One of the best ways to learn about something is to build it. When you build something for the first time you are forced to think of intimate details that you might not have thought of in advance, because it’s something that is strange or counter-intuitive but absolutely essential to how that thing functions. Repeatedly you will stumble across several seemingly minor details and are forced to stop for a moment to think about how you’re going to tweak things to incorporate them. Sometimes this will only require some minor changes, but other times it will require a major rethink on how you’re doing what you’re doing.

As part of this series, we’re going to take this idea and apply it to building an economy. Over the course of several tutorial posts, we’re going to outline a design to build an economy on the computer, write the code that will follow the rules in our design, and run it to see what happens. We’ll create some output using a database, from which we can construct charts and run statistics to have an idea on what is going on inside our new virtual world. Through this, hopefully we’ll learn all sorts of interesting things about economies that we may not have known already, either because it came out of the simulation, or we had to do some research into existing work to see how other people have solved this problem in the past.

On the way, in addition to learning plenty about economics, we’ll become quite familiar with the tools we use to build the economy: computer programming, software engineering, and mathematics. These on their own are very interesting and useful tools, so it’s worth the exercise even if we aren’t particularly concerned about the economics side of things.

I hope you enjoy this journey, and learn plenty along the way!