I am currently expanding upon prior work by Eric Alden Smith and Jung Kyoo-Choi (2007), developing an agent-based simulation that models the emergence of institutionalized social inequality as arising from mutualistic interactions between wealthy "patrons" and less fortunate "clients." The idea is that inequality may have emerged not because of coercion by elites, but through the economic and evolutionary success of these "patron-client" relationships.
If you're not up on the lingo, you might be asking, "What the heck is an agent-based model?" An agent-based model is a computer simulation that allows digital "agents" (little code-monkeyed automatons) to interact on a digital landscape, usually composed of patches (see the picture to the left? That's from one of Smith and Kyoo-Choi's simulations and it basically gives a visual of what I'm talking about). Every time step, the agents and patches are commanded by the code to perform certain processes, like learn about their environment, "mutate" into other agent types (strategies), reproduce, form relationships with other agents, and die (some probable agent processes) and regrow resources or undergo chance changes in habitat richness (some probable patch processes). It's sort of like a video game that plays itself and doesn't have very exciting graphics. The output of the simulations and the insights it might provide are what is exciting.
The point of these agent-based simulation experiments is to better understand the ecological and economic circumstances that could have favored the evolution of inequity from a hypothetically egalitarian socioeconomic structure to help generate hypotheses that could be refined and tested in the real world. |
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