Abstract
In this work, we are studying the dynamics of wealth inequality in a simulated primitive economy of producer agents. These agents represent families that live, produce and move in an environment that can be unstable. The families have different technological abilities and can decide differently about sharing produced food with others – i.e., whether to share through public stores and how much – or keeping it all for themselves and become wealthier. We show through agent-based modelling that in a competitive environment with cultural evolution, where agents that survive pass their behavioral profiles to their descendants, wealth inequality between agents follows an initially upward and then downward trend before stabilizing around its final value. This trend is reminiscent of swings identified by economists. We study it in cases of “shocks”, where after stabilization one of the parameters of the system is reinitialized (technology, environment, birth model and others). In all cases, the after-shock inequality movement shows the same overall trend but it is smaller in size, and this is true irrespective of the sharing outcome. We formulate the hypothesis that the size of the emerging maximum inequality is due to cultural reinitialization or innovation, where because of the shock the agents reinitialize their stances toward sharing, i.e. they innovate culturally. This hypothesis is supported by a series of experiments with varying degrees of cultural innovation as well as by an experiment with generalized cultural evolution. The global conclusion is that it is the cognitive/cultural lever of the economic relations, here the disposition toward sharing, that is responsible for the type and breadth of inequality that emerges.
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Notes
- 1.
Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) claimed that “the increase of population is necessarily limited by subsistence”, i.e., when population grows faster than the increase of food production then the population will arrive at a plateau where famine, wars and diseases will prevail and where the population size is the maximum allowed by the actual production rates. His suggestion was to use higher production rates for increasing standards of living rather than letting the population grow unconstrained.
- 2.
The number of runs was set empirically to ensure that the resulting standard deviations of all experiment series are very low compared to averages. This way, when comparing inequality measures, that are normalized by construction, we can judge significance in a quick, ad hoc manner. For example, for the second pair of lines of Table 3, the averages of 0.792 and 0.545 for Ineq(max) have a stdv of 0.041 and 0.061, respectively, therefore they are significantly different.
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Tzafestas, E. (2023). Cultural Innovation Triggers Inequality in a Sharing Economy. In: De Stefano, C., Fontanella, F., Vanneschi, L. (eds) Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation. WIVACE 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1780. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31183-3_13
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