The IOUTopia Model

I'm a career computer systems analyst, with a special love for "OOA-object-oriented analysis". OOA is particularly attractive since it comes very close to the way we think in a categorical way. After reading a few books on the economy, especially the "Value of Everything".

Here are some of the key objects in this model:

• Resources, such as corn, fish, wood, fuel. Each of these resources has its own profile as to how much "work" is required to obtain the resource, how much is available etc.
• The Market. This turned out to be the most complex thing to specify. How do you model trades between people? This question is at the heart of economic theory, such as, How does money evolve?
• The Person. Resources are owned and consumed by persons. To make the model work, we'd need thousands of these persons with different "policies" regarding consumption and trade.
• The environment. This object "owns" resources, but also knows about things like limits on these resources and "external" costs such as pollution.
• The "God" object provides the tick of a clock and things like seasonal variation, weather (success of fishing), seasons and outbreaks of disease.

At first, I looked into this as a system of linear equations, but this quickly fell apart. At most, this technique could be used to find initial conditions that satisfy a set of constraints. The need for a dynamic simulation emerged.

I have lots of experience as an IT manager. It became evident that actually creating a working model would require a small team working for a year or so. Another issue was whether this model would tell us anything worthwhile and, if so, how this information would be shared. 

In the end, I decided to shelve the idea. Even so, the model provided me a better image of the "cogs and gears" of the economy - something better than the images you see in an economic textbook and certainly an improvement over the semi-mythological view of the economy that is assumed by everyone in public debate.