title: Hierarchical mechanism of development of wealth and structure for a premodern local society.
abstract: We propose a hierarchical model of social development composed of two associated hierarchies, each of which describes economic and noneconomic activities in society, respectively. The model is designed to explain the development of wealth distribution and social structure over 50 years in a premodern Japanese local society. Data analysis shows that the wealth distribution has a well-known universal power-law tail throughout the observed period, while the Pareto index gradually decreases with time. We further show that the noneconomic social properties, such as the household number, average family size, and number of collaterals in a household, of the local society, also have decreasing or increasing trends throughout the observed period. We show that the hierarchical model consistently demonstrates the correlations of these economic and noneconomic properties.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan. miki@daisy.phys.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
authors.forename: Miki Y
authors.initials: MY
authors.lastname: Matsuo