
Economics Simulation - ntoshev
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Economics.ipynb
======
josephlord
If you are interested in economic modelling have a look at Minsky.[1][2] It
isn't that pretty and it is in (C++ and Tcl/Tk) rather than Python but Steve
Keen's Minsky project looks like an interesting take on macroeconomic
modelling (rather than microeconomic simulation). It was Kickstarter funded
(at least partially).

Steve Keen was predicting a big debt triggered crash before 2008 and believes
in economic models that at least have the possibility of crisis and
disequilibrium being the normal state (which is regarded as unorthodox in
economics).

Minsky can model chaotic system (even outside of economics)[3].

[1]
[http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/minsky/](http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/minsky/)

[2]
[http://sourceforge.net/p/minsky/home/Home/](http://sourceforge.net/p/minsky/home/Home/)

[3] [http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2013/09/10/famous-
models-...](http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2013/09/10/famous-models-of-
chaos-in-minsky/)

~~~
photon137
Tom Sargent, the econ Nobel Laureate, has a great website with examples in
numpy/scipy solving some well-known micro/macro problems.

[http://quant-econ.net/](http://quant-econ.net/)

------
JackFr
This is not economic model in any usual sense of the word 'economic'. At best
it's a discrete diffusion simulation -- purposely obfuscated with loaded words
like wealth and transactions.

Its a nice exposition of using python for a simulation, but it has little
bearing on economics.

~~~
aet
[http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/WhyEconomistsShunSimul...](http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/WhyEconomistsShunSimulation.Lehtinen2008.pdf)

~~~
Fomite
As someone who works with simulation models for a living, this was a
fascinating read. Thanks for linking it.

~~~
arethuza
I'd be interested in what you think of that paper - I was fascinated by it as
it seemed rather odd coming from an engineering perspective.

~~~
Fomite
Disclaimer: I'm an Epidemiologist, not an Economist, so it was a reading from
someone outside the field.

The idea that fields have certain "ways of knowing" something was interesting
to me - that for economics, its about the analytic solution of an equilibrium.

My own field has something similar - generally speaking, the "hierarchy of
evidence" starts with single case reports at the bottom, and then way up at
the top are meta-analyses of large randomized clinical trials. As a modeler, I
was once asked by a clinician where models (be they analytical or simulation)
fit in that framework, and the only answer I could give was "along side it".
Analytic results are Capital-T True in a way that even RCTs aren't, but are
only true in the universe laid out by the model itself, for example.

It was also just an interesting read as models in my field have been migrating
from analytic (or numerical) solutions to equilibrium problems toward more
simulation and agent based models, and that same "Yes, but how do you _know_
it's right" type questions are coming up.

~~~
Quequau
This is slightly off-topic but I've recently read the book "Growing Artificial
Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up" and in my spare time I've been
slowly implementing something very similar to the sort of "Maximally-
Minimalist" simulation they describe.

This simulation includes the concept propagation of disease, again in a sort
of "Maximally-Minimalist" way. While it's suitable in the sense that it fits
with the rest of simulation, I've identified it as something that I am going
to have to learn about before I extend that part of the simulation beyond
what's already been described.

So I was wondering if you might know of a resource which presents various
minimalist models of disease propagation that you could recommend. I'm not
epidemiologist, I'm actually retired and studying economics as they pertain to
environmental systems, so I'm not actually looking for anything that extremely
complex or compute intensive... I'm just looking for something slightly more
detailed that what I've got now and perhaps describes a step-by-step method
towards modeling that's actually realistic.

~~~
Fomite
This may be a good place to start:
[http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9639.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9639.html)

It's a textbook on agent-based models written by an ecologist (where an awful
lot of disease modeling is done). I believe there's a cheaper paperback
version on Amazon, and they use NetLogo, which is pretty gentle
computationally.

~~~
Quequau
Thanks!

