How can statistical mechanics contribute to social science?

A model of interdependent decision making has been developed to understand group differences in socioeconomic behavior such as nonmarital fertility, school attendance, and drug use. The statistical mechanical structure of the model illustrates how the physical sciences contain useful tools for the study of socioeconomic phenomena.

Self-organized criticality: sandpiles, singularities, and scaling.

We present an overview of the statistical mechanics of self-organized criticality. We focus on the successes and failures of hydrodynamic description of transport, which consists of singular diffusion equations. When this description applies, it can predict the scaling features associated with these systems. We also identify a hard driving regime where singular diffusion hydrodynamics fails due to fluctuations and give an explicit criterion for when this failure occurs.