> After, the developer then introduces ration tickets. This is simulation #20, and I'm pretty sure it's Zimbabwe. But it's not the real world Zimbabwe, it somehow works. That is, if you're ok printing trillion dollar bills.
In a cashless society, I suspect the zimbabwe method would actually probably work. The only hangup was "Now I need to crate around boatloads of money". In a cashless society, we can just move the decimal point every so often.
It's definitely important, when analyzing the impact of policies on an economy, not to get hung up on things like 'what the numbers on the banknotes look like' rather than important things like 'how well the population's wants and needs are satisfied'. Certainly it's not inherently a problem to continually have to revalue your currency if the net effect of your economy is it makes a lot of happy people, and it's certainly not impossible to imagine that a functional stable productive economy might coexist with a rapidly inflating - or deflating - currency.
But the simulation doesn't do much to validate that concept. It introduced inflation to a group of agents who never think about the future value of their goods or money.
In a runaway inflation situation, some producers of apples aren't going to sell you apples today for 1,000 Simoleons, when they know tomorrow those apples will fetch 1,100 Simoleons... and by Friday they'll be worth 10,000. And some holders of Simoleons will think 'These 10,000 Simoleons could buy be ten apples today, but tomorrow they'll only buy me 9, and by Friday they'll only buy me one... so I should buy 10 apples today, then sell them on Friday'.
Without capital accumulation, time valued money, or investment, this simulation barely scratches the surface of what effects inflation has on an economy.
In a cashless society, I suspect the zimbabwe method would actually probably work. The only hangup was "Now I need to crate around boatloads of money". In a cashless society, we can just move the decimal point every so often.