------
patrickmay
It's an interesting simulation, but fatally flawed by the assumption that
transactions between actors are a zero sum game. It would be more realistic if
it modeled the fact that wealth can be created and that actors transact only
when the net outcome is more valuable to each of them.

~~~
cma
Seems to model things like transactions in fixed resources like land pretty
well.

In third-world countries we (the US) have repeatedly bought up land in
exchange for short-term goods. The people in the country increasingly become
dependent on providing services to the foreign land-holders, or factory work
for the outside market.

Once they get fed up with this near-slavery they often try land reform, and
that's when we send in the troops/CIA-paid thugs in the name of anti-communism
(see Guatamala or Haiti as good examples).

It's like the Asimov story where aliens offer to extend humans' life by ten
years for a price in natural resources, which they repeatedly double every ten
years. Every resource on earth is eventually strip-mined, life can no longer
be supported, and the aliens just move on to the next "voluntary" target.

The WTO plays a big role in these kind of attacks on societies as well. Of all
the third-world countries that have developed, they have almost uniformly made
heavy use of protectionism, foreign-ownership limitations, etc. The Seattle
WTO protests in the 90's were actually seeded with some really interesting
arguments and analysis.

Still focusing on land, but bringing things back towards Norvig's simulation
(lots of individual actors), Thomas Paine's short essay, "Agrarian Justice,"
has some good descriptions of what goes on and offers some pretty good
solutions.

[http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html](http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html)

~~~
001sky
_in fixed resources like land..._

What is this resource you talk about?

Land values are f(productivity, past productivity).

That is they are derivatives of income and wealth.

Notwithstanding the critique of the author, the GP has a point that the
science of economics is about the relationship between (production,
distribution).

Eliminate that feedback loop, and ... yes, you are just looking at the
diffusion of "fake games" people play.

Which are only insightful in the assumptions, but broadly speaking, not so
much

All of that in mind, this type of essay/article is just a demonstration of
~technique in a very broad sense.

Its useful to mention/caveat any extrapolations are problematic, but no need
to dwell or be overyly crtitical here. IMHO.

~~~
saraid216
To clarify dllthomas' comment,

Land _acreage_ is a fixed resource.

This is one of the reasons that a lot of economic models depend on land: there
is a very real scarcity there to drive the equations with, and it forms a
foundation for virtually every other form of scarcity besides labor.

~~~
dredmorbius
More subtle is the point, particularly in early economic thought, that land is
a proxy for the master economic input: energy.

With sufficient energy, you can provide other inputs (raw materials, labor,
capital). Without it, you're sunk.

In a preindustrial society, energy == land (and sea), in the form of food and
fuel production (agriculture, grazing, fuelwood, wild herds, fish, all by way
of direct or indirect sunlight conversion), as well as in the form of wind and
water power resources which can be tapped through mechanisms. Ricardo's "law
of rent" was in part a lament that all the good ones -- that is, most
productive acres -- are taken. He was complaining about asset allocation in
his day (he also saw economic surpluses accruing to landowners and labor
rather than hard working capitalists and bankers, which is a tad curious).

With an industrialized society, energy's become something we _extract_ from
the land (coal, oil, gas, uranium), rather than which is produced or converted
by it. But the fundamental truth remains.

In a future sustainable world, we'll again either be at the point where what
we take from the land matches the rate at which it's created, or we'll have
found some entropy gradient so abundant (fusion? thorium?) that it can be used
extractively for tens to hundreds of thousands of years or more without
exhaustion, despite the very formidable technical challenges to its
utilization.

My leaning is more toward the former than the latter.

~~~
saraid216
Economics would be a lot more interesting if they discussed things in terms of
joules rather than in terms of dollars.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've been exposed to the idea of an energy-backed currency since reading
Arthur Clarke's _Imperial Earth_ as a kid (it's actually got a lot to do with
energy economics in general, among other themes).

More recently I've been looking at some of the principles of dissipative
systems and wondering if one of the fundamental inequality equations of that
field isn't applicable as a general concept of capital accumulation. Let's see
if I can't find that ... OK: the storage function here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system#In_control_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system#In_control_theory)

I've also been kicking around the ideas of, variously, an organism (say, a
human), or a herd, or an ecosystem, as an economic analog, and trying to
figure out what the equivalent systems within them are. For the body analog,
there's the long-standing metaphor within economic literature of the banking
system and money as the heart and blood. My read is that these are mistaken --
those correspond to physical constructs within the economy (transportation
systems and energy), not the _control_ and _signaling_ systems of the economy.
There I think you'd want to map something more on the lines of Ca+ ion
exchange or endocrine signaling, though honestly my understanding of biology
and systems is pretty loose. I've been meaning to look at how biological and
ecological systems signal for resource utilization.

------
vetleen
This is a fun experiment, but in real life transactions create wealth. If a
buyer doesn’t feel that the widget she's been offered at a certain price is
worth more than the price then she won't buy it. Similarily, if the seller
feels the widget is worth more than the price, he won't sell. Therefore, a
transaction means wealth wads created since both parties' wealth has increased
after the transaction.

I’m pointing this out because it is quite a common misunderstanding that a
certain amount of wealth exists in the world, and that it is a zero sum game,
where someone has to loose every time someone wins.

