Submitted 3 weeks ago by SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/
The simple math of the Yard-Sale Model shows that if everybody started out with equal money in a fair economy, the outcome tends toward one person holding all of the money. The cool graphical simulations on this page demonstrate why.
Hard work does not create wealth. The only thing that creates wealth is wealth, and we have it, and you don’t.
This quote from Horrible Bosses 2 always stood out to me.
Wealth is not the same as power. Wealth is owning money. Power is owning souls.
House of Cards… Paraphrasing Frank.
But one seems to always grant the other. You don’t get just the power, or just the money.
You’ve demonstrated exactly how the system works. Statistically a few players will be lucky and become very rich. They’ll be looked at as “built different”. All the other poor players will try to emulate them as if they can beat the system by achieving some virtue like working hard enough or having innate skill rather than realize the system is mathematically impossible to beat.
What is this from?
And you only had to win at a 60% rate. Less than I expected
The odds of that are still ~1.1%. He got very lucky
The probability of you getting 74 (or more) wins in 122 fair coin flips is ~1.16%
Yes, if you make your economy “people with money gain more money” then this is the endgame
Yard-Sale model also explains the Network Effect: People will flock to where the masses are because they will have a higher access to interact with folks than in isolated networks. Thus silos will eventually emerge: See Meta+Discord, etc…
Capitalism is working exactly as intended, which is the reason why it needs to be totally dismantled.
Note: I said capitalism, and not the free market. The two are not the same thing. You could have a completely free market under socialism and even communism, as those are economic systems that ensure workers actually earn the value they produce. Neither system says anything about command economies - that’s an Authoritarian shtick.
The title of the post is a little misleading. The model presented here does not require many parts of a capitalist system. If you can own stuff and have a free market this model predicts extreme wealth inequality. This happens by pure chance.
The model is not a good argument against capitalism. It can be used as an argument for taxing rich folks and against the “trickle down” idea.
Yup! That is why salary increase always is in percentage; the more you have, the more you get! 😡
This is why you want fewer ultra rich people in your country.
I think the fact is most people wouldn’t do certain work if they were wealthy enough to have a choice in the matter. The system relies on extreme poverty in order to coerce people into taking jobs they otherwise wouldn’t.
Any work that wouldn’t be done if we had a UBI should either be automated away or sufficiently well-paid that it would find workers even without the threat of poverty.
We don’t need to ritually kill a homeless person just so someone will pick up our trash any more than we need to do so for someone to tended to our elders dying of cancer.
Not a fact, an assumption based on an assumption baked into this economic system.
If I could live on the salary, I would prefer a manual labor job.
If I could live on the salary, I would prefer a manual labor job.
Wouldn’t your anecdote then be supporting the premise?
That means you’re doing your current job out of economic necessity. The fact you make more with your current role means free market proponents have deemed it more necessary, so have you not been economically coerced into taking a job you otherwise wouldn’t?
I don’t think people should be coerced into work they otherwise wouldn’t do, but there is some level of truth to it. If nothing else the wealthy and powerful want us to be mostly effective workers, so they can have more wealth to siphon off
Hard not to keep reading with such a nicely built article! Thsnks bud :)
It’s baked in because we choose capitalism
Absolutely, and the headline here isn’t that extreme wealth inequality is not the result of human nature, greed, or anything. It’s actually an emergent mathematical property of the system itself. It’s unavoidable, even if everybody acts honorably. Proof by physicists that capitalism is wack.
Super slick web experience on mobile. One of the best I’ve seen in a while.
In light of the pedofile parasite class raping and killing children and funneling all of our money to Israel I think it’s pretty obvious that the system needs to come down
Winning 60% of the rounds, and you still haven’t more money than the player who started with more. Is that not proof of the concept?
Also, yes, this game tickles in a good way.
Great article thanks for sharing!
Oh, this is very good. Thank you for this.
I’ll share this here - my explanation of why capitalism inevitably leads to fascism
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I’m afraid that it is absolutely inevitable - let me explain why
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
In this thread: I don’t like this article and it’s stupid. I can’t tell you why, but it is, and anyone that disagrees with me is stupid too.
QED
I know. Now what?
There are a lot of people out there who still believe in trickle-down, Galtism, or the primacy of hard work. Idiots, dupes, or both, we still need to recruit them, or at least stop blocking change. Easily-digestible information like this needs to become widespread.
Make choices that support the alternative economy. Find a CSA, use a credit union, use the library, support local businesses. Better yet, put money into things like the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast cooperativefund.org
In real life people die.
But in real life inheritance exists
Sure. But as of now Elon has 14 Children that we know of, probably 200 clones in bunkers around the world. If that’s not redistributing wealth, I don’t know what is.
That people in the middle and bottom support it and consider it normal is the problem.
