Zemerge Project

If you are not familiar to what the Alpha Zemerge project will be about please read the project proposition post. The project is coming along slowly with the front end presentation being developed. As discussed in the earlier post the project at first will visually display how wealth in our current monetary system paradigm gets transferred between parties and how wealth creation and inequality develops, and most importantly how unsustainable the whole setup in the long term.

Further specs of the project

One cycle of the simulation will last one second which will represent one hour in simulated time. Thus 24 seconds will represent a day, and 2.5hrs of simulated time will represent a year. If someone will be brave enough to run the simulation for about 11 days (and assuming the simulation doesn’t crash the flash environment) then they will simulate in retrospect a 100 years of economic activity giving an interesting long term outcome of the simulation.

The user interface (UI) will comprise of 8 elements which include:

• The households represented by icons of a home
• The employers represented by icons of a business building
• The bank represented by an official building with the label bank on it
• The government represented by an official building with the label government on it
• The physical resources represented by a series of crates
• An information section on the current status of the simulation
• Some sort of gauge of how the environment is doing, ie. if the background is more green it is healthier and if its more grey/brown it is in trouble.
• User input section where the user can alter simulation settings during the simulation

As the simulation will be running lines will be drawn between the home/employer/bank/government icons representing transfer of wealth, the thicker the lines the more transfer they will represent. All of these icons will shrink/grow according to the inequality developing from their starting conditions, thus if all the icons are the same size it could mean they are all wealthy or all poor since it is the inequality they are measuring. As employers produce products/services for the population they will be using resources, hence the resources icons and lines connecting them to the employers will represent an usage of resources. There will be various resources represented, ones which are renewable and ones which are not, for simplicity a set of dozen or so will be chosen with different parameters and used through out the simulation. The user will be able to set government and bank policies as well as population and employer behaviors to alter economic conditions through out the simulation.

Some of these settings currently in the works include:

• Government taxation
• Government public spending on services, infrastructure, health, education, security, etc.
• Government incentives
• Bank interest rates
• Bank wealth creation, loan, risk adverse settings
• Household spending habits
• Employer efficiency
• Employer employment rates
• Employer competition habits
• Employer advertising habits
• Investment rates
• Loans and debt rates
• Currency inflation
• Bankruptcy rates
• Corruption rates
• Infrastructure inefficiency
• Population wellness/satisfaction/approval rates
• Population pensions/unemployment/social security or public safety nets
• Discrimination/False ideologies rates that disturb and affect the model
• Demand and supply rates
• Natural and artificial disasters that affect the model
• Pollution and degradation of the environment effects

Screenshot of the latest UI can be seen here:

Stayed tuned for next monthly update on the project.