~~~
capisce
How does buying a can of pringles or a pack of cigarettes create wealth for
the buyer?

~~~
juanre
Economists call it "increasing utility". When, in a free market with perfect
information, you part with your money in exchange of a good it is assumed to
be because the good has higher utility for you than the money it costs. A
transaction increases utility for the two parts concerned, otherwise it will
not happen.

~~~
capisce
> A transaction increases utility for the two parts concerned, otherwise it
> will not happen.

But it happens all the time, through manifactured desire and the exploitation
of people's addictions. People are not "rational actors" even though economic
theory attempts to dictate it. In fact, most of consumerism seems to be built
on getting people to buy things that in turn does not help them to create even
more value.

~~~
aggronn
You start off fine by saying that in the context of addictions and other
mental aberrations, people are not likely to act in their long term best
interests. But then you say this:

> In fact, most of consumerism seems to be built on getting people to buy
> things that in turn does not help them to create even more value.

In this context, "creating wealth" is not about accumulating resources to
create 'even more value' a la Capital. It seems like you're confounding wealth
and capital, and they're very different things here. Here we're talking about
wealth as meaning economic welfare. Society has more economic welfare--Wealth
--when economic exchange happens because resources are allocated in a way that
increases utility for everyone.

Life wouldn't be worth living if we worked for the sole purpose of creating
lasting capital, in order to build more capital. Consumerism is necessary, so

>In fact, most of consumerism seems to be built on getting people to buy
things that in turn does not help them to create even more value.

isn't really a bad thing.

So your first idea and your second idea are only marginally related, and
combining them probably hurts your argument overall.

------
DArcMattr
There's a wide variety of economists. Speaking as someone with Master's
degrees in Math & Economics, this sort of simulation is inadequate in many
ways.

I was educated via the Neoclassical approach, where the macroeconomy is
modeled through a microeconomic (individual) foundation. What's needed at
least is a budget, a utility function (preference relations), and a transition
function. The agent then is modeled through optimizing their utility against
their budget constraint at each timestep, then the transition function gets
applied. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This form the basis of a recursion model, the simplest one being the Solow
model [1]. More details are available in Recursive Methods in Economic
Dynamics by Stokey & Lucas [2]. Computer simulations are definitely used in
cases where the models are mathematically intractable.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solow_model](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solow_model)
[2]: [http://www.amazon.com/Recursive-Methods-Economic-Dynamics-
St...](http://www.amazon.com/Recursive-Methods-Economic-Dynamics-
Stokey/dp/book-citations/0674750969)

------
breischl
The redistribution rules strike me as being closer to a simulation of games of
chance, perhaps blackjack when played with good strategy. If you have a big
bankroll to start with, you can afford to ride out the bumps in the road so
you'll probably win eventually. If you have a small bankroll, you'll probably
get wiped out by random chance pretty quickly.

But it doesn't seem to have much bearing on actual economics.

