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The infamous coin toss

ergodicityeconomics.com

141–150 of 258 posts

Re: The infamous coin toss

#141
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're paid by the word, it'd be better to skip all that and state your third option.

I point out your false dichotomy and you say what is the third option? I have been very clear there are more two more than three but many many options. To be clear - the two options you’ve presented are not actual options that anyone is arguing for. So presenting a single alternative would be to fall into an obvious trap. I ought not to have replied to disingenuous debate in the first place I get that. But perhaps so…

If there's a third it doesn't mean there isn't a fourth. It just means you have an actual argument instead of just calling something a false dichotomy.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#142
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the plumber exploit people with his/her tool ownership?

They have the opportunity to exploit people through asymmetric knowledge. Any other questions?

By that definition of exploitation the factory worker can exploit the factory owner by working slowly or calling in sick or or or or

Re: The infamous coin toss

#143

Huh. So I wrote the code, and ran the simulation. Now I get it. Investors: 100,000 Iterations: 100 Average worth after 100 iterations: $83.923 Average net worth increases. However the distribution of wealth is skewed dramatically. Winners: 13,704 (net worth of more than $1 at the end) Investors worth What That Guy was worth (the investor who made the most money): $1,171,830.00 He flipped 71 heads and 29 tails. Median…

> Average wealth increases; but average log(wealth) decreases

What’s the mathematical rationale (or intuition) for looking at the log values?

I don’t quite understand what they represent.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#144
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I point out your false dichotomy and you say what is the third option? I have been very clear there are more two more than three but many many options. To be clear - the two options you’ve presented are not actual options that anyone is arguing for. So presenting a single alternative would be to fall into an obvious trap. I ought not to have replied to disingenuous debate in the first place I get that. But perhaps so…

If there's a third it doesn't mean there isn't a fourth. It just means you have an actual argument instead of just calling something a false dichotomy.

You’ve presented two options and there are many more than two. I don’t have to list them to point at that at face value it is obvious that the two options you listed are not the only options. Can you genuinely imagine no other options? Really?

I am giving a true dichotomy here, either:

1. You believe there are precisely two options

2. You do not believe there are precisely two options.

Which is it?

Re: The infamous coin toss

#145
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The vast majority of wealth is concentrated in a very small number of people - and not directly attributable to those people - due to local and international tax avoidance. Yes, this is known. I just asked you to clarify what it was I said that is so naieve?

You asked two questions. Sorry if I answered the wrong one. I think when the person above suggested eating the rich you literally believed them and you’ve been on a misguided tear ever since. There’s little I can do to help you, but by god I’m glad I tried. Best wishes.

This isn’t an adverserial exchange my friend.

I’m sorry if I got on your nerve with the “worldly and educated” jab, but you were (and have continued to be) quite condescending in your responses.

Have a nice day :)

Re: The infamous coin toss

#146
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's a third it doesn't mean there isn't a fourth. It just means you have an actual argument instead of just calling something a false dichotomy.

You’ve presented two options and there are many more than two. I don’t have to list them to point at that at face value it is obvious that the two options you listed are not the only options. Can you genuinely imagine no other options? Really? I am giving a true dichotomy here, either: 1. You believe there are precisely two options 2. You do not believe there are precisely two options. Which is it?

You don't have to list them to say that it's a not dichotomy, but you do if you want to demonstrate it's not a dichotomy. I don't know why you're spending 100s of words on the theory of dichotomy, instead of just providing a third option to show how it's not one.

E.g. this could have gone:

LeonB: what about businesses owned by many people?

robertlagrant: ah, yes - what I was saying would put them in the "private ownership" bucket.

Or whatever it is that you're actually thinking of, but are reluctant to say.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#148

Huh. So I wrote the code, and ran the simulation. Now I get it. Investors: 100,000 Iterations: 100 Average worth after 100 iterations: $83.923 Average net worth increases. However the distribution of wealth is skewed dramatically. Winners: 13,704 (net worth of more than $1 at the end) Investors worth What That Guy was worth (the investor who made the most money): $1,171,830.00 He flipped 71 heads and 29 tails. Median…

[dead]

Re: The infamous coin toss

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long time limit, there are about the same number of heads and tails, and since all changes are multiplicative, the coin tosses can be permuted. We can thus divide the game into two sets of coin tosses: excess heads or tails that represent a negligible amount of good or bad luck, and many HT pairs, each of which shrinks EV by 0.9. Put another way, for each HH pair you should expect a TT pair, and a HHxTT or TTx…

Thanks, putting it this way does help me understand a bit better. So a large number of repeated fair tosses can be broken down into a sequence of win-loss pairs, which are always =0.9. The thing that still confuses me is, why the heck is the EV 1.05? It seems to be expressing something true - if you were to split your money into a thousand piles and "play" each individually, you make money overall.

> It seems to be expressing something true - if you were to split your money into a thousand piles and "play" each individually, you make money overall.

This is exactly the catch of the experiment. It's proposing you cannot split your money in independent experiments. You need to pick a history and stick with it. That's what ergodicity is about.

Hence, no one owns the average (EV) money of all possible outcomes and it's a pointless metric, even though it doesn't say something that's mathematically false.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#150

Huh. So I wrote the code, and ran the simulation. Now I get it. Investors: 100,000 Iterations: 100 Average worth after 100 iterations: $83.923 Average net worth increases. However the distribution of wealth is skewed dramatically. Winners: 13,704 (net worth of more than $1 at the end) Investors worth What That Guy was worth (the investor who made the most money): $1,171,830.00 He flipped 71 heads and 29 tails. Median…

Except, in your simulation you only consider accumulation of dollar amounts. Pure gambling, wealth in a vacuum. Calling these dollar amounts 'wealth' is not helpful because they need to have purchasing power, there need to be goods and services to buy, otherwise they're just meaningless entries in a ledger, bits of paper (see Zimbabwe). It's wrong to dismiss capitalism on the basis of this simulation.

In the real world there are usually side effects to these 'bets'. For example, a person, who is already rich, uses their wealth to purchase a factory and produce goods at a dollar price in the hope to earn more wealth. Those goods might be rejected by the market, but if accepted, they receive dollars and the rest of the world receives goods. The factory owner can only receive the dollars if others can afford to buy them. This means there is another road to ruin - fail to produce anything people want at a price they can afford and you'll soon go bust.

The buyers who receive goods in exchange for money, particularly durable labor saving goods like dishwashers/fridges/cars/computers, are surely more wealthy in some sense? In addition, the factory owner might make tools/machinery that enables other entrepreneurs to make stuff too.

Also consider ongoing costs, that capital has to be replaced (things break!), unexpected bumps in the road, finite lifespan, waste, and so on.

Which leads me to our current system: the rich have got richer through financialization, government lobbying, zero-interest financing et.c, that has allowed them to acquire assets that appreciate without a substantial increase in production.

The solution is to make rich people take much bigger, potentially ruinous, risks with their wealth on production instead of financial chicanery. More abundant goods and technology are the payoff while failure leads to liquidation of their assets, making assets more accessible to everyone else who might need them.

Deflation, and crashes are a feature, not a bug. Inflationism, stimulus, cheap money et.c helps protect workers in the short term during a downturn, but prolonged stimulus makes assets unaffordable. Worse it causes huge misallocations of capital into unproductive endeavors at no risk to the investor.

My belief is you don't 'prop-up' the big fish using the government/central bank. Then yes, you may still have inequality, but it won't be nearly as static, but more dynamic. i.e there may always be an extreme power law wealth distribution, but what's more important is there's regular turnover at the top and nobody spends too long in the top or the tail.

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