Population and Economic Data

It could be done. It depends on what you want to accomplish. It's been done in the real-world with good and bad repercussions in the past. I don't know if this is a good idea or bad idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate

Something just occured to me - what proportion of all these numbers comes from the teen grid?

What I know about the teen grid:
- Teen grid and main grid share the same L$
- L$ goes a lot further in the teen grid than in the main grid. For example, clothing & apparel is much much cheaper. I'm told land is around L$2-L$3/m.

It stands to reason that we would expect a much lower average L$ account balance on teen grid than main grid.

If the teen grid represents a substantial proportion of these numbers, they could be indeed skewing our stats - the average L$ account balance on main grid may not be decreasing.

Maybe it's a possibility that the teen grid L$ is dragging the main grid L$ down? If I had to guess, I would bet that proportionally, there are many fewer L$ buyers on teengrid than on maingrid.

More data please

It was done where I live during the 1997 asian recession triggered by speculators. Our nutty prime minister went against the IMF's so called economic aid packages and decided to peg our currency to the USD to stabilize the economy instead. In the end we did manage to come out of it a bit better off than the other nations whom accepted IMF's aid. In some ways, it did work, partly due to having lots of reserves which some of the neighbouring countries did not have.

http://www.bizasia.com/gen/articles/?ac=HZW5M-Y

I think what he was referring to was unique "humans" -- thus narrowing things down to the number of actual people using SL rather then the number of accounts being logged into (which could be a primary and any number of alternatives or other "family" accounts.)

I know that this could actually be problematic to do, since people could be using multiple credit cards, and potentially multiple billing addresses between their accounts -- so there is no single unique identifier (excpet perhaps RL name & RL birthdate, but that won't nessesarily be unique either)

Whike economists don't agree in general about the idea of fixed exchange rates - at least to my knowledge - most agree that it only makes sense if "special" economic situations ("crisis" is such an ugly word).

If you try to hold on to a fixed exchange rate for too long and the actual buying power (or perceived value) of the two currencies drift apart too much, a gray market develops usually very fast. Such a gray market can easily be used to "game" the official exchanges leading to adjustments of the official exchange rates. These sudden adjustments are rarely good for the economy.

As it is said in the Wikipedia article Nothing could be farther from the situation in SL, where Linden Lab exercises very little control over the economy - besides controlling the creation and destruction of currency.

1. Does the Money Supply column in these data represent the money supply at the beginning of the month or at the end of the month?



2. Whichever assumption I make wrt question 1, the balance equation:

Money(month n+1) = Money(month n) + Sources - Sinks

doesn't hold. Why is this?

You can't count it like that. That's fixed exchange... It would be
(Money(month n+1) / pop) = (Money(month n) / pop) + Sources - Sinks

Um what Nexus?

Money supply should be last month's money supply + souces - sinks (although for which month it isn't clear) - and as pointed out it isn't. There seems at first look at the data to be a random error, sometimes it's too high, sometimes too low, although with a short data run like this it's hard to be certain.

Interestingly if you assume they've done their sums wrong and work from the initial money supply figure you end up with a far higher final money supply 628M rather than 574M - but you also get an appreciably more stable money per capita figure (SEM 15% rather than 32%) - which given the money supply is meant to be tied to users might suggest a source of the error...

Whatever it is there is some missing data here or something else wrong.

Stellar point Francis!

It never occurred to me either, but they really should be kept separate.

From Robin's initial post:



Does that explain what you're seeing, perhaps?

- Jon

You are correct, though your first paragraph answers your second.

It's true that scarcity raises value. But just because everyone only has a bit of something doesn't make it necessarily scarce. At least not to everyone.

If you don't know of or see anything you'ld want or need to buy, would 100Ls be too much or too little in your pockets?

But if I would want to rent land, buy a prefab and fill it up with goodies.. then it would be too little.

I wouldn't have thought so, although it is certainly one source of error. I certainly could be wrong, but at first thought I'd have thought money in dormant accounts would give a systematic error (always the same way, even if not fixed in size) and I'm seeing errors both ways. It suggests that there's something else going on.

One thought I had was Ginko, They hold 'virtual' money and if it plays oddly by month you might see this sort of pattern I guess, although again I'd have expected a more even pattern - there are, generalising wildly, "savers" (just deposit their excess L$ and rarely withdraw, certainly not large amounts) and "investors" (who deposit and withdraw, possibly with a bias one way) and as people shift money around into and out of Ginko that will bias the money supply figures. My first guess, more people saving, and money in circulation appears to fall, more withdrawing and it appears to rise - but I'm tired enough I might not have got that right - maybe it only affect the GDP? but the shifts are a few L$million, so changes in that balance might be enough to do that.

I also don't know what the prices, exchanges etc. on SLB, SlEx and IGE do to the numbers, particularly the "saved" money in SLEx if you don't withdraw your earnings, it's another 'virtual' store.

Who do you suppose, among Linden Lab's programming staff, ever stood up at a staff meeting and said, "Gee, what I really want to do is to write a double entry bookkeeping system?"

So code that creates and destroys Lindens is probably scattered among four or five hundred different modules, some dating back to day one. Nobody knows where. The only logic is the logic of the process by which the server code was built. It'll take a while to expose all that code before the books can be balanced.