~~~
wavefunction
>>big bankroll...you can afford to ride out the bumps >>small
bankroll...you'll probably get wiped out by random chance pretty quickly

>>doesn't seem to have much bearing on actual economics

Don't be too quick to assume that, I think your post actually contains
everything you're looking for...

~~~
breischl
So if you randomly bump into someone on the street who has more money than
you, you give them half of whatever you've got?

It's only a simulation insofar as people are governed by mindless rules and
random chance, with no thought or planning involved. So it's a decent
simulation of some people, but certainly not everyone.

------
ChristianMarks
As a model of economic institutions, it has what Joseph Heath of the
University of Toronto has termed _catallactic bias_ : gain from trade is
explicitly modeled, but the four other mechanisms of cooperative benefit,
economies of scale, risk pools, self binding and information transmission, are
not recognized.

"...much of contemporary social contract theory has been marked by what might
be referred to as a _catallactic bias_ , which results from a tacit conceptual
privileging of gains from trade as the primary mechanism of cooperative
benefit. [1]"

[1] Joseph Heath. The Benefits of Cooperation. Philosophy & Public Affairs.
Volume 34, Issue 4, pages 313–351, Fall 2006

------
calhoun137
One flaw with this model is that the value of money is not absolute, it is
relative to the price of goods and services. Furthermore, the rate of
circulation of money is directly related to the amount of economic activity
taking place in the society (since each transaction represents an economic
event), and economic activity _creates wealth_ as PG says.

I once tried to develop a similar theory to the link, by applying the
principles of statistical mechanics, and treating the rate of circulation of
money as the temperature, and each actor's amount of economic activity as
their kinetic energy. It seemed like a neat approach but it has it's flaws
obviously.

~~~
kaonashi
Another is that there is no credit.

------
vbs_redlof
Lesson learnt from the comments: beware of modelling economics if you have a
background in a hard science. As a profession, we are incredibly envious and
defensive of our position as the quantitative social science.

------
jackym
Generally speaking, the problem with Economic models is that they are
mathematical models of a particular economic theorem or 'identity', as
economists sometimes prefer to call them. When you dig into the scientific
basis for those theorems however, it's often lacking. So saying that this
isn't an economic model is quite correct - but that's actually a good thing,
not a bad one. Economic models by and large have no scientific validity.

Although this isn't that useful by itself, it's a very nice way to get some
basic intuition about how money behaves as a unit of exchange, in a system
with a constant money supply. The reason why some commentators think that this
isn't a realistic simulation of our actual monetary system is that in the
current system, the quantity of money is more or less continuously expanding.
But that doesn't imply that more 'wealth' is being created, it just means that
more tokens are being created.

The problem is though that as a result the unit of measurement (money) is also
expanding, and so you have a monetary system that appears superficially to
obey rules of 'growth' as measured in other fields, but in fact is based on
something that is quite different, as these experiments show. And you have
economists merrily chasing their tails for the last 3 centuries over trying to
determine what causes 'growth', when actually it's an illusion of measurement
created by the day to day operations of the fractional reserve banking system.

~~~
Mikeb85
Except there really is 'growth'. We have computers and cars instead of papyri
and horses.

Technological advancement, quality of life, etc..., IS growth...

~~~
jackym
Yes, exactly. But modern economics isn't actually measuring that, and I think
is in a certain amount of denial about it occurring at all. Economic growth is
growth in GDP. GDP is calculated as function of price, and although it's
adjusted for inflation, the vagaries of the monetary system mean that
inflation is a very poor proxy for the actual growth in the money supply.
[Which btw. is well known within Economics - better known there as the mystery
of the 'monetary policy transmission mechanism'].

Go back 150 years, and production was measured as production (tons of coal,
etc. You can see this in historical records like the German Statistical
Yearbook's from the 1870's.) Today's economists make measurements using money,
and ignore the very real problems of money as a unit of measurement.

For example, take the quantity theory of money (and note the word theory
there), MV = PQ. V - velocity of circulation of money cancels - this was
pointed out in the 1930's, but for some reason has never made it into the
textbooks. We're left with P(prices) ~ M (quantity of money)/Q (quantity of
transactions.

Now if this equation is valid (and it is mainstream economic theory, although
the presence of a cancelling issue probably isn't a good sign there), then we
have an inverse relationship between the quantity of money in the system, and
the quantity of transactions (i.e. production), indicating that actual
economic growth in the sense you're using it would cause decreasing prices, if
M is held constant.

OTH, if that equation is wrong, then how can we measure anything with money,
since we don't know what the relationship is between production and prices?

