Exploring Wealth Inequality with Mesa: A Toy Economic Model and Tutorial

[cconsta1]

Hello all,

I'm a nuclear physics PhD who came across agent-based modeling about three years ago. After wrestling for a while with NetLogo, I discovered Mesa and found it much more approachable. I'm currently unemployed and making YouTube videos to keep learning and sharing what I'm working on.

Recently, I decided to dive deeper into Mesa by creating a simple economic model to simulate wealth inequality. I'm not an expert in agent-based modeling or economics, but I wanted to document my learning process and hopefully help others who are new to Mesa as well.

I made a tutorial-style video explaining my approach, model design, and some basic visualizations. This is a toy learning project and I would really appreciate any feedback, advice, or critiques from those with more experience in ABM or Mesa.

Video:
https://youtu.be/YZDU_Dxjrac?si=nfd8Ixw3rXs4JHXq

GitHub Repo:
https://github.com/cconsta1/wealth-inequality-abm

Thanks for taking a look! Any comments or suggestions are very welcome.

[tpike3]

Thanks @cconsta1! That is really cool.

Mostly to get the conversation going here is a wealth inequality model I have been working on that is a variant of the econophysics (Boltzmann Wealth) that we use for our tutorial.

In this case I added "policies" to show the impact. The goal was to try and make it more accessible to people, so a lot of front end work.

https://inequality-simulator.onrender.com/ - (its the free version of render so only one instance spins up and it will take a second)

GitHub -- https://github.com/4-Impact/inequality-simulator

Let me know what you think, excited to keep the conversation going!

[cconsta1]

Hi @tpike3 I'm glad you like it! I didn't look into your model thoroughly (I will once my schedule frees) but I loved your app! Its cool! In case you have a better understanding of economic models I was wondering about how realistic is my model. If you run it for higher investment probability (maybe 50%) the population ends up rich with a Gaussian distribution. I show that in my YouTube channel :)

Btw, I didn't know that one can make a web app with cool graphics using Flask!