71–80 of 217 posts
No banks, no capital, no capitalists living off the workers' labour. This is not even close how the economy works.
You know banks exist outside of capitalism, no?
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The parent's point is that an economic simulator that does not include them is probably not something that's useful to draw conclusions about capitalist societies from.
It is a fun toy, though.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know banks exist outside of capitalism, no?
While it's true that banks can exist outside capitalism, capitalists generally can't. --- The parent's point is that an economic simulator that does not include them is probably not something that's useful to draw conclusions about capitalist societies from. It is a fun toy, though.
That's not really true; people who own and profit from their ownership of the means of production exist in feudal economies; the fact that their ownership of the means of production is a sonetimes a consequence of rights associated with land tenure and, whether or not that is the case, not marketable or less freely so than under capitalism the capital, makes the system not capitalism, but doesn't make the owners of capital not capitalists.
Capitalists qua capitalists aren’t the ruling class outside of capitalism (though being a capitalist was also a subordinate part of being part of the labded aristocracy, and control of certain elements of the means of production was connected to land tenure), but they still can exist. Capitalism as a system is mostly a result of the non-landholding capitalists progressively leveraging their existing wealth to gain more systemic advantage (at the express of the landed aristocracy) than they enjoyed in pre-capitalist economies.
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.
It is buoyancy. It lifts few people up very high as they push down more that go down under the waves.
Can someone explain why in Simulation 16, 4 producing workers can support 3 non-producing workers consuming just as much as them with just 10% taxation and yet they have similar QOL? It doesn't make sense to me intuitively.
If we ignore money and just look at goods this implies 3 people can do "nothing" (the government workers don't buy from anyone in this simulation) and yet consume as much as 4 people who do produce, and the 4 taxed people only have to pay 10% taxes while everyone enjoys similar quality of life as 60% taxation.
It would be like imagine you have four cartons of ten eggs and you tax 10% of each one. How can you end up with 3 whole cartons just from that taxes, it would only be four eggs, less than half of one carton rather than three extra cartons of the same size as the new reduced carton size of 9.
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.
https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/the-death-of...
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.
Eve Online? They even used to employ an economist to monitor the state of the game.
An interesting thing you can do with a simulator is pause, rewind, make arbitrary experiments, run counterfactuals, etc -- all of which are prohibited in Eve since it needs to respect the users who are there to have fun, not be test subjects.
dont' mistake a beautiful map for the territory, you'll find yourself lost amongst lines that aren't a real place.
On Exactitude in Science By Jorge Luis Borges …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with…
Simplifying from a non-complex source is a waste of time.