------
juanre
If you want to understand the classic economic models you might find useful
the python implementation I wrote a while ago of some of them. Inspired in
Caltech's Principles of Economics for Scientists, they still lack supporting
documentation, but I think they are good enough to play with and explore.
[https://github.com/juanre/econopy](https://github.com/juanre/econopy)

------
kfk
Uhm, I see the problem here:

m = random.uniform(0, pot)

Once somebody wins a few games, he will fish "wealth" from a bigger and bigger
pot, even if he plays against the poor. According to this, you just have to be
rich to be even richer. However, your wealth per se doesn't affect your future
wealth, this is clear, right?

Maybe this could be a poker game simulation. Certainly not an economics
simulation.

~~~
yen223
"However, your wealth per se doesn't affect your future wealth, this is clear,
right?"

No. Your current wealth is a very strong indicator of your future wealth, and
indeed, your future income.

------
Patrick_Devine
I tried creating economic models like this for a video game I was trying to
make, but inevitably the market would end up oscillating too much or the whole
thing would crash. The idea was to allow people to exploit arbitrage, but then
as they did that, the market would become more efficient and the player would
have to find some other commodity to arbitrage. I spent more hours than I care
to mention and trying to take as many factors in as possible, but doing quasi-
realistic simulations is just hard.

I think part of that is for reasons others have stated here, which is that
there aren't a lot of people doing market simulation. Even the best
simulations are going to be wrong, so what's the point.

~~~
saraid216
Have you tried looking at how EVE Online does it? The idea you describe
roughly matches my experience in it, though I was never a dedicated trader
exploiting arbitrages. As a manufacturer, though, I'd often be able to ascribe
price fluctuations to externalities like, "Alliance X just won a war in region
Y and now they're consolidating their gains, resulting in purchases of lots of
starbase construction materials, which I'm making." Or even simpler ones like
"Corporation Z seems to have come back from hiatus."

------
MereInterest
Could someone perhaps explain to me how the "random_split" results in wealth
accumulation? From the description, I would expect it to have the opposite
effect.

If two actors with initial values X and Y interact, their expected outcome
would be (X+Y)/2, with expected change being (Y-X)/2 and (X-Y)/2 for the two
actors. If X<Y, then (Y-X)/2>0, and so the person with less wealth expects to
gain, and the person with more wealth expects to lose, for an overall
smoothing effect.

~~~
qiemem
First, accumulation would be the wrong way to think about it. Once the two
agents are engaged in transaction, it doesn't matter which is which.

Let D be the difference in wealth post-transaction divided by the total. The
expected value of D is 1/2\. That means that we should expect that one agent
will walk away with 75% of the pot and the other with 25%. Thus, although the
expected outcome for an agent is 50% of the pot, we're still pretty much
guaranteed to get very uneven splits.

Next, note that a person's wealth affects the payout of the next transaction.
In other words, the person who takes 25% is almost guaranteed to be able to
make less on the next transaction than the person who walked away with 75%.
Suppose all our agents start out with 100, and that the 75%/25% splits are
guaranteed. If each agent engages in exactly one transaction, then half our
agents will have 50 and half will have 150. A 50's next transaction will
either be (50, 50) or (50, 150). A 150's next interaction will either be (150,
50) or (150, 150). The expected outcome for (50, 50) is (25, 75). The expected
outcome for (50, 150) is (50, 150). The expected outcome for (150, 150) is
(225, 75). None of the expected outcomes even things up. It just gets more and
more spread out.

------
jimmytidey
I think it's worth pointing out the most politically salient missing feature.

All the people who are on the blue line have enough money to start changing
the rules of the market. For example persuading government to grant them a
special licence, or bail out their company or letting them bank offshore.

As this is HN I should point out that I don't think this is an argument for no
government, just against political funding.

------
acd
It would be interesting to simulate Free banking vs Central banks and the
effect of different interest rates.

~~~
hbags
Such a simulation would reveal a lot about the creator's beliefs, and
essentially nothing about reality.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Making the creator's beliefs (including hidden assumptions) completely clear
is valuable all by itself. But in addition to revealing the creator's beliefs
it also reveals arithmetic errors, which are quite common in poorly specified
verbal models.

