Schelling and Luther

Current Issues and Trends in Luther Studies

Bad for Business: Luther Against the Papacy

This paper analyzes Martin Luther’s criticism of increasingly corrupt church practices, including, the papacy’s granting of indulgences, the promotion of pilgrimage, the preservation and exploitation of relics, the cult of saints, and the belief in saintly intercession. I will examine how Luther’s critiques of these practices were expressed in the religious propaganda that circulated during thi...

A physical analogue of the Schelling model.

We present a mathematical link between Schelling's socio-economic model of segregation and the physics of clustering. We replace the economic concept of "utility" by the physics concept of a particle's internal energy. As a result cluster dynamics is driven by the "surface tension" force. The resultant segregated areas can be very large and can behave like spherical "liquid" droplets or as a co...

Urban skylines from Schelling model

We propose a metapopulation version of the Schelling model where two kinds of agents relocate themselves, with unconstrained destination, if their local fitness is lower than a tolerance threshold. We show that, for small values of the latter, the population redistributes highly heterogeneously among the available places. The system thus stabilizes on these heterogeneous skylines after a long q...

Tipping Points in Schelling Segregation

Thomas Schelling’s spacial proximity model illustrated how racial segregation can emerge, unwanted, from the actions of citizens acting in accordance with their individual local preferences. One of the earliest agent-based models, it is closely related both to the spin-1 models of statistical physics, and to cascading phenomena on networks. Here a 1-dimensional unperturbed variant of the model ...