For people that didn't make the connection, the inscription says "Zarmanochegas, of Barygaza" which is the greek name for Baruch. (an ancient port city in Western India)
Seems a bit extreme to have the government pay people to have kids on the level of a full time job when you consider that through most of human history people worked to support their kids / families and at much lower income levels.
Looking at Northern Europe seems their TFR is similar to the USA despite incentives.
- people enthusiastically lining up to get the latest sneaker / iPhone.
- mildly enthusiastic grocery shopping.
- overpriced medical drugs due to a monopoly.
- taxation.
- outright theft at gunpoint
2. Insightful, thanks. I think one variable the model doesn’t account for is time (which is not multiplicative and scarce).
Money and power can be multiplicative so maybe most of us are playing the non-multiplicative game of spending our time to make money, while the rich are leveraged time to play multiplicative games where they spend money to make more money and happened to win a bunch of times.
This smells misleading / overly simplistic but I can’t quite quite put my finger on precisely why?
Some thoughts
- consensual trades are win win (you want a sandwich, I want $5 let’s trade! And we both win)
- something about the model is overly simplistic, like it produces a statistical distribution that looks like extreme inequality from randomness, but lots of different sorts of distributions can emerge from aggregating random (for eg a normal distribution several dice and looking at their totals).
Article doesn’t seem to mention that Japanese temples are rebuilt periodically every 20-60 years.
Most construction businesses don’t have this recurring revenue model, tied to religious rebuilding.