For an example of the latter, observe this HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7042469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7042469)

~~~
scarmig
I'm surprised you didn't include a link to this thread, where I still owe you
some work...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6725096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6725096)

~~~
yummyfajitas
Yeah, but that's a discussion I didn't want to get into again. A simple,
completely indisputable arithmetic error made the point better.

------
coldcode
Nothing is more fun that listening to economists argue about economics.
Programmers have nothing on them.

------
fiatjaf
"For now we will only consider transactions that conserve wealth, so our
transaction rules will decide how to split up the pot of X+Y total wealth."

Economics is not about redistribution of wealth, it is about human actions
that generate -- or destroy -- wealth.

Wealth, in economics, is not a quantity of money, it is some set of valuable
goods usable in producing other goods or to be consumed.

In fact, every voluntary transaction by definition creates wealth, because it
brings the goods (being transacted) from an individual who values them less to
an individual who values them more -- and vice-verse.

~~~
nopassrecover
Surely that depends on your definition of voluntary, the value functions of
the individuals involved, and the impact of any externalities.

------
girvo
I remember calculating an economic model with my Mum when she was doing her
Masters. It was done by modelling the "world" in a large, fairly sparse matrix
and performing particular transformations as per a defined algorithm. It
basically collapsed the matrix into particular values to find what you were
looking for.

The guys who came up with it (I think they were Australians) won a Nobel(?)
prize for it, but I can't remember what the technique is called. Anyone know?
I might be remembering it incorrectly however.

------
WWKong
The other day I was wondering why we, as a population, keep arguing about what
economic model would work the best? Don't we have computers that can run
simulations and provide answers? Inputs could be population size, current
wealth distribution, socialist/capitalist/hybrid, tax rate, cultural influence
etc. We don't have to be accurate, just directionally correct. Why do we keep
playing this game in the real world? Is it because we don't yet have
information to model the engine?

~~~
marcosdumay
> Don't we have computers that can run simulations and provide answers?

It's the old "garbage in / garbage out" problem. If you don't have a good
model, you can only simulate a bad one. Also:

> We don't have to be accurate, just directionally correct.

If the model is not accurate, you can't ever falsify it, thus you can't
improve it. That's one of the biggest flaws of current economics, their models
are not accurate.

~~~
Mikeb85
> That's one of the biggest flaws of current economics, their models are not
> accurate.

Some are more accurate than others. This isn't a flaw BTW, rather an indicator
of how complex the problem really is.

------
mwexler
Any way to see when this was created? Do these ipython notebooks log
create/change events? Just curious to see if this was a recent creation or
just a recent discovery...

~~~
some_pythonista
At norvig.com/ipython where the file is hosted it says it's from 18-Apr-2013.

------
metaphorm
this is highly abstracted and missing the usual attempt to link psychology
with economic behavior. that doesn't mean it isn't useful and interesting. at
minimum this does a good job of showing what sort of results we might expect
from policies w.r.t redistributive policy vs. deregulatory policy.

------
plumeria
This shows how nice an Econometrics book made with IPython would be, something
in the likes of [https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-
Programmin...](https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programming-
and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers)

------
GhotiFish
Glad to see there's some interest in economic simulation on HN. I'd personally
like to see some simulations done where economics is actually applicable, ie.
scarce resources.

------
11001
Is it possible to get a full list of all such notebooks by Norvig?

------
codex
I'd like to see individuals split out. The variance in wealth for a particular
individual over time is likely very high in these simulation--much higher than
in reality.

------
porter
This does not seem to take into account the fact that the bottom quartile
start with horses and outhouses and end up with motorized vehicles and indoor
plumbing.

~~~
mempko
Yeah, but that would have been true regardless of markets... look at the
slavery, or stalin's five year plans...

------
Eleutheria
Redistribution kills motivation, ergo diminishes prosperity.

How do you simulate motivation?

~~~
ap22213
All wealth is redistributed at some point. Many people just want to
redistribute it to their kids.

I'd be happy with a flat tax for all, as long as there's a significant death
tax. Maybe cap inheritances to (average household income x average life
expectancy) for each child. The rest would be distributed to everyone else,
equally.

~~~
baddox
I think that, in this context, "wealth redistribution" refers to _forced_
redistribution.

