ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will look at an important social problem, that of racial segregation. This illustrates yet again the basic argument of the book. What happens at the macro-level may not reflect individual wishes. However, I would like to introduce another consideration here. It should be clear by now that I believe that economists should be open to lessons from other disciplines. Here I want to argue that by making a physical analogy we can better understand understand one of the major problems faced by our societies. In the third chapter I have already used a simple model from statistical physics to explain the emergence of loyalty. In this chapter I will use another model to analyse the emergence of segregated clusters of individuals. Once again there is a certain reticence on the part of social scientists when faced with physical models but I will come back to this.
