🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the trade-off between wealth inequality reduction and aggregate utility loss. We propose a coupled macroeconomic–econophysical model that, for the first time, formalizes “consumption ethics” as an adjustable threshold parameter, enabling joint dynamical analysis of redistribution mechanisms and individual consumption behavior within a unified framework. The model integrates macrodynamics of capital, consumption, and utility; incorporates business–redistribution interactions; and employs numerical simulations to quantify how redistribution intensity and the consumption ethics threshold jointly affect the Gini coefficient and total social utility. Results show that moderate redistribution combined with rational (i.e., restrained) consumption—above the ethical threshold—simultaneously reduces inequality and enhances aggregate utility. In contrast, excessively weak or strong redistribution induces adverse equity-efficiency trade-offs. The work provides a computationally tractable theoretical pathway and quantitative foundation for transitioning toward morally embedded, cooperative economic systems.
📝 Abstract
Reducing wealth inequality and increasing utility are critical issues. This study reveals the effects of redistribution and consumption morals on wealth inequality and utility. To this end, we present a novel approach that couples the dynamic model of capital, consumption, and utility in macroeconomics with the interaction model of joint business and redistribution in econophysics. With this approach, we calculate the capital (wealth), the utility based on consumption, and the Gini index of these inequality using redistribution and consumption thresholds as moral parameters. The results show that: under-redistribution and waste exacerbate inequality; conversely, over-redistribution and stinginess reduce utility; and a balanced moderate moral leads to achieve both reduced inequality and increased utility. These findings provide renewed economic and numerical support for the moral importance known from philosophy, anthropology, and religion. The revival of redistribution and consumption morals should promote the transformation to a human mutual-aid economy, as indicated by philosopher and anthropologist, instead of the capitalist economy that has produced the current inequality. The practical challenge is to implement bottom-up social business, on a foothold of worker coops and platform cooperatives as a community against the state and the market, with moral consensus and its operation.