesis of the conferences conclusions. That summary has already been published on-line as part of the bi-annual ISCWP newsletter (Angle 2008). In this brief essay, I recapitulate the themes of my earlier summary and expand, in my own voice, on some of the key points

The Inequality Process vs. The Saved Wealth Model. Two Particle Systems of Income Distribution; Which Does Better Empirically?

The Inequality Process (IP) is a stochastic particle system in which particles are randomly paired for wealth exchange. A coin toss determines which particle loses wealth to the other in a randomly paired encounter. The loser gives up a fixed share of its wealth, a positive quantity. That share is its parameter, ω_ψ, in the ψth equivalence class of particles. The IP was derived from verbal social science theory that designates the empirical referent of (1-ω_ψ) as worker productivity, operationalized as worker education. Consequently, the stationary distribution of wealth of the IP in which particles can have different values of ω (like workers with different educations) is obliged to fit the distribution of labor income conditioned on education. The hypothesis is that when a) the stationary distribution of wealth in the ψth equivalence class of particles is fitted to the distribution of labor income of workers at the ψth level of education, and b) the fraction of particles in the ψth equivalence class equals the fraction of workers at the ψth level of education, then c) the model's stationary distributions fit the corresponding empirical distributions, and d) estimated (1-ω_ψ) increases with level of education. The Saved Wealth Model (SW) was proposed as a modification of the particle system model of the Kinetic Theory of Gases (KTG). The SW is isomorphic to the IP up to the stochastic driver of wealth exchange between particles. The present paper shows that 1) the stationary distributions of both particle systems pass test c): they fit the distribution of U.S. annual wage and salary income conditioned on education over four decades, 2) the parameter estimates of the fits differ by particle system, 3) both particle systems pass test d), but 4) the IP's overall fits are better than the SW's because 5) the IP's stationary distribution conditioned on larger (1-ω_ψ) has a heavier tail than the SW's fitting the distribution of wage income of the more educated better, and 6) since the level of education in the U.S. labor force rose, the IP's fit advantage increased over time.labor income distribution; goodness of fit; Inequality Process; particle system model; Saved Wealth Model

Not a Hollowing Out, a Stretching: Trends in U.S. Nonmetro Wage Income Distribution, 1961-2003

Much of the U.S. labor economics literature asserts that U.S. wage income inequality increased in the last half of the 20th century. These papers point to two trends: 1) the increasing dispersion in U.S. wage incomes, and 2) the rapid growth in the relative frequency of large wage incomes of fixed size in constant dollar terms. A subset of the labor economics literature interprets these trends as a hollowing out of the wage income distribution. A hollowing out would yield fewer middling wage incomes. Since nonmetro wage incomes have, historically, been smaller than metro wage incomes, a hollowing out might disproportionately displace nonmetro wage incomes into the left mode of the hollowed out distribution, that of small wage incomes. However, there was no hollowing out of the nonmetro wage income distribution between 1961 and 2003. While trends #1 and #2 exist in U.S. nonmetro wage income data, they are aspects of the stretching of the distribution of nonmetro wage incomes to the right over larger wage incomes as all its percentiles increased between 1961 and 2003. This stretching means that all nonmetro wage income percentiles increase simultaneously with greater proportional growth in the smaller percentiles. The literature focused on the greater absolute gains of the larger percentiles and took them as evidence of growing inequality. This paper shows for nonmetro wage incomes in the U.S. that those gains are but one aspect of the stretching of the distribution and that other aspects of this transformation might as easily be taken as evidence of growing equality.distribution dynamics; hollowed out distribution; inequality; nonmetropolitan; wage income; wage inequality

The particle system model of income and wealth more likely to imply an analogue of thermodynamics in social science

The Inequality Process (IP) and the Saved Wealth Model (SW) are particle system models of income distribution. The IP’s social science meta-theory requires its stationary distribution to fit the distribution of labor income conditioned on education. The Saved Wealth Model (SW) is an ad hoc modification of the particle system model of the Kinetic Theory of Gases (KTG). The KTG implies the laws of gas thermodynamics. The IP is a particle system similar to the SW and KTG, but less closely related to the KTG than the SW. This paper shows that the IP passes the key empirical test required of it by its social science meta-theory better than the SW. The IP’s advantage increases as the U.S. labor force becomes more educated. The IP is the more likely of the two particle systems to underlie an analogue of gas thermodynamics in social science as the KTG underlies gas thermodynamics.Inequality Process; Kinetic Theory of Gases; labor income distribution; particle system; Saved Wealth Model, social science analogue of thermodynamics

Statistical equilibrium in simple exchange games I

Simple stochastic exchange games are based on random allocation of finite resources. These games are Markov chains that can be studied either analytically or by Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, the equilibrium distribution can be derived either by direct diagonalization of the transition matrix, or using the detailed balance equation, or by Monte Carlo estimates. In this paper, these methods are introduced and applied to the Bennati-Dragulescu-Yakovenko (BDY) game. The exact analysis shows that the statistical-mechanical analogies used in the previous literature have to be revised.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, submitted to EPJ

The Future of Confucian Political Philosophy

On February 14, 2017, Joseph Chan and Stephen Angle convened a Roundtable on the Future of Confucian Political Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. Eight invited speakers each offered thoughts on the main topic, followed by discussion among the panelists and responses to questions from the audience. This transcript has been reviewed and edited by the main participants. Much of the discussion revolves around the relations and tensions between Confucian political philosophy as academic theory-construction and the lived realities of citizens in the modern world, especially in East Asia. How is Confucian theorizing connected to Confucian activism? Another central concern is democracy—as value or as institution, as necessary in pluralistic societies or as problematic monopolizer of political discourse. We also discuss translation, republicanism, meritocracy, the proposals of Jiang Qing and Daniel Bell, and the role of Confucianism in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea

Gamma-distribution and wealth inequality

We discuss the equivalence between kinetic wealth-exchange models, in which agents exchange wealth during trades, and mechanical models of particles, exchanging energy during collisions. The universality of the underlying dynamics is shown both through a variational approach based on the minimization of the Boltzmann entropy and a complementary microscopic analysis of the collision dynamics of molecules in a gas. In various relevant cases the equilibrium distribution is the same for all these models, namely a gamma-distribution with suitably defined temperature and number of dimensions. This in turn allows one to quantify the inequalities observed in the wealth distributions and suggests that their origin should be traced back to very general underlying mechanisms: for instance, it follows that the smaller the fraction of the relevant quantity (e.g. wealth or energy) that agents can exchange during an interaction, the closer the corresponding equilibrium distribution is to a fair distribution.Comment: Presented to the International Workshop and Conference on: Statistical Physics Approaches to Multi-disciplinary Problems, January 07-13, 2008, IIT Guwahati, Indi

Relaxation in statistical many-agent economy models

We review some statistical many-agent models of economic and social systems inspired by microscopic molecular models and discuss their stochastic interpretation. We apply these models to wealth exchange in economics and study how the relaxation process depends on the parameters of the system, in particular on the saving propensities that define and diversify the agent profiles.Comment: Revised final version. 6 pages, 5 figure