Now and then, when people hear I code economic simulations with cadCAD (and I just heard about its rust cousin radCAD), they want me to write one for them. And it usually involves asking how humans would behave in a specific situation.
here’s the thing
I don’t know.
I can’t simulate human psychology.
What would people do in this or that case? This is not what a simulation does. A simulation says “given these conditions, and behaviours, this will happen (most/some of the time)”. One must be very clear about what these behaviours are and formulate the question in such a way that we can answer it without having to program mini-humans. Mini-humans are impossible to verify anyway.
Bad question: “What would humans do if I raised taxes?”
Better question: “How many people would stay in my system given a group of humans (with income distribution A, differing tolerances for tax raises B) and if I raised taxes above a certain threshold?”
You get the idea.
Math helps to set your intentions in stone. If you can express every interaction and change as an equation, everyone can verify that the simulation is working as intended. After all, if I write a complex system that I claim simulates how humans would behave, how is anybody going to verify that? I was probably just guessing; and it’s hard to verify if the code does what I intended. It’s far easier to test if an equation computed the right result.