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.
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Building an economy simulator from scratch
31–40 of 217 posts
Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch
#32Is 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.
Author here, if there is enough interest I can clean the code up and put it on GitHub. It is basically a state machine.
I'd love to see it, even in unpolished state.
It'd go well as comparison vs. this code I've been playing around with from Phillip Rosedale (Founder of Second Life) where he's simulating economy for purposes of determining wealth distribution scenarios: https://editor.p5js.org/PhilipRosedale/sketches/odl5elMWy
Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch
#33Is 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.
Author here, if there is enough interest I can clean the code up and put it on GitHub. It is basically a state machine.
State machine? Why not entity component system?
Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch
#34This website is really cool (not just the post). Thomas must have put a decent amount of work. How to find the secrets?
Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch
#35This 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…
> the people were programed to actually follow the law. It fails every time on the real world because real people aren't.
Is anyone working on the problem of programming people? Or are we just hoping for a solution to that to fall into our laps?
> and why forced price-fixing bankrupts countries.
Ah ha! On this one I paid very close attention. No secret libertarians hiding in woodpiles, and sneaking out at night (or any other time) and stealing from the people. The only rational conclusion is that the simulation was set up to fail as some sort of propaganda.
Besides, only a few people died anyway, which for any socialist country is miraculously impressive success. So maybe not propaganda.
I'm beginning to think these simulations don't offer any insight into the real world at all.
Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch
#36OT: 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…
> 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.
Are you high or what?
The problem is so complex that people don't even agree how to take a measurement, let alone how to simulate the system. If nowadays people disagree when looking at the same numbers, imagine if each one could point to the numbers in his own simulator.
Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch
#37The MONIAC built in the 1950s by Bill Phillips (of Phillips curve fame) attempted to model economic processes with coloured water (fluidic logic)
Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch
#38This is so cute, love the animation and idea behind it.
Just yesterday I listened to Planet Money talk about how Bill Phillips got a position at the London School of Economics on the strength of his hydraulic computer simulating the economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch
#39I've long had the fantasy of an economics simulator given dwarf fortress levels of dedication and attention to detail. This might not be it, but it does warm my soul a bit.
star citizen with its quantum economic simulator is close enough:
https://www.boredgamer.co.uk/2020/04/24/star-citizens-quantu...
Re: Building an economy simulator from scratch
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
See LA lifeguards making $300k/yr https://lamag.com/news/the-highest-paid-lifeguard-in-l-a-mak...
How does this happen?
Every single government employee and their family/friends vote in local elections, and other people do not. You will not win an election without their votes, and you can use opaque compensation like DB pensions and whatnot to hide and punt forward the costs of the compensation.
You will never find a non taxpayer funded entity promise something like this:
>After 30 years of service, LA lifeguards can retire as young as 55 on 79-percent of their pay.
Go ask an insurance company how much an annuity for even $80k would cost starting at age 55 until death. It would be $1M+.
Social Security averages out your earnings for your whole lifetime to calculate the benefit, and that is with the power of the federal government. City and state governments regularly promise employees final average 1, 3, 5, and at best 10 pay formulas. So you see cops/firefighters/lifeguards/etc spiking their overtime and working 80 hours per week for the last few years, doubling and tripling their DB pension benefit.
And you simply will not see this outside of taxpayer funded entities.