During dinner tonight, there was a small argument over whether, all things equal, differences in birth rates result in increases in wealth disparity. In other words, if population A and B begin with equal proportions of wealth and that wealth is passed down to descendants directly, and if these populations have different birth rates, how quickly does per-capita wealth increase or decrease? This presented an opportunity to do some simple python wrangling. To start, I just modeled the problem by asking, if Japan and the rest of the world started with equal shares of wealth, how quickly would the per-capita wealth change. Japan of course has a negative growth rate, making it a good place to start, but there are endless improvements and permutations. In any case, it helped to settle the argument..
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