Empirical Confirmation of the Environmental-Dominance Inequality A direct decomposition of Var(ln \r{ho}eff ) across four levels of aggregation

Abstract

Empirical confirmation of the environmental-dominance inequality Var(ln rho_eff) >> Var(ln k) from arXiv:2605.02985, computed directly from three public datasets (Opportunity Atlas, World Bank GDP per capita PPP, World Inequality Database) at four levels of aggregation: U.S. census tracts, between countries, within-country deciles, and the global pooled-individual distribution. The headline global value Var(ln rho_eff) = 4.33 yields a dominance ratio R in [27, 134] across plausible sigma_ln k in [0.18, 0.40]. The inequality holds with one-to-two orders of magnitude margin at the global and within-country-decile levels, with a single-digit but still dominant margin between countries, and collapses to R in [0.33, 1.61] within already-homogenized U.S. census tracts for income. A 1990-2022 time series shows the global aggregate stable while composition shifts from between-country dispersion (-34%) to within-country dispersion (+26%), consistent with international convergence plus Piketty r > g. Multi-outcome validation shows the inequality is robust for income, infant mortality and incarceration but shrinks toward parity for outcomes targeted by sustained global convergence (life expectancy). Partial-identification and selection-bias bounds (Chetty-style 40-50% selection share) leave R in [14, 80]. All inputs and outputs are SHA-256 hashed in an append-only manifest and fully reproducible from the accompanying notebooks.