Does a similar (perhaps probabilistic) concept exist within finance/economics?
Georgism posits as a general principle that a lot of money is captured as land rent.
(separately: perhaps Georgism would require some upgrades for today's digital economy where land isn't necessarily required for production)
But I think a lot of big tech's expenses are engineer salaries in High Cost of Living areas, which really does come down to landowners preventing housing construction there.
(and companies absolutely do not pay their taxes on that: quite the opposite, they pay exorbitant compensation in order to convince people that no such taxes are required of them as corporations, and indeed to help persuade the owners of the mind-stuff that taxes themselves are problematic)
(.com, ipv4 addresses - yes, examples of similar circumstances, but not the core)
"The term land embraces, in short, all natural materials, forces, and opportunities..." (in the context of contrast with "capital")
So I don't think any upgrades are required; just perspective.
Hydrology and economics both have stock/flow models. I don't know much of anything about hydrology, but you seem to be describing a directed acyclic graph with multiple sinks (i.e. nodes with no outgoing edges, "drainage basins"). The full water cycle is not explicitly modeled; there is no "edge" from a drainage basin to the atmosphere, and from the atmosphere back to the ground, to create a cycle.
In economics, there are many models of cyclical flows of commodities or money (acylic graphs are a special case of limited interest, as far as I know). Historically, the physiocrats were among the first to propose one (the "Tableau Economique"), to support their doctrine that the growth of national wealth was limited by agricultural output (which was, to a first approximation, true in their time).
The descendants of the Tableau are Leontief input-output models, which form the basis of national accounts (from which we get concepts like Gross Domestic Product). You can calculate the "leontief inverse" of an input-output matrix that lets you characterize how coupled different firms or sectors are in a given economy. Under assumptions of linear technology, these let you answer questions like: "How much would the total output, in dollars, of the steel sector have to increase to increase the total output of the automobile sector by $10 million dollars, relative to last year?"
If a sectors or firm has a relatively large multiplier, it means that it has a greater impact on the whole economic system than those with a smaller multiplier. When you hear claims like "building this factory would indirectly create 10k jobs", it is usually based on a regional input output model commissioned by a lobbying group or government agency.
I'm dimly aware these techniques have been used to model the diffusion of inflation from sector to sector, but I believe the state of the art involves convex optimization techniques that are beyond my ken.
In a geological drainage basin, gravity is the constant. Not sure what is analogous in economics besides the obvious “money” but there are plenty of outliers to point out there whereas gravity doesn’t have as many.
Probably not, but I’m not really sure what you’re asking? What do you want this concept to do?
- do you want to know where people will migrate to?
- do you want to know how people will sort themselves based on some feature they possess?
I think it was this HN discussion[1] of housing prices that led me to wonder about this; I considered commenting there but it could've seemed like an obscure tangent.
It seems unsustainable societally for housing prices to continue to rise long-term, and I'm wondering if there is a way to graphically represent the state of the market and the players involved, in order to first of all understand the situation, and then to communicate what is going on to a variety of different audiences.
Housing supply is rising slower than the supply of dollars.
Simple supply and demand, you should expect housing prices to continue to rise long-term and it shouldn't be a surprise, nor should it be considered unsustainable if the supply of dollars continue to increase at this rate.
Regardless of what you do for a living we're all human and those two are major expenditures for 100% of the population.
I can't explain it but in my mind its sort of a map like the Collatz conjecture where you end up in a loop somewhere that always ends up being food, somewhere down the line.
Thats why giving money to the poorest people works.
Its called the trickle up effect..
as opposed to the now debunked trickle down effect, which was a invented theory of the 1%rs in an effort to speed up the trickle up effect to their own advantage.
If by "money" it is meant value, then I wonder if money really can accumulate somewhere, since it is subject to devaluation.
Maybe something like products or workers pool like water but I don't think wealth really does.