I don’t think this is as good a model as you or the oop seem to think it is. Nobody is under the impression that you can make even by buying and selling random things. And gambling your money against other people isn’t something people can afford to do unless the already have money to live comfortably. Real people have fixed needs they have to buy and usually a fixed value they can create to make money.
I don’t a model that doesn’t share any similarities with the system can be used to prove that inequality is baked into the system. I don’t mean that it isn’t, but I couldn’t in good conscience claim so based on this alone. Please keep your standards for evidence high yall.
Also the article completely misses the reason why wealth accumulates in the model. It has nothing to do with compound ratios being confusing or the amount one can afford to wager. This is simply a normal distribution with flipped axes and a bottom cap of 0. Inequality arises even if you change the game so that richer people give more when they lose and receive less when they win.
If it’s not a good model, then you are welcome to pick it apart. However, the study that applied it for the 2017 paper in Scientific American found that it matches observed data about our economy stunningly well when applied.
As the author of that study was quoted here saying, the simple Yard Sale Model here can’t begin to explain a complex economy, but its function is like an X-ray to cut through the complexity to see the bones of the thing.
In any case, we know empirically that Trickle Up is the actual effect of the capitalist system. If there’s a model that can explain the mechanism more accurately, I’d be happy to hear it.
Scientific American isn’t an academic journal and there’s no paper about this published in 2017. There’s a Scientific American article about it written in 2019 though. I think you’re referring to the part in the article that says it matched real world data remarkably after they modified it in 2017.
I don’t think this model is an x-ray that reveals the bones of the system, as its premise about how it works is plainly inaccurate. Maybe scientists can gain actual insight by studying it further but I don’t think drawing conclusions such as the title on social media is healthy.
At best the model teaches why gambling is a bad idea even if the chances are perfectly even. At worst someone looks at this and decides all anti capitalist evidence must be flimsy
I think there is some confusion as to what this model represents. The linked article is not bad at explaining it but some things could be clearer.
First of all, the “money” in the model is not the cash you have at hand. It is the total value of all the things you own. This model does not need money and it also works if you exchange cigarettes for candy (as long as you can assign some worth to the objects).
It is also not about gambling. It assumes that every time you exchange goods with someone else, you can become richer or poorer (I like the example from the article: if you pay $200 for a watch that is worth $150, you lose $50, someone else gains $50).
It makes the extremely optimistic assumption that the chance to gain or lose money in a trade is equal. This is often obviously not the case in the real world. If you buy something from a supermarket, the owner wants to earn money, needs to pay their employees, needs to pay rent, … so you know you pay more than the value of the goods you get.
Now this simplified and very optimistic model predicts that there is an exponential distribution of wealth and it predicts that repeated exchanges between a rich and a poor person will most likely result in the rich person getting richer and the poor person getting poorer.
What can we learn from that?
1.) even under these very optimistic conditions money trickles up. The real world is stacked much more against you, making a trickle down effect unlikely (though not impossible, this model is a simplification).
2.) rich people (in the model but imo it applies to the real world as well) are not smarter or otherwise better than the average person. They were lucky.
3.) Even if we remove a lot of the advantages rich people have in the world and construct a system that is seemingly “fair” (as in every one has the same chance) you still end up with super rich people. The only way to combat this is by redistributing money - tax the rich. Note that you still get an exponential distribution in the model but it becomes flatter.
What this model says nothing about is how the real world is stacked in favor of rich people. It tries to eliminate all these factors. So using this model to argue that inequality is built into the system (as the headline suggests) is somewhat strange. The model rather suggests that the inequality always arises from simple chance - One could maybe argue from it that we need to actively combat it (depends on the personal sense of justice if earnings due to luck should be redistributed).
I agree with you on the value creation. This model treats the economy as a zero-sum game. But the real economy is typically growing and this is ignored here.
Theft is the reason for wealth inequality.
This article is unbelievably stupid and completely divorced from reality.
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.
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.
Theft is also an equalizer.
Increasing wealth inequality is a feature of capitalism
TheFogan@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Another simulation… that’s mainstream in american society… Landlords Game – IE what’s now Monopoly. By definition everyone starts with the same amount of money, and it ends with one person massively ahead and everyone else going bankrupt.
Mog_fanatic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Well yes, but have you tried just throwing the board across the room when that one person gets massively ahead and you land on Pacific avenue with a hotel on it?
FearMeAndDecay@literature.cafe 2 weeks ago
It’s even more realistic when the banker is stealing money!
TheFogan@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
True, but the point of the simulations is basically debunking the idea that even when capitalism “works”. IE the hypothetical perfect scenereo where everyone starts off with the same, has the same chances of getting good and bad opprotunities, that the the fairness systematically fades out of the system the longer the game runs.
I recall an economics class once where they started out playing monopoly, but giving everyone different starting amounts of money… and basically demonstrating that well over 90% of the time… the advantages basically determined the game.