1.42: