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Building an economy simulator from scratch

thomassimon.dev

21–30 of 217 posts

Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch

#21

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 qual…

> at this point the quality of life index abruptly rockets up

That's because on this simulation the government isn't doing any useful work.

The ration tickets work because the people were programed to actually follow the law. It fails every time on the real world because real people aren't.

And the simulation #20 works because the simplistic model actually works. At a first approximation, inflation isn't a problem at all. Things only start to fail after you have competition, corruption, very limited resources, etc.

Simulation #21 is a great visualization of why people must be able to set prices with enough freedom, and why forced price-fixing bankrupts countries.

Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch

#24

OT: I see economists of various ideological tilts constantly arguing about how macroeconomic variables will respond to specific government policies. You know: "this new tax will increase inflation; no it will not, it will increase unemployment". What I don't get is why there are no readily available online macroeconomic simulators with real world data that make these sort of predictions. For a lot of countries, up-to…

[deleted]

Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch

#26

OT: I see economists of various ideological tilts constantly arguing about how macroeconomic variables will respond to specific government policies. You know: "this new tax will increase inflation; no it will not, it will increase unemployment". What I don't get is why there are no readily available online macroeconomic simulators with real world data that make these sort of predictions. For a lot of countries, up-to…

>[1] Much like the standard model of particle physics or of cosmology. Fairly dirty and complicated models with lots of tunable parameters. Anyone capable of making models that can predict the future with a reasonable degree of accuracy is probably in finance, making 5-10x what they could in economics. The economy is an incredibly complex system, subject to emergent behaviour and chaotic effects, much more so than in…

Any model has some precision associated with it. I am not asking for 5 sigma level of precision. But if the economists are fighting about what will happen to a particular macroeconomic variable, they are making a prediction even if it is a log_2(3) bit prediction [1]. There must be some math that is backing that. I want to see it explicitly put into a computational model that runs on live data. Otherwise is there any real content to the arguments that economists are having?

> Especially because it's not possible to create true controlled experiments

Cosmology has zero-experiments. It is a completely observational science [2]. And in fact, has very bad data. Basically a time-frozen snapshot of the universe from a particular point in space. They can't even make predictions about the future, only about what some new dataset of that same time-frozen universe will say. Economics on the other hand has the benefit of lots data about interventions and their consequences. There is so much opportunity to develop models by making predictions and checking what happens.

[1] variable goes up or down or stays the same.

[2] The fact that the roots of modern science lie in a purely observational no-experiment discipline of astronomy is lost on many.

Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch

#30

Simulation 16 is hilarious. By the state dynamically scaling how much they print money in order to support government workers, government workers accumulate more wealth than the producers of goods.

Those that actually produce goods are very far down the wealth pecking order
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