12 Comments
Jan 28, 2021Liked by Philip Rosedale

Insightful simulation! Now, how can we evolve the algorithms so that the richest is less than twice as rich as the poorest? What does that mean for both individual and societal wealth? How does that affect behaviour? Also, what is the total money volume transacted? It’s not about how much money one owns, it’s about creation of value. So if every transaction creates some kind of value for the buyer (and maybe satisfaction for both), we might be better off shifting focus on value/happiness creation, away from money owning, and visualise that instead.

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Beautiful piece of simulation! It's interesting that what appears to be "fair" is actually biased. Certain parties in the UK (not naming names) often advocate a proportional tax, because it's fair if we all pay 30%, right? Well no, because if wealth grows exponentially, it needs taxing exponentially! However, I added a method to your code called "maybeTradeProportionally" and if you hit the trades themselves proportionally, so that both parties risk a roughly equaly proportion of their wealth, you get something that looks very Gaussian in the long run, and hence actually fair, not the fake fair that your code so beautifully shows! Here's my addition:

https://editor.p5js.org/benTriesToCode/sketches/q6bjT8fzT

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Apr 4, 2022·edited Apr 4, 2022

I think my biggest problem with this is how very zero sum it is. In the real world, people don't just flip coins and give money to other people if they lose. Portraying it as zero sum implies that mercantilism is the correct form of economics and that all trade is fundamentally bad when in reality it's just the opposite. It is a super neat illustration of how something that seems to have an expected value of zero still ends up lopsided.

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This simulation is evocative because it shows the 'eating' of the middle (blue) class. What are the comparable systems in nature that we can design economies from? Nature doesn't have a 2,000 foot tall elephant. Nature has natural limits, on earth supplied by gravity, that inhibit one organism, regardless of its relative size, from continuing to leverage its weight to diminish others. 'Wealth' unlike nature, doesn't spoil. Which seems to me to be the key issue: in nature, if apples lasted forever, and increased in value over time, surely you'd see 'Great Monkey Kings' hoarding all the apples.

But the 'Monkey King' itself has a lifespan, a spoiling point of diminishing returns.

I think that without reverse-engineering where the monetary system came from: Violence based extraction of resources from the collective-"Kings" who established the concept of non-spoiling 'money' and hereditary passage of coersion-based power systems, we will have trouble undoing it.

In nature, ownership outside of peer-to-peer transactions does not exist.

One owns the moment of their labor, or transaction. There's a certain amount of energy that can be banked as calories through fats or sugars, but those easily become food for others, especially the larger something gets (think trees, sap, etc.)

The great difference in nature is that in nature the only transactions that are asymmetrically destructive (lessening ones buying/ interacting power) happen rarely, and usually in the case of predation.

However, the majority of natures interactions are additive and frictionless: no bee has been turned away from a flower due to lack of funds.

The value for both bee and flower is the fact that they are transacting.

The primary aspect is that in nature there is not a set of policies whereby certain organisms are hired to protect and maintain the hereditary accumulation of other organisms.

1 organism that has 99% more than all other organisms of its kind does not serve natures goals of reproduction, diversity and evolution.

Neither does it serve the possibility of an evolving society.

I think that if we keep trying to optimize something that very well may simply be obsolete, we will continue to effectively "make more efficient the internal combustion engine", in other words, optimize the fundamentally flawed.

WWND?

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Love this. Would be interesting to model in the use of credit. I would guess that any algo that includes credit would show that the aggregate amount of credit in the system always rises, and always exacerbates wealth inequality because at the low end all "excess" income is used to service the debt.

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