from Hacker News

When random people give money to random other people (2017)

by munificent on 6/13/25, 4:49 PM with 88 comments

  • by munificent on 6/13/25, 4:56 PM

  • by thaumasiotes on 6/13/25, 6:30 PM

    Two thoughts:

    - I don't see why it's important to this person that N people start with a total of N^2 dollars. It would seem more natural to have N people and M dollars.

    - The piece says this:

    > in the long run every possible state is equally likely; we are just as likely to see $9,901 in one person’s hands and everybody else with $1 as we are to see exact equidistribution again.

    As stated, this is quite wrong. We're 100 times more likely to see $9,901 in one person's hands and everybody else with $1 than we are to see everybody with $100, because there are 100 different people who might have $9,901 to satisfy that description of the state. It isn't really clear whether the author understands this or not.

  • by NooneAtAll3 on 6/14/25, 4:06 AM

    I don't want to comment of philosophy part, but isn't math part flawed?

    The problem states that everyone shares dollar on the clock tick - that means the node of the game graph has out-degree of smth like 99^100, not 100? (or maybe ~comb(199,100) with bizarre distribution if you dislike multi-edges)

    And the whole idea of "undirected graphs have easy stationary distribution, so our almost-stationary one has almost-that" isn't grounded in anything but a hunch... (and having >30% of "bad" nodes doesn't seem all that much "almost" to me)

  • by gnabgib on 6/13/25, 5:04 PM

    Discussion (555 points, 2017, 241 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14729400

  • by staplung on 6/14/25, 2:16 AM

    This is explored in more depth in one of Peter Norvig's pytude notebooks:

    https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/main/ipynb/Economics....

  • by pfortuny on 6/13/25, 5:26 PM

    Essentially similar to “after N throws of a coin, what will the difference be between heads and tails?”. It will most likely be away from 0, and probably large.

  • by k__ on 6/13/25, 6:18 PM

    "inequality of wealth rapidly appears and then persists (though each individual person bobs up and down from rich to poor."

    Does still sound fair to me.

  • by deadbabe on 6/14/25, 12:38 AM

    Wouldn’t this be a cool game someone could build with crypto where all players will randomly give a unit of coin to other people every 5 minutes or so until some people get really rich?

    To keep it fair the game must run for a fixed amount of time before people are allowed to withdraw their money. Then a new round begins.

  • by dgan on 6/13/25, 5:16 PM

    okey but the burning question now is: how much more fair it becomes when the richer participants give specifically to poorest participants, instead of random one?

  • by wordglyph on 6/13/25, 6:11 PM

    Introduce credit so the people with zero can still give. Then I suspect it would be more even.

  • by Noelia- on 6/14/25, 2:37 AM

    The first time I saw a model like this, I assumed that randomness would eventually balance things out. But that is not what happened. The rules were completely fair, yet the system still ended up producing significant inequality.

    That stuck with me. Sometimes, all it takes is time and a bit of randomness for imbalance to emerge on its own. Inequality does not always come from someone doing something wrong. It can simply be the long-term result of randomness playing out. So the real question is, once we understand that, what do we do with it?

  • by MichaelRo on 6/13/25, 7:23 PM

    >> When random people give money to random other people

    It's called taxing the first to keep the second on welfare benefits.