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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.
Author here, if there is enough interest I can clean the code up and put it on GitHub. It is basically a state machine.
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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 a…
so you mean the solution to that would be mandatory voting?
That would solve politicians being able to pay with unaccounted for benefits that become a burden decades later, and increase labor price transparency and result in better functioning markets once employers are out of the health/vision/dental/public transport/retirement benefit business.
And a third bird it kills is reducing the advantage big businesses have over small businesses.
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>[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…
This is what (some) people in finance do: make models to predict things, because if something about the future can be predicted to a sufficient degree of accuracy, it's generally possible to make money from it. In economics, the incentives are slightly different; in academia, the incentives are to publish interesting/novel/topical papers, like with other social sciences, not necessarily to make repeatable predictions. In social science nobody gets punished for making an interesting model that hasn't been rigorously proven to make repeatable predictions, while in finance on average better models make more money and get rewarded more. But sharing an effective model means other people can use the predictions too, meaning you capture less value from the predictions yourself, so people with an effective model have an incentive not to share it
dont' mistake a beautiful map for the territory, you'll find yourself lost amongst lines that aren't a real place.
It sounds like you take issue with this simulation? It applies heavily academic and simplistic rules around behavior. I like build up of it all to illustrate _simulating things_, but I think almost any traditional economics theory outside behavioral economics ought to be shelved for good.
The simulation only has workers/producers and it has a free market – it is missing capitalism. To make it realistic you need a subset of people owning the labor output of others, taking out all the surplus, using it to buy stakes of more economic activity, diverting profits to themselves, thus creating the loop of concentration of wealth which removes the surplus wealth from the producers and assigns it to ever decre…
I'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.
The simulation only has workers/producers and it has a free market – it is missing capitalism. To make it realistic you need a subset of people owning the labor output of others, taking out all the surplus, using it to buy stakes of more economic activity, diverting profits to themselves, thus creating the loop of concentration of wealth which removes the surplus wealth from the producers and assigns it to ever decre…
The "good" news is that gravity hates the Tower of Babel that every society inevitably produces.
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> 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 a…
We gave The New Soviet Man[1] a try for a couple of decades, but it didn't really stick.
As the late-20th, early 21st century has shown, programming that seeks to amplify our vices[2], as opposed to turn us against them turned out to be far more effective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man
[2] Don't think, just buy.
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…
> 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.
The data they use is usually publicly available, the models used by these must not be very secret. Is it not possible to hook this all up into a nice package, where I can go in and tune some knobs to my liking (there will always be knobs) to get a prediction on the inflation over the next three quarters.
Then, I can publicly claim, "Given this data, and this model, and my knob settings, here are my prediction." Then some other economist can come and dispute the data, model and the knob settings. They select a different data source, model and their own knobs.
Then three quarters later we check who made the right prediction.
Notice, I am not asking for the correct model of reality. Only a playground where people can argue using concrete data, models and knobs.