Simulated Economy Tutorial

Just as we have weather forecasting, climate models .. we do need and should have good fine-grain computational models of complex systems such as the cell .. and the global economy.

We should be able to have whole economy simulations give reasonable predictions in response to natural events and lever-pulling such as :

- higher progressive tax rates - central bank interest rate moves - local tariffs and sanctions - shipping blackades / blockages - regional war - extreme weather events - earthquake - regional epidemic - giving poor people cash grants - free higher education - science research grants - skilled immigration / emigration

But .. of course this would require something like a rich country providing grants to applied cross disciplinary research over many years.

It might even lead to insights that prevent semi-regular economic boom and bust cycles we experienced the past 100 years.

There’s a whole discipline which does nearly that, though they do not use this style of agent based model.

Generally agent based models have numerous parameters which can take many values (endowments, preferences) and the models don’t themselves give any guidance about how to set the parameters. Theory can give limited guidance (eg., that function is concave, this parameter is negative). Sometimes we have experimental data though its generalizability beyond the lab is uncertain.

What you want to do to create a scientific macroeconomics is to work backwards from the data you see in the economy (aggregate consumption, investment, etc.) and how you know the aggregates were generated (via the behavior of a lot of individual agents), and an equilibrium assumption to recover the parameters.

If you know the parameters of the model you assume, you can then simulate interesting counterfactuals. (And yes you assume the model - a “full” model including “all” of the individual endowments and parameters you can think of is completely intractable. You have to simplify.)

You’ll never get that out of the author’s computer game.

If you want references to the macro literature it’s enormous and I can provide them.

Would you happen to know what some key search phrases might be to get started in the contemporary modeling literature?