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Comment by spc476 | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago I wrote a very simple economic simulator. It had a fixed number of actors with a fixed amount of money. Each tick, I would pick a "buyer" and a "seller"---the buyer would give the seller some amount of money (if the buyer had insufficient funds, no money would be exchanged; there was no credit or debt). I would run this for thousands of times. The thought behind the "buyer/seller" concept was that we all act as both (we're a "seller" when working or a buyer when relaxing (food, entertainment, etc)).

It did not matter how much the amount was---fixed or random, the outcome was always the same---a small number of actors would end up with the majority of money.

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So this should make some sense. If you are randomly picking "people" to buy and sell stuff certain actors are going to buy more and certain ones are going to sell more. I'd expect in the beginning (assuming everyone starts with the same money) there would be a lot of fluctuation. Then you get the "1 percenters", if you will.

But that doesn't mean we can't teak the dials to create better distributions. Being human means we can overcome certain natural processes. We can fly. We can live in inhospitable places. Why can't we do the same for natural economic processes?

I actually did not expect that outcome. Some variation yes, but not an actual power law distribution (each actor has the same chance of being a buyer as a seller). But as I stated, every one started out with the same amount of money, and there were runs where the amount paid was identical in every case. Still got a power law outcome.

But isn't that a simulator of a gift economy (unidirectional value flows) rather than a market economy?

It might appear that way, but I didn't want to get into a full economic simulation [1]. That's when I decided to simplify the problem to just the money exchange (which is why I started with a random amount of money to be used). The seller is offering "something" the buyer wants and thus, the exchange of money.

But hey, the outline of what I did is there---try your own hand at simulating this.

[1] I thought of maybe food, materials and energy (ala M.U.L.E.) but I had no way to determine realistic price levels (or want levels for that matter).

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