Inequality in Death from Social Conflicts: A Gini & Kolkata indices-based Study

Abstract

Human deaths caused by individual man-made conflicts (e.g., wars, armed-conflicts, terrorist-attacks etc.) occur unequally across the events (conflicts) and such inequality (in deaths) have been studied here using Lorenz curve and values of the inequality indices Gini ($g$) and Kolkata ($k$) have been estimated from it. The data are taken from various well-known databases maintained by some Universities and Peace Research Institutes. The inequality measures for man-made conflicts are found to have very high values ($g$ = $0.82 ~\pm~$0.02, $k$ = $0.84~ \pm~$0.02), which is rarely seen in economic (income or wealth) inequality measures across the world ($g \leq 0.4$, $k \leq 0.6$; presumably because of various welfare measures). We also investigated the inequalities in human deaths from natural disasters (like earthquakes, floods, etc.). Interestingly, we observe that the social inequality measures ($g$ and $k$ values) from man-made conflicts compare well with those of academic centers (inequality in citations; found in earlier studies) of different institutions of the world, while those for natural disasters can be even higher. We discuss about the `similarity classes' of social inequality (similar higher values of $g$ and $k$ indices) for man-made competitive societies like academic institutions and man-made social conflicts, and connect our observations with that of the growing recent trend of economic inequality across the world (with rapid disappearance of welfare strategies).Comment: Physica A (in press