2020 Sci-Fi Econ Lab warmup: revamping the wiki and a conference that looks like fun

[alberto]

Happy 2020s to all friends of the Sci-Fi Economics Lab! We are working hard under the radar to prepare the terrain for Lab activities in the year that’s just begun, but we do need another 2-3 weeks for our plans to be publishable. Please bear with us.

Meanwhile, however, some activities have been going on.

First, you might have missed the seminar on @mstn’s zero-growth Goodwin model. The notes are available here.

Second, we have been busy revamping the wiki of selected econ-SF works. There are new entries, expansion of stubs, and even a contribution from two of the authors themselves, Anne E. Currie, here as @AnneC, and @yudhanjaya Widjeratne. The idea was put forward by @zvanstanley, who also offered to do some curation of his own.

Third, thanks to @amiridina we have stumbled into a conference that might be a good fit for Lab work. It takes place in Eindhoven in May 2020. @mstn, do you want to make a stub at presenting a next iteration of your work?

Call for papers and artworks Economia 2020.

[mstn]

Hi @alberto, I am going to publish the code soon and I have already started to do some experiments with the Jackpot model. I have been busy with ski mountaineering (fully green alternative to alpine skiing ).

Initially, I was going to create a github repo, but then I thought that an ObservableHQ notebook would make collaboration easier. It is like Jupyter Notebooks, but has some interesting features, like sharing code snippets and graphical elements between notebooks in a non linear way.

As far as I can tell (I have not tried), the full code is downloadable, can be run outside ObservableHQ and can be imported as an npm module. The only non ideal thing is the proprietary user interface of the editor.

[alberto]

I thought that an ObservableHQ notebook would make collaboration easier

You did the work, you get to call the shots. ObservableHQ looks lovely but… I can’t code in Javascript! Anyway, I trust you. Let me know when we are ready for me to start looking at the equations.

Meanwhile: the conference has a 15th January deadline for submitting a proposal. One of the themes, called “The economy as evolution”, seems a reasonably good fit, given the formal similarity of the Goodwin model with the Lotka-Volterra equations. To apply, you need to submit:

Proposal requirements: max 400-word and a short 100-word biography.

Do you want me to give it a go?

[alberto]

@zvanstanley Zach, are you there? How are things going on your end?

[mstn]

I do not know much about conference proposals. No idea about how much it must be accurate and/or complete. What were you going to write?

[alberto]

400 words are only enough to explain what the model is about.

[zvanstanley]

It’s been going well. I’ve been really busy lately with releasing a mobile game and some other stuff.

[zvanstanley]

@alberto it looks like the wiki has been coming together more. I feel like it would be good to let it build some more before taking next steps. What do you think?

[alberto]

@zvanstanley sure. I am reading Webs of Varok, but actually that entry is already quite OK. I was hoping to add some more notes on the economics (she seems to be into Daly), but TBH I do not enjoy the storyline that much. At this point, the only piece of work that (a) I have read and (b) does not have an entry in that list is Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I could re-read that and make an entry in the next week or two, but anything over that will take me quite some time. Anyone else can contribute?

[alberto]

@mstn but I am happy to have a go, if you authorize me!