I assume that you mean theft of the surplus value of labor by capital owners? If so, that’s exactly what the Yard Sale Model captures: One party to every transaction ‘wins’ and one ‘loses’.
Take a factory as an example. The wealthy owners can afford to gamble on paying less than the full value of labor as wages because they’ll survive if widgets don’t get made and they can’t buy a second yacht. The workers can’t afford to gamble on holding out for better pay, because it could mean their families starving in the street. Thus, they’re forced to give up the surplus value of their labor in order to survive.
The YSM just aims to simplify complex, real-world situations like this into a clean mathematical construct that’s easy to use for computer simulations.
thisisbutaname@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
I’m not arguing theft doesn’t happen, at all, and neither is the article. In fact, it explicitly states that the yard-sale model doesn’t represent reality, and doesn’t even claim to do so. It simply shows one underlying phenomenon where wealth accumulates naturally in a random system.