Without going into a debate whether this statement makes sense or not in absolute terms, it seems to make sense in some people's heads, as differences can be measured across different groups in the 500+ user population.
The very purpose of this game is to measure biases and perception, not reality
"ABSTRACT. The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online
search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product information. Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers to purchase advertised products. In the mid-twentieth century, courts applying the antitrust laws held that such persuasive
advertising is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers, but the Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) was unable to pursue an antitrust campaign against persuasive advertising for fear of depriving consumers of advertising's information value. Now that the information function of most
advertising is obsolete, the FTC should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by
treating all advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is
available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act."
This makes the argument that the need to convey product information is now fully accomplished by search engines, and advertising only adds harm / manipulation.
It recounts several examples of internet self-righteous mobs lynching people for minor and larger offences.
In particular, one conclusion of the book is that aggressively not making amends for bad behaviour, even raising the bar for offensiveness, is the optimal survival strategy. See Trump ...
It focuses on observable social and economics consequences (failures of equality, opportunity and sustainability in particular), when introducing new economic concepts.
The goal is to avoid students being blinded by appealing, but simplistic, economics models.
Having been seduced by many an economic theory before, I for one welcome this perspective.
The development of behavioural science (i.e. not modelling people as rational beings, but exploiting human psychological biases, see R. Cialdini, D. Ariely, D. Kahneman) is a new phenomenon.
Also is the shift from mass broadcasting to targeted messaging. The degree of information available to exploit you, your weaknesses and biases is a new phenomenon.
The erosion of social loyalties and ties, which can be linked to one century of neoliberal policies, is also a change (although it happened in the past: see the Corruption and decline of Rome: http://www.historytoday.com/stephen-williams/corruption-and-...)
Probably my misunderstanding, but this simulation does not reflect a continued concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, in my opinion.
Please let me know your thoughts:
I agree that the concentration of wealth reflected in the charts shows that, at any point of time, the person at the 1st percentile owns an increasing fraction of the total wealth.
However, this same person is very likely to be almost immediately spoliated by the subsequent transaction, and give all its wealth to someone (maybe the poorest person).
In summary, there is a lot of social mobility, as can be revealed by commenting out the following line in the code (essentially, we now track the financial path of specific individuals, rather than the wealth of various percentiles):
def record_percentiles(population, percentiles):
#population = sorted(population, reverse=True)
N = len(population)
return [population[int(p*N/100.)] for p in percentiles]
So, it seems to me that, on average, everyone is equal over time, but each instant offers every participant dramatic ups and downs.