It is easy to think that government or policy choices cause the rich get richer, but that's not the reason. The rich actually always get richer, no matter what. It's a basic law.
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.
Thanks! YES, that is exactly what I am trying to do - find a simulation that keeps the Gini index around something like 0.5 - and if you press 'i' in the box with the graphics while the simulation is running, you will see a basic income + wealth tax start which does exactly that - compensates to a stable balance.
How about us who turned our lives to be VR creators as a RL job for a living, believing this is a future for 3D freelance work of this kind - Virtual reality worlds.
Thank you for everything you've done for anyone around the world, thank You :)
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:
Wow, thank you for doing that! Right - it's sort of a matter of whether you have to commit capital before deciding whether you win or lose (my original design), versus each person setting their own willingness to buy from their own balance (your adjustment) and then paying that amount regardless of the other parties wealth. So I agree that there are transaction cases where you see both sorts of strategy. The real world example that best captures mine is a poker game - where each party invests in a bet (from their own resources) before they find out whether they won or lost. And of course is this case it is not proportional because the poorer person cannot risk more than they have. This is exactly the 'All-in' betting behavior that rapidly results in a single winner (Gini index = 100) for a poker table. I would propose that the cases where 'proportional trade' dominate are less obvious (though altruistically appealing). The idea of proportional trade would suggest that there are often cases where if the buyer is the richer one, the seller has something to offer of matching value. Inothewards, as a millionaire I then walk up to a person randomly chosen in the square, and ask her "Do you have anything to sell me that is worth $100,000?" In general her answer will be "No, but I have this basket of potatoes which I will sell you for $1". As the richer person gets richer, they cannot find 'proportional' trading partners. The seller has to 'match' the buyers amount of cash with some good or service of equivalent value in exchange.
No problem, please keep it if it's useful. I didn't know whether it was rude to do that or not, but making the addition and seeing the result was fun (incidentally, you get a Gini index of about 45 for this, and if you start with one person owning everything, the system is still able to equilibrate to a Gaussian :o)
Oh poker is a good example, I wouldn't have thought of that!
And finally, yeah implementing proportional trading (at the individual level) would probably be impossible as you say, and so taxation and basic income may be a better option (working at the network level rather than the individual level). It's just interesting that what we humans observe to be fair (trades of equal amounts) leads to an unfair system, whereas a "unfair" trade (i.e. proportional trading) leads to a fair system. I don't think our intuition evolved for modern economics!
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.
Also the way "transactions" work is fundamentally weird too. In a real world transaction people have prices in mind before they even talk to the other person and if they're too poor, they just don't transact. TLDR, I think it's a neat simulation, just not reflective of the real world.
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.
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.
Yeah - I will give that a try and come back with an update. I think the monte-carlo transaction for interest would be a random chance of transferring from poorer to richer (interest) as a function of wealth difference. It'll definitely speed the process but I'm curious how fast compared to the base transaction (limit based on poorer balance).
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.
Thanks! YES, that is exactly what I am trying to do - find a simulation that keeps the Gini index around something like 0.5 - and if you press 'i' in the box with the graphics while the simulation is running, you will see a basic income + wealth tax start which does exactly that - compensates to a stable balance.
How about us who turned our lives to be VR creators as a RL job for a living, believing this is a future for 3D freelance work of this kind - Virtual reality worlds.
Thank you for everything you've done for anyone around the world, thank You :)
Thank you!
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
Wow, thank you for doing that! Right - it's sort of a matter of whether you have to commit capital before deciding whether you win or lose (my original design), versus each person setting their own willingness to buy from their own balance (your adjustment) and then paying that amount regardless of the other parties wealth. So I agree that there are transaction cases where you see both sorts of strategy. The real world example that best captures mine is a poker game - where each party invests in a bet (from their own resources) before they find out whether they won or lost. And of course is this case it is not proportional because the poorer person cannot risk more than they have. This is exactly the 'All-in' betting behavior that rapidly results in a single winner (Gini index = 100) for a poker table. I would propose that the cases where 'proportional trade' dominate are less obvious (though altruistically appealing). The idea of proportional trade would suggest that there are often cases where if the buyer is the richer one, the seller has something to offer of matching value. Inothewards, as a millionaire I then walk up to a person randomly chosen in the square, and ask her "Do you have anything to sell me that is worth $100,000?" In general her answer will be "No, but I have this basket of potatoes which I will sell you for $1". As the richer person gets richer, they cannot find 'proportional' trading partners. The seller has to 'match' the buyers amount of cash with some good or service of equivalent value in exchange.
No problem, please keep it if it's useful. I didn't know whether it was rude to do that or not, but making the addition and seeing the result was fun (incidentally, you get a Gini index of about 45 for this, and if you start with one person owning everything, the system is still able to equilibrate to a Gaussian :o)
Oh poker is a good example, I wouldn't have thought of that!
And finally, yeah implementing proportional trading (at the individual level) would probably be impossible as you say, and so taxation and basic income may be a better option (working at the network level rather than the individual level). It's just interesting that what we humans observe to be fair (trades of equal amounts) leads to an unfair system, whereas a "unfair" trade (i.e. proportional trading) leads to a fair system. I don't think our intuition evolved for modern economics!
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.
Also the way "transactions" work is fundamentally weird too. In a real world transaction people have prices in mind before they even talk to the other person and if they're too poor, they just don't transact. TLDR, I think it's a neat simulation, just not reflective of the real world.
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?
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.
Yeah - I will give that a try and come back with an update. I think the monte-carlo transaction for interest would be a random chance of transferring from poorer to richer (interest) as a function of wealth difference. It'll definitely speed the process but I'm curious how fast compared to the base transaction (limit based on poorer balance).