Diego

You may find this affine wealth model that was outlined recently in Scientific American by Boghosian et al very interesting: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/. The original published article is also available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.02370.pdf. Essentially they set up a simple trading model and show that after a finite number of transitions it always converges to an oligarchic state with all the wealth owned by one person. By introducing additional variables to account for debt, standardization of wealth differences and redistribution by taxation, they were able to describe accurately the Gini curves of any country. This should be equally amenable to a Mathematica representation. The takeaway is that normal capitalist systems if not regulated are inherently self-destructive. There is also a reference to another paper by Stiglitz whose work on the asymmetry of markets presaged similar results.

Regards Michael

Hi Diego Thanks very much for your interesting model. I notice that in your transactCompiled function that you Unitize the individualWealth which leads to wealth always being positive. What about when people go into debt and their net wealth is negative? Would you use Sign instead of Unitize in that case?

Regards Michael