(259g) A Renaissance Man Explores a Societal Problem: A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Fairness in Income Inequality By Venkat Venkatasubramanian

Venkat Venkatasubramanian, has over the years, made stellar contributions to fields such as artificial intelligence in chemical engineering, process safety, fault diagnosis and Risk Management. Physics is probably Venkat's first love and inner obsession but he has expertise spanning many areas including complex systems, economics, emergence, spirituality and literature (definitely Tamil literature).

Being the humane individual that he is, it is not surprising that Venkat's mind was, for a long time, caught up in unraveling one the greatest social issues of our times viz. income and wealth inequality [1, 2]. Venkat looked for a rationale in what would seem as the outcome of the actions taken by many irrational actors - to understand what can be considered as fairness in inequality given that certain amount of inequality is unavoidable and perhaps undesirable. Working on this formidable problem, from a unique perspective, meant that he had to draw upon and connect his wide interests in physics, political science, economics, and game theory. This led him to create an utopia, BhuVai, and come up with an analysis framework to examine income inequality. In my opinion, his work that culminated in a 2017 book "How Much Inequality is Fair? Mathematical Principles of a Moral, Optimal, and Stable Capitalist Society" [3] is one of his greatest scholarly contributions.

In the presentation, I will present an overview of Prof. Venkat's work in the application of Game Theory to socio-technical problems with particular focus on Income Inequality.

References:

1. M. P. Drennan, Income Inequality: Why It Matters and Why Most Economists Didn’t Notice, Yale University Press, 2015.

2. J. E. Stiglitz, Wealth and Income Inequality in the Twenty-First Century, Presented at the 18th World Congress of the International Economic Association, Mexico City, June 19-23 2017.(https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/sites/jstiglitz/files/mexicokeynote%206.15.17%20Final.pdf; last accessed on 31st March 2020)

3. V. Venkatasubramanian, How Much Inequality is Fair? Mathematical Principles of a Moral, Optimal, and Stable Capitalist Society, Columbia University Press, July 2017.