“Increasingly favoured” is a statement about mechanisms.
When you personally state it, or in general when it’s stated by anyone? If the former, fair enough. If the latter, I disagree (cf. the last paragraph of an earlier comment). As a down-to-earth example, if I lost a game of Monopoly to you and afterwards ruefully remarked that “the dice were favouring you more & more towards the end”, I would not automatically be accusing of having swapped the original dice for a different set of dice partway through the game.
If the mechanisms remain the same as the population increases, then every individual who ends up rich is still working within the same mechanisms. It’s just that when the population increases, chance alone, operating on the same mechanisms, will produce many richer individuals.
Right (accepting arguendo the premise that the relevant mechanisms imply a power law-like distribution with α appreciably less than 2). And in that situation one could react as T&D might, i.e. by arguing that since the mechanisms remain the same, the resulting increase in equality is chimerical. Alternatively, one could react as I would, i.e. by arguing that an increase in some quantitative property of a concrete group of people does not magically become chimerical just because it arises from immutable mechanisms. (This is essentially the disagreement I laid out before between definitions (3) & (4) and definition (2) of the relevant statistical population.)
“Increasingly favoured” is a statement about mechanisms.
When you personally state it, or in general when it’s stated by anyone?
Ok, those words could be used for either meaning—to the confusion of discussion. T&D do say:
So examining times series, we can easily get a historical illusion of rise in wealth concentration when it has been there all along.
which could also be read in either sense. But the population centile and the mechanisms whereby people get rich are what they are. They are both real things, the divergence of which does not make either less real than the other.
When you personally state it, or in general when it’s stated by anyone? If the former, fair enough. If the latter, I disagree (cf. the last paragraph of an earlier comment). As a down-to-earth example, if I lost a game of Monopoly to you and afterwards ruefully remarked that “the dice were favouring you more & more towards the end”, I would not automatically be accusing of having swapped the original dice for a different set of dice partway through the game.
Right (accepting arguendo the premise that the relevant mechanisms imply a power law-like distribution with α appreciably less than 2). And in that situation one could react as T&D might, i.e. by arguing that since the mechanisms remain the same, the resulting increase in equality is chimerical. Alternatively, one could react as I would, i.e. by arguing that an increase in some quantitative property of a concrete group of people does not magically become chimerical just because it arises from immutable mechanisms. (This is essentially the disagreement I laid out before between definitions (3) & (4) and definition (2) of the relevant statistical population.)
Ok, those words could be used for either meaning—to the confusion of discussion. T&D do say:
which could also be read in either sense. But the population centile and the mechanisms whereby people get rich are what they are. They are both real things, the divergence of which does not make either less real than the other.