Week 5 – Gini Coefficient + Trade Trouble

This week, after wasting lots of time trying to figure out how to accurately calculate the Gini Coefficient, I just caved and took code from this Github. Of course, everything works perfectly now, and it took 5 minutes to implement using their code, but when I spent hours trying to make it work with my own code (spoiler: it never did).

Apart from that, I realized we’re still in phase 1 (the boring stuff) because there’s a major oversight in my simulation: I forgot to add trade. Now that I’ve been forced to confront this, I realize trade is basically impossible for me to model in Python with my current skill set. For now, my tentative plan is to somehow estimate the fair value of a property when trading and work out some algorithm that gives you whatever cash you would have to add to make a trade, but I’m not entirely sure how. This is also probably only going to apply to 2 properties at once since anything more sounds like a logistical nightmare for now. All in all, this is definitely proving to be a challenging and exciting research project.