Hoody Economy: Stable inequality, unstable lives

Hoody Economy is a browser-based simulation in which wealth never piles up. A population of agents trades week by week under an econophysics model. You can run it, tune the policies, and pick a strategy for your own player. I wrote up what nine screenshots from a long run actually show.

Live demo: https://www.playgroundsofreality.com/playlab/hoody-economy

Write-up: https://www.cihantoraman.com/post/stable-inequality-unstable-lives

Code: https://github.com/cihantoraman/hoody-economy

Everything tunable in Hoody Economy fits on a single screen. Population, the products on the market, how hard prices swing, whether the rich are taxed, and whether poverty triggers a rescue.

Image 1: The constitution on one screen. Every lever you can pull, and the one thing that isn't a lever, the fixed money supply.

One thing on that screen is not a setting. The money supply is fixed before the first week: capital will move between players and a shared treasury, and nothing will ever be minted or destroyed. The toggles are parameters; this rule is the constitution. Every chart below is downstream of that difference.

Once it runs, the first thing worth watching is not a number. It is a line that refuses to go anywhere. The player's capital climbs, slips, recovers, slips again, and after three hundred weeks it sits about where it began — no trend, no arrival, a wander.

Image 2: A line that won't settle. One player's capital across about 300 weeks, ending near where it began. Gini 0.22.

The easy reading is bad luck, or noise in a toy. That reading does not survive the analytics.

The society around the restless line is not restless. Plotted over two hundred weeks, the Gini coefficient is nearly a horizontal trace at 0.25 — stable inequality, drawn as a flat line, in an economy that visibly never stops churning.

Image 3: Inequality as a flat line. The Gini coefficient held near 0.25 across 200 weeks, besides the live class pie.

So two things run at once that do not obviously belong together: the individual drifts, the structure holds.

They can both be true because they are different kinds of objects. The distribution is a shape — how many sit in each band. Membership is who sits there. The class-evolution chart makes the shape's life visible: the bands breathe week to week, thicken and thin, and never trade places. At week 235, the census reads 45 poor, 103 lower middle, 136 middle, 98 upper middle, 18 rich, no elite — and fifty weeks later the proportions are nearly the same while a quarter of the population has changed class beneath them.

Image 4: The bands breathe but never swap. Social Class Evolution: the week-235 census reads 45 / 103 / 136 / 98 / 18 / 0.

The container keeps its form; the contents pour through it. Inequality here is structural — there is always a top and a bottom — but it is not a sentence anyone serves for life.

If the churn were pure chance, the top would be a rotating cast. It is not. Week after week, the five wealthiest are the patient ones — Conservative players who keep most of their wealth out of every exchange — while the jail fills with the opposite temperament: 21 penalized, 18 imprisoned, risk-takers caught rigging the market.

Image 5: The patient stays on top; the reckless go to jail. Top 5 Wealthiest are all Conservative; Justice shows 21 penalized, 18 imprisoned.

Strategy does not bend the shape of the economy. It bends a path through it. Patience buys no permanent seat, but it changes where the wander spends its time; recklessness does the reverse, with a cell at the end.

The economy is also not left alone. Shocks arrive, sometimes two at once — a healthcare reform cutting the price of medical services while an agricultural crisis drives food prices upward.

Image 6: Two shocks at once. A Healthcare Reform and an Agricultural Crisis are running together in the event log.

The price chart shows what a shock actually does here: a price jumps to a plateau, holds while the event lives, then slides back as demand and supply pull it home.

Image 7: The price skyline. Each shock steps a price up to a plateau, then it slides home.

Steps up, shelves, returns — over thousands of weeks, the trace looks like a city skyline, and every roof eventually comes back toward the street.

That return is the real meaning of the flat Gini line, and "stable" is still too clean a word for it. In longer runs, the coefficient creeps to 0.26, the rich band thickens, and more names fall into poverty before being pulled back.

Image 8: Stability is a basin, not a value. By week 532, the Gini has crept to 0.26, and the rich band has thickened.

What holds is not a value but a basin — a region the economy keeps re-entering after every boom, crash, and policy shock. Stability is a return, not a stillness. A frozen economy and a self-correcting one look identical in a single frame and behave nothing alike across a decade.

Underneath all of it, the constitution does the work. The pool is closed, so the economy cannot grow its way out of anything — it can only move the same money around. Year after year, the report says the same words: held steady, average 1,199 to 1,199.

Image 9: Year 30, held steady at 1,199.

One player's good year is, somewhere on the board, another's bad one. Getting rich stays real and stays temporary, because the pool a person climbs is the pool everyone else is standing in.

So the wandering line was never the flaw. It is the honest shape of a single life inside a closed economy that redistributes faster than anyone can accumulate — always real, never final. The shape holds; the people move through it.