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Introducing Life

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Abstract

While the economic system is meant to serve people, distribution failures present no permanent consequences in linear-system economic models as endogenously induced starvation and population changes are not modelled. Metaphoria is an agent-based model that features a ‘living’ population, one where the agents must find and secure food in order to remain alive and breed. All their propensities are evolved, even if this leads to extinction. This enables us to explore starvation and system efficiency in terms of the well-being of the population. It also allows us to directly test the efficiency hypothesis explored in Chapter 8, as Metaphoria can run a hunter/gather economy and a monetary economy using an identical set of agents in an identical environment.

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Gooding, T. (2019). Introducing Life. In: Economics for a Fairer Society. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17020-2_13

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