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Comment by doubleunplussed | Hacker News Reader

Thank you so much! I've similarly been trying to wrap my head around monetary things recently, and as with learning anything in physics (my field), I believe you don't really understand a model unless you can code up a simulator.

It's been maddening not being able to find a comprehensive model of how all the bits fit together, and I have many times wondered if the lack of existence of a game like yours meant that no such model actually existed. Happy to be wrong!

And of course a game is a brilliant way to build intuition whether you know the equations of the underlying model or not.

I haven't played it yet but am greatly looking forward to it, really hoping to answer various gaps in my knowledge. Thanks again!

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This is exactly why MONIAC[0][1] was created in 1949. Not a real computer exactly - it simulates the entire system with water flow.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAZavOcEnLg

I've been looking for something similar too, an explanation of the financial system written out in code so that I can try understand it.

Something I found recently is Steve Keen's Minsky, and his book The New Economics, which uses Minsky to go through a series of simple models of the modern fiat money system.

http://www.profstevekeen.com/minsky/

I was going to suggest this tool too as I’m not aware of others like it.

Worth the caveat that Keen is a heterodox economist. So if you pull his off-the-shelf models you are not getting the current accepted “mainstream” theory. I don’t think Economics is a field as mature as Physics where you should have extremely strong deference to the orthodoxy based on an incredibly strong prediction record, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

While we are at it: I need this for climate change as well

There's The Climate Game¹

1: https://ig.ft.com/climate-game/

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31106819

This game was ok until it asked about energy generation and didn't allow you to increase nuclear production.

This Climate Game by FT .. it feels a bit like promotion for carbon capture tech.

But, aren't finical systems a sociological science, rather than a mathematical model?

In economies, people, politics, and their dispositions, their sentiments, dominate.

How do you model human responses to local, national, regional, and global events. How do you model human cascades?

Mathematical models are that, models—a simplified version of a particular phenomenon. Economic models are no different, in particular they presuppose, among other things, that economic agents behave rationally [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

Thank you for your response, I shall read that Wikipedia entry when I sober up.

Australian East Coast Saturday night wooo!

Economic “rationality” sometimes gets a bad rap, but it’s more defensible than it may appear and provides a well-circumscribed, workable general foundation to expand on. In simple versions: rational preferences (which include indifference) are transitive and complete, and people pursue these goals. That’s all. Symmetric violations wash away in the aggregate, and asymmetric can be included, e.g. as loss aversion. Criticism of “rationality” is often stuck in late 19th to mid 20th century debates that were since generally resolved.

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