Building an economy simulator from scratch

Great start! Some things to consider for future versions: more sophisticated tax code, financial regulations, monopsonies, monopolies, collusion, corruption, oligarchies, demand elasticity, cascading effects from supply chain disruptions, central bank quantitative easing.

All of this is emergent behaviour. Agents need to be smarter and the networks need to be larger and information needs to have a cost.

Is the source code for this simulator available anywhere? The post's code itself is minimized/obfuscated: https://thomassimon.dev/assets/cashloss.1fca21f6.js

I couldn't find anything on the author's GitHub. I'm mostly just curious how it's built.

Where are the bad actors who exploit the system to steal from everyone? No economic simulator is complete without this.

Edit>> It appears to be the state.

This is interesting, in that I've tried to come up with simple simulations like this for strategy games before. But I was a little "eww" when he kicked the number of government workers up to 40% of the workforce. Looks like it goes all the way up to 50%.

On simulation #13, where tax is fixed at 10%, the government workers all eventually starve. Surprisingly, the libertarians are correct because at this point the quality of life index abruptly rockets up to twice what it used to be. But there's some sort of robotic overlord AI going on, it still collects the tax.

But then in simulation #18, things become a little insane. I call this one the Massachusetts simulation... only 3 workers, but 9 government employees. For a 3:1 ratio. The simulation suggests that some sort of economic meltdown occurs and they all starve, but I suspect that things were a little more violent than that.

After, the developer then introduces ration tickets. This is simulation #20, and I'm pretty sure it's Zimbabwe. But it's not the real world Zimbabwe, it somehow works. That is, if you're ok printing trillion dollar bills.

Simulation #21 takes a new direction entirely. FDR has been elected, and tries to stamp out competition... but he is too late, evil capitalist farmers have grown too many apples, which perversely leads to starvation. Careful apple quotas are needed. The government has disappeared though, probably because late stage capitalism destroyed it. Only the corporations survive.

Surprisingly, no farm subsidies yet. I predict the introduction of a new private sector worker, the ConAgra lobbyist. We'll see if he shows up in a later simulation. That is, assuming another government is elected.

In simulation #25, one of the warlords has settled down and become a government again. But this is the last of the simulations. No lobbyists, though the central bank has returned. This might be because Andrew Jackson has died. I did not like the man, he will not be missed. But quite clearly the inflation is through the roof again, and 30% taxes are here to stay.

What I've learned from these is that history is a lie. Rhodesia probably never existed, and Zimbabwe happened before the US civil war.