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Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling Thread 4: SimWorldEconomy

by Migeru
Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 03:49:16 AM EST

A funny thing happened on the way to systemic fiscal reform...

Chris Cook posted a diary on how the current financial, monetary and fiscal system is as broken as Humpty Dumpty and, as of right now, upwards of 80% of the comments are in a subthread about developing an online simulation game to teach people political economy (quotations below the fold).

So, as the title of this diary suggests, let's get cracking.

Part of the "Probably Incredibly Unreadable Modelling Thread" series:

Probably incredibly unreadable modelling thread by Colman on June 12th, 2006
(Yet another) probably incredibly unreadable modelling thread by Migeru on November 18th, 2006
Probably Incredibly Unreadable Modelling Thread 3: Tariffs and capital controls by JakeS on October 10th, 2008

Here's how the discussion in Chris' thread developed:

Frank Schnittger

Given that most people owe their livelihoods to those who control these commons, how can we educate them to vote against their masters (and perhaps even their own private, immediate, self interests)? For most people, their job trumps their vote every time - and thus privilege and power triumphs over people and democracy. We need a political theory and process which can overcome this roadblock without violence.
Sven Triloqvist
Such a system would still require a non-political continuous management (read civil service). Although in my dreams, it would be possible to decentralize the civil service and give a little bit of work to do to everyone, napsterwise.
ThatBritGuy
But here's an idea - let's say that as a side project to your EP site, there was a practical modelling 'game' which illustrated the consequences of economic and political decisions.
You want lower taxes? Okay - let's see what happens if you cut tax rates. Where do you cut them? What are the consequences on spending and social investment?
You can see where this is going. Rather than - or possibly as well as - putting out Think Tank PR in the usual way, you can turn this into a 'game', and get participation and increased insight at the same time.
ARGeezer
A college friend of mine became the Director of the Bureau of Trade Statistics in the Department of Commerce during the Nixon Administration and held that position into the mid '90s. One of his primary responsibilities was maintaining the Bureau's computer model of the US economy as adapted to account for international trade. I was fascinated by the idea of being able to "what if" policy options. With current models only a few people have the opportunity to make such queries.
It would seem that the explosion of computing power should make it possible to put such models into open source code that could run on relatively inexpensive platforms as a distributed computing system over a network or the internet. Run in stand alone mode such a program would enable individuals to model the effects of various policies and events. But a more interesting model might be a sort of economic "Second Life" where a multitude of separate agents take actions directed primarily towards the benefits to their particular institutional avatar and the combined effects on the individual avatars and the aggregate model of the economy could be observed. This might require a greatly more powerful processor or it might be possible to accomplish via distributed processing.
I have a sense that this would likely give rise to useful management information and could lead to gainful employment for a whole new group of specialists. Were it set up so that sub sets of the users could devise, employ and test new organizations and techniques in separate economy domains it could allow experimental meta-economics. If these proved promising, they could be re-integrated into the basic group model and the effects of new agents acting on the existing system could be observed.

That's where the discussion gets technical and I recommend that people 1) go back to ARGeezer's comment and read the thread from that point down: 2) cross-post their own comments or a summary of them here so we can start discussing the development of the model and game.

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Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling Thread 4: SimWorldEconomy | 16 comments (16 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

XBRL (none / 0)

To kick off, I'll repost an edited version of my comment of today to ATinNM in the original thread:

I am not sure what you (ATinNM) are saying (in general) about modeling an 'economy': that it is impossible, too expensive, or something else?

Economies are modeled - they have to be modeled in some way, for governance. That is why there are national budgets, and offices of budget and management. Now, these models may be imprecise, contentious or too narrow, but they are used to predict the effect of changes in the rules of different types of transactions of citizens, companies, organizations, government and 'external transactions' (i.e. how these rules might interact with the rules of other budget systems in other nations).

However 'inaccurate' such national budgets may be, it is correct to say that building a parallel one would an expensive project. However, the Dutch government is already considering the use of XBRL to 'code' their national budget in such a way as to allow any citizen to play 'what if' with it. The mandated use of XBRL would also bring transparency to corporate accounting, because the tax authorities could also play 'what if' with those accounts. Stress testing, I suppose you'd call it ;-)

An explanation of XBRL is here. There's an XBRL conference in Paris 23-25 June.

So there may be a 'game' to be played in the future that does not require the building of the model.

TBG's 'game', as I understand it, is not about producing a perfect, but coarse, real 'what if' modeled budget, but a simulation of the budget decision processes so that citizens can better understand the processes and thus vote in a more informed manner. Lemonade Stand 3.0.

BTW I wrote a diary about XBRL a year ago, and the different views expressed in comments are useful to the present discussion.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 04:02:08 AM EST

Re: XBRL (none / 0)

That's an accounting language, not a modelling language.

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 04:09:32 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: XBRL (none / 0)

The model is the model. XBRL allows you access the 'model' in new ways.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 04:27:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: XBRL (none / 0)

All flavors of XML require a human to construct the inter-relations of word (semiotics) and meaning (semantics) as well as meta-text from primary text.

