Eva Durant asked
> I admit I did not follow this thread thoroughly, but
> I have a question: How do you collect your initial data,
Anywhere I can find it. I have several back issues of the CIA World Fact
Book (text files on CD-ROM) which will provide some basic data about
population, income, literacy rates, and so forth. I'll download what
I can find on the net, and may type in some values from printed sources.
> is it all based on the present ownership mode?
> Can your scheme simulate a system based on a different
> economic base, such as common ownership?
It's hard to answer anything but "maybe" to these questions, which doesn't
really satisfy me. "Ownership" is quite an abstract concept, and for all
that Marxists talked about materialism they sure attached a lot of
importance to something so abstract.
I think we can incorporate into a simulation or model anything that
can be estimated -- if someone could estimate the amount of private,
state, corporate and morgaged owernership for most of the countries
in the world, that information could be put into simulations, but
it might not mean or be useful for anything. But then again, it might.
Putting data into a simulation can be a way of finding out what is
meaningful, by way of sensitivity analysis, which I mentioned in the
first sentence of my first message about this simulation project.
> How can you simulate the scale of democracy in decision making,
> and the scale of oppenness - surely an important feature.
Such things are estimated quite often, by many people for different
purposes. For example, each month the New Internationalist magazine
has a review of a country, in which they give it from 1 to 5 stars
for various aspects. E.g. last month they rate the Fiji Islands
Income Distribution **
Literacy ****
Self-Reliance **
Position of Women **
Freedom ***
Life-Expectancy ****
Politics **
I find this quite useful, and if I had a chance to use their estimates
in a simulation, I definitely would, even though the magazine as a whole
is terribly one-sided. But making estimates from scratch is hard, and
it is not something I plan to do. I'll write the software, put in some
data, try it, and then encourage other people to use it with their
own data -- hoping they will make some of their results public.
dpw
Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html
