Anomaly, Class Division, and Decoupling in Wealth Dynamics

Abstract: Economic inequality is shaped by the agent-network structure, the interaction between agents, and the individual agent's ability. We provide a comprehensive picture of anomalous diffusion, economic class division, and bimodal wealth distribution in an agent-based model, where the allocation of heterogeneous agent abilities/growth rates is tuned in sparse regular networks.In particular, we focus on the statistical characteristics of logarithmic scaled normalized wealth distributions with two ability parameters, assortativity $\mathcal{A}$ and concentration $\mathcal{R}$. For the set of $(\mathcal{A},\mathcal{R})$, temporal behaviors of log-wealth distributions reveal that the decoupling between different ability groups depends primarily on $\mathcal{R}$ and long-term inequality depends mainly on $\mathcal{A}$. In other words, class division and decoupling are driven by $\mathcal{R}$, while the super-diffusive nature in the leading class is driven by $\mathcal{A}$. Our findings highlight that hierarchical segregation of abilities, rather than ability differences alone, is a key driver of economic class stratification. Finally, our model provides a minimal, yet powerful framework for understanding the bimodal global income distribution observed over the past half century and highlights the critical role of network-level segregation in shaping economic inequality.