Boooor-ing

;-)

No one could have predicted

by ATinNM on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 08:40:14 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling (none / 0)

I think so far the best proposal comes from ATinNM:

The ability to model a local political-economy has been around for a long time: SimCity does as good a job as one can expect given their limitations and methodology. And since,
On January 10, 2008 the SimCity source code was released under the free software GPL 3 license under the name Micropolis.
that's where I'd start my research. If I was going to do something ... which I'm not¹.
SimCity, as is, does a good enough job that it is widely used by urban planners, city planners, & etc. as a tool. Idly projecting here but it seems to me a neural network-like construct having lots of nodes - 200 or 300 - running SimCity autonomously tossing in cross-communication plus "macro-economic" influences together comprising a first-hack Fitness Landscape would prove interesting. The easiest way to add complexity to the Fitness Landscape is to build some - say 10 to 20 - analog computers, cross-linkable with A/D and D/A conversion to/from the neural net to simulate continuous data streams which the neural net nodes have to 'chunk' - both for data processing and across time.
As an added benefit, you'd get the first major non-von Neumann computer built in a long, long time. Which, by the way, is something we desperately need as a research tool.
¹ Unless somebody wants to pay me to do it. This gun for hire. I can be had. :-)

I recently got introduced to Travian. It has a very very simple local political economy and a very very simple mechanism for trading among players. It's more of a massively multi-player version of Civilization. What AT is proposing here is a situation where people download a Micropolis client with an additional interface to a peer-to-peer server where they can engage in diplomac and trade...

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 04:21:07 AM EST

Re: Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling (none / 1)

Another MMO to look into might be EVE-Online. A couple of my friends used to be mildly addicted to it. From what they said, they actually have a political economy going, albeit a somewhat "wild west" one.

The problem, of course, is that they are doing an empty-world simulation, whereas we want to do a full-world (or even overfull-world) simulation.

- Jake

"Terraforming your own planet to make it uninhabitable hardly counts as epic win." - ThatBritGuy

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 04:43:06 AM EST
[ Parent ]

MMO (none / 1)

Some friends of mine run this MMO start-up, which got €500.000 from Finnish state R&D funding organizations as well as the Nordic Game Program.

It is possible that MMO could develop OS tools that could be applied in many different 'scenarios', including RW ones. The point is (as I repeat) that when you harness, say, 250.000 users who spend, say, 20 hours a week 'playing', you get 125.000 work-weeks. A switch from 'games' to solving real 'problems' is not hard to envision.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 05:04:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: MMO (none / 0)

Of course!

I am, without doubt, the stupidest son-of-a-bitch on the planet, fit only to sit in a corner and fill a drool cup.

MMO is how you get the asymmetrical microeconomic input and the varying degrees of Knowledge Struct Fitness for the Model plus the source of the initiating low-level inputs for morphing the macroeconomic parameters and, thus, the Fitness Landscape completing the Information/Praxis feedback loop to the Agents. Abstract the process and you get a solid, if singular, Set of data to apply to the Formal Model.

Damn it! How many frickin' times have I said, "semantics emerges from semiotics and syntax?"

Jesus, what a moron.

No one could have predicted

by ATinNM on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 08:59:49 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling (none / 1)

The problem, of course, is that they are doing an empty-world simulation, whereas we want to do a full-world (or even overfull-world) simulation.

The problem is that people enjoy starting from scratch and building up - how do you generate player interest in joining an endgame scenario?

Another problem is that, if you run a simulation from scratch and then at the end of the game the exponential growth makes the whole thing crash, people will complain that the game is not well tuned for playability.

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 05:18:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling (4.00 / 2)

Sell it as an apocalypse themed game

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 10:42:26 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling (4.00 / 2)

IDK... MUDs like Utopia (an online political simulator from back when I was in grade school) regularly "rebooted" when things became so lopsided that it stopped being funny. And there's a Swedish developer, Paradox Interactive, who do political, diplomatic and economic simulations in various historical epochs. They have basically shot game balance in the back of the head and dumped it in a shallow grave, and their games are still selling well enough that my local box office has them.

So as long as you're up-front about what you're doing, it seems to be possible to violate some of the usual genre conventions and still get something that works. I think the key here is to be very explicit that half the challenge of building an empire in this game is to make sure that there's something left to rule when you're done building your mega-corporation and grinding all the others into dust.

- Jake

"Terraforming your own planet to make it uninhabitable hardly counts as epic win." - ThatBritGuy

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 01:14:12 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling (4.00 / 4)

I'm thinking it would be interesting to simulate democracy as well as economics.

Let's all be libertarians! Fine.

Now watch as the world drives off a cliff.

Keep a historical record of previous incarnations. It would be educational - and also interesting in that most sims to date seem to be a-historical, which makes them culturally atypical.

My idea isn't to model specific examples or to create another Second Life - there are plenty of faux economies out there already.

It's more about creating another media channel which gets a practical progressive message to a potentially receptive audience, bypassing the trad media in the same way that blogs do.

The modelling algorithms are relevant, but less influential than intent.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 01:24:02 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Probably incredibly (4.00 / 3)

I was thread-jacked!

Modern conservatives engage in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.Galbraith

by ChrisCook (cojockathotmaildotcom) on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 05:48:11 AM EST

Re: Probably incredibly (none / 1)

My appologies, Chris, for my contributions to the thread jack. And at my advanced age to have such poor impulse control! ;-)

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer at eurotrib.com) on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 04:34:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Probably incredibly (none / 0)

Oops.

sorry

No one could have predicted

by ATinNM on Sun Apr 26th, 2009 at 08:41:52 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling Threa (none / 1)

What are you actually hoping to achieve? Predictive power? Forget it: I don't believe it's doable even in theory.

An educational tool to educate people that choices have effects that resonate through the system? No problem, if anyone cared to learn such things.

What might be possible is working out shared features of the system in different configurations.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Mon Apr 27th, 2009 at 06:08:41 AM EST

Probably incredibly Unreadable Modelling Thread 4: SimWorldEconomy | 16 comments (16 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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