A chilling mathematical model of inequality
A meta comment, but I&#x27;m really interested here. I tend to read the &#x27;new&#x27; page a lot (I mostly see HN stories in the RSS feed rather than visiting the site) and there is a constant stream of &quot;the economy is going to explode!&quot; submissions. They are all based on loose reasoning and wild extrapolation (much like this one).<p>I enjoy thinking about economics because I am fascinated by systems. And economic systems are pretty cool because we all participate one way or another, they behave in ways that we might individually dislike (like &quot;fair&quot; market values) and as we are all components in a larger machine we get to try to see the &quot;big&quot; picture to understand what actions are available to the individual cogs.<p>And as the system arises as <i>an artifact</i> of our individual actions, it cannot &quot;break&quot;, it can only &quot;change&quot;. Further, when it does change it does so over months or years as peoples actions change and new equilibrium emerges.<p>Many, if not most, of the stories posted take some aspect of the system and extrapolate it out to some weird end point. My favorite example is, &quot;Housing is so out of control in SF soon nobody will be able to afford to live there.&quot; On its face, extrapolations like that are silly. If nobody lived in SF, there would be no companies and no businesses and no need for city services, it would be a giant scrubland. Which absolutely nobody believes would ever happen. It doesn&#x27;t happen because prices rise until nobody (individual action) is willing to buy at the price, at which point sellers have to lower their price (individual action) if they want to move away and realize the economic value of their home. Or more crisply, the system adapts to what is happening and that adaptation becomes the new normal.<p>So when I read these sorts of articles&#x2F;stories, I always wonder &quot;What are they really trying to say, the premise is clearly bogus so that can&#x27;t be it.&quot; And in this particular case it seems to be trying to make people &quot;care more&quot; about inequality. Did you care more? If so why? If not why?