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Institutional Emergence and the Persistence of Inequality in Hamilton, ON 1851–1861

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Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (CSSSA 2018)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

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Abstract

Economic inequality in urban settings is a readily observable phenomenon in contemporary cities, but historical research reflects that the problem is not new. In this paper, we argue that there are citizen-level interactions and arrangements that contribute to the stability of a small group of wealthy citizens alongside a high degree of transience in the poor and more populous part of the city. We developed an agent-based model that drew on the dynamics revealed in a study of Hamilton, Ontario (1851–1861) by Michael Katz (1977). Our central hypothesis was that the wealthy developed and have had access to institutional resources that buffered negative externalities whereas the poor did not. Early results suggest that the presence of an entity that can pool individual agent resources contributes to sustained inequality expressed as a Gini coefficient. Our model is based on Epstein and Axtell’s sugarscape models (1996) where a probability function led to proto-institutions that emerged from inter-agent interactions and thereafter produced greater stability, higher levels of wealth (sugar), and longer lifespans for their participating agents. The inverse was true for the agents who did not have institutional access.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Planning, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Milton J. Friesen

  2. School for Professional Studies, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Srikanth P. Mudigonda

Authors
  1. Milton J. Friesen
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  2. Srikanth P. Mudigonda
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Milton J. Friesen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software and Information Systems, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Ted Carmichael

  2. Department of International Studies, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA

    Zining Yang

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Friesen, M.J., Mudigonda, S.P. (2020). Institutional Emergence and the Persistence of Inequality in Hamilton, ON 1851–1861. In: Carmichael, T., Yang, Z. (eds) Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas. CSSSA 2018. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35902-7_1

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