I think you can also see aspects of this + the way it interacts with the human tendency toward altruism in the success of One Red Paperclip and later imitators, who repeatedly made progressively larger positive-value trades until the combined effect is that they'd traded something of effectively no worth (a single paperclip) for something of substantial worth (a house, car, etc.): people will intentionally and knowingly make negative-value trades for someone with charisma or to be part of a good story!
The Best To Never Do It
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Aspiring writer, unwilling political analyst, renaissance gamer; friend of unions, enemy of empires, watcher of cartoons.
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in reply to @vogon's post:
A super loose observation as I'm meddling with the little coin flip game: I managed to even myself out with the rich person before it all tanks, and I'm still the one making the 20% wagers while the rich person can only collect: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/989937705515356210/1055213943372656690/image.png
Commonfolk cannot afford to lose in this economy, down to not letting major incidents burn holes in our pocket, else we will reach that $0 flatline and life will come knockin' at our doors.
I even manged to become the rich person, though I went super close to the $0 line for a bit first.
Oh, yeah. It's def possible to risk your way to the top via coinflip, though it's even more fun to imagine how real-world variables could even allow for somebody to legit go from rags to riches. 🤭
The second minigame is absolutely worth analyzing, too. The takeaway could be protecting the people from making such huge risks (ex: affordable/free healthcare let's goooo) and then pooling or redistributing excess wealth to further support the community. You can damn HEAR the conservative-adjacents crying communism/socialism lol
I do wonder about the validity of the second game, though. I think that 0.5% redistribution is of the individual's total wealth? I don't know for sure.
I do know that redistributing 0.5% of someone's total wealth on a regular basis, rather than of their income, would be very hard to achieve legally.
This is great and maybe intentionally approached from this perspective to not "scare people off" but I do think it's a bit of a disservice to not mention capitalism anywhere in the article. I think knowing this is an inherent structural problem of capitalism benefits everyone, but again, maybe the editorial decision was that would be read as "too radical" or something.