There's been hundreds of years of writing on this subject from political and economic theory, but the article doesn't touch on it at all; it's just a weird math

There's been hundreds of years of writing on this subject from political and economic theory, but the article doesn't touch on it at all; it's just a weird mathematical model. Then there's this: You might, of course, wonder how this model, even if mathematically accurate, has anything to do with reality. After all, it describes an entirely unstable economy that inevitably degenerates to complete oligarchy, and there are no complete oligarchies in the world. It is true that, by itself, the yard sale model is unable to explain empirical wealth distributions. To address this deficiency, my group has refined it in three ways to make it more realistic. So, they started with a model that made no sense, and modified it to make it match "reality", and finished with this: Given how complicated real economies are, we find it gratifying that a simple analytical approach developed by physicists and mathematicians describes the actual wealth distributions of multiple nations with unprecedented precision and accuracy. Also rather curious is that these distributions display subtle but key features of complex physical systems. Yeah... curious....