2022 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat | Hackaday
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21 thoughts on “2022 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat”
I was considering funding a HAD contest about solving wealth inequality. (I have money set aside for the prize.)
Basically, a completely fair trade simulation will show that wealth inequality will eventually arise, even when the trade is completely fair, and this indicates that such inequality is a feature of the mathematics and not from some unfairness that we have in our existing economy. This is shown by these simulations and the corresponding paper:
physics.umd.edu (slash) ~yakovenk (alsah) econophysics (slash) animation (dot) html
I reimplemented the simulations from that page on github so that anyone could download/compile and run it, with hooks in places where people could insert their own code, and was considering funding a challenge asking for the best way to modify the simulation to avoid wealth inequality. Is there a taxation mechanism that can help? UBI of some form? Lottery wealth?
My take is that HAD wouldn’t be interested in a software-only challenge (ie – with no physical component such as a PCB).
I’d be interested in any feedback people have on the idea. Is there a better site that would host the challenge?
(There are restrictions on possible solutions. For example, a solution must always encourage people to earn, so you cannot just implement a maximum total wealth cap. You cannot have a solution that’s too complicated to implement in the real world, &c.)
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Paul says:
I was intrigued by the economics and ecotopia backstory in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge. He obviously put a lot of thought into it, and I sometimes wondered how to encourage the development of that kind of economic environment, but without a lot of people dying for it. Recommended reading, if you have a lot of time to kill — it’s pretty slow-paced stuff.
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HaHa says:
Yikes.
KSR is just full of BAD ideas.
Like ideas you’d call bad if a middle schooler suggested them:
We’ll go to mars, but completely fuck up the colonist selection process, so we end up with the contents of a grateful dead parking lot (3 hours after show ends) as our colonists. But it’s believable, because ‘all smart people are hippies, just ask any hippie.’ And it all works out, hippies chant over plants to make them grow in vacuum. That’s about where I stopped reading, not SF, fantasy.
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r4m0n says:
The problem is reasonably well studied, but there really aren’t well known solutions that don’t have their own bad side-effects, so I guess some extra solutions would be welcome.
Now, a venue that might work better for such a software-driven contest would be Kaggle, but it would end up being a competition on how to game the simulation to give you the highest score, whatever metric you decide to use.
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irox says:
I think you could frame it as a general “Solve wealth inequality” problem and it would make a great contest. Some people will want to work on macro issues, some will want to work on specific issues, some maybe hardware, some maybe software. Possibly you can pick some sub categories (hardware/physical, software, micro, macro, low tech, etc.).
I’m not sure if there is a better site for such a contest, but consider reaching out to HaD, they may be able to provide better guidance.
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anon says:
How in the world would you evaluate these things beyond “how much do I feel like this might do something.”
Oh my math model shows that in this system people will all work as hard as they can to do their best even though no matter how hard they work wealth will be equal. Either that means that wealth being equal does not directly relate to material prosperity or it assumes people will work hard when they could work less hard for the same result. This idea has been tried before. It fails. People are greedy. Here I’ll save you the trouble. If I could put in varying amounts of work and receive an equal amount of wealth I would without hesitation pick the one with minimal work and maximum time to be with friends and family. I work hard to increase my wealth, not for my love of mankind.
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Comedicles says:
“solving wealth inequality” as if “it” needs a solution. People can create wealth. Why would they care how much someone else has? Anyway, I suggest it isn’t part of the math, it is human nature, the element that makes everything unpredictable.
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Foldi-One says:
To me wealth is entirely the wrong metric, it should be quality of life inequality – when some folks can’t afford to eat properly and heat their abode, do the basic maintenance (or get the owner to do so when renting) despite in some cases working more than one job and heaps of hours combined that is wrong… Yes most of those folks are lower educated or troubled – perhaps burdened with a criminal record, learning difficulty etc, but still it is wrong for them to be left in such poor condition, especially if they are trying to be a productive member of society (how you want to treat the ‘incurable’ criminal class and mentally/physically ill that are not productive members of society at all is a slightly different and much more complex dilemma that isn’t directly relevant to talk on fiscal inequality or quality of life) – but that vastly underpaid menial job worker on their pittance is usually doing something rather important for the function of society as a whole, you’d rather miss the shelf stackers, cleaners, refuse collectors etc if they suddenly were not there…
Afterall what use is a house so big you can’t actually use all the space in it, ever, even including having all your friends to stay and that costs you more to heat/cool than most folks spend on everything combined all year, or a Limo, supercar, giant SUV over a normal car – the stuff almost everyone in most places reading this can own – the fancy car doesn’t get you there any faster, isn’t going to be more economical to run, quite possibly isn’t even more comfortable, or reliable, its just a bloody fashion accessory wrapper around a relatively basic utility, that usually makes it less useful than the ones most folks have access to…
You need huge wealth to to own the bling brands, no doubt some of the time it is actually also providing some useful additional service, but ultimately the quality of your life for having that brand name over cheaper stuff the middle and working classes own isn’t actually any better, and may actually be worse, as those fashion brands are about vanity and showing off, not actually being good at the task – give me a decent workman like tool anyday. Also I expect you can be stupendously wealthy on paper and have tougher financial problems than most of us – to keep your company functional, get customer or investment you need to look like everything is going to plan, so can’t go dumping the fancy goods that make you appear in control and successful (nor would all of your bling actually go that far in covering the following), but employing all your staff, paying for your buildings, utilities, contractor all of which you need to make/develop etc costs you a fortune and that one unexpected bump in the cashflow is too large to cover without the whole house of cards trying to tumble as soon as you don’t look like everything is fine and the existing investor pull out…
So as much as it sounds like communism, a failed social experiment everywhere its been tried, having a basic level of quality of life really aught to be the goal – money need not be involved at all – if everyone for instance just got a basic ration of all the basic stuff required for a modern life and could end up upgrading and choosing extras with their earnings I would say that is perfectly good enough – if you end up earning a great deal you are apparently of value to society as a whole, even if nobody quite knows how that can be the case… (As somebody who has been on the receiving end of the UK’s reasonably good but always complained about social care payments this is to some extent what we do have here, its a bit of bureaucratic mess, often slow to react to changing costs of living and get processed initially, but still its not bad really, and in my case has been enough I don’t think I suffered from it, though that doesn’t appear to be true for everyone)…
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Daniel Matthews says:
My wife and I spent a year working at a hospital in the third world and I can tell you from that experience that health inequity is caused by the same thing as other inequities, poverty is a state of mind. All of the disparities I saw come down to what a person didn’t know, so there is your solution in the abstract if you want to narrow down possible contenders for concrete solutions. Empower people through knowledge, and that means building and supporting the infrastructure required to do that while ensuring equitable access. That is the easy part because once you do that you will find your biggest problem is other people trying to interfere and block your efforts because the knowledge you offer empowers the poor in ways that makes them harder to control and exploit. So if you really want to solve the world’s problems you need to detect and cure psychopathy as it is the underlying driver of the behaviour of those who set up or pervert social structures so as to serve their own ends at the expense of everyone else. 1% of humans cause 99% of humanity’s problems.
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HaHa says:
You don’t have a decent model for human behavior.
At best: All you will do is optimize a system that works well for the theoretical humans you postulate.
That’s also a fair criticism for your referenced simulation.
People aren’t simply a bundle of supply/demand curves (but that is a decent first order approximation.)
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