The Chancy Islands 
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About this website
This website explores wealth inequality in a society in which all factors other than luck (inborn traits, personality, skill, education, effort, etc.) have been eliminated. It uses a simple spreadsheet model and presents the results metaphorically – each run of the model with different paramenters is presented as a fictitious “island.”
This idea was first conceived and modeled by Randy Schutt in 2011 and then further developed from 2011 to 2018. The results were first posted on the web in June 2019.
Randy Schutt has BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. He is now retired and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
The menu on this page displays all the Chancy Island pages, including the five “daughter” pages that are normally not displayed unless the link to them is clicked.
Site Problems
If you find spelling mistakes, broken or misdirected web links, or other problems with this site, please let us know. Thanks.
Contact
You can contact Randy by writing to:
[Note: the address is displayed here using a script to prevent its capture by spammers.]
- Added Visualizing the Results page.
- Added wealth quintile graphs for each island in Year 50.
- Added 5 articles to the Additional Resources page.
- Added 1 game to the Additional Resources page.
- Changed meta information on each page to improve browser search results related to wealth inequality and luck.
- Fixed a mistake in the calculation of the Decile Coefficient of Dispersion for each of the islands (the formula erroneously used the 5th and 95th percentiles instead of the correct 10th and 90th percentiles).
- Added a row in the Numerical Results page for Total Wealth of the Bottom 60%. Also, added a column with the same statistics for Skewed Island in Year 0 (with a green background) and made all of the numerical results available through a GoogleDocs spreadsheet.
- Added a draft of the Chance Magazine article to the News page.
- Added 1 book to the Additional Resources page.
- Linked to the final version of Chance Magazine article on the News page.
- Added 2 articles to the Additional Resources page.
- Added 1 article and 1 animation to the Additional Resources page.
- Added 1 article to the Additional Resources page.