I recently wrote a very simple economic simulator. Given X actors, each starting with $Y (for a total money supply of $(X * Y)). For each "tick," two actors a

I recently wrote a very simple economic simulator. Given X actors, each starting with $Y (for a total money supply of $(X * Y)). For each "tick," two actors are selected, a buyer and a seller. The buyer gives the seller a random amount of money (if the buyer didn't have that said amount, no transaction happened). That's it. No skill. No talent. No fraud. Just random transactions between a fixed number of actors and money. Even after a few hundred transactions an interesting pattern emerged---a power law distribution of money, with the average amount of money per actor less than the starting amount of money (generally, about 66% of the starting amount). The results were similar regardless of the number of actors, the amount of starting money, and the amount per transaction (even a fixed amount exchanged per transaction would result in a similar result). I think the result would the same for your hypothetical town.