The Richest One Percent
The richest one percent owns more than the half of the world’s wealth. This statistic seemed unintuitive to me. Why isn’t wealth more evenly distributed? So I decided to make a simple simulation to see what happens when you unleash a free market 🤓
The graph below shows the output of the simulation: the wealth of 50 people. Each start off with $100. On every simulation turn, they randomly pair-up and flip a coin. The winner takes $1 from the loser.
If bankruptcy is disabled people with negative wealth get saved, possibly by the government and are restored to 0. So they can keep participating in the market — toggle this off to see what happens in more unforgiving circumstances 😅
Even though this models a super simple marketplace where everyone is unrealisticly equal, we get some interesting emergent behaviour out of it. Not unlike the real world.
Go ahead and run the simulation and see what happens!
P.S. Tell me what you think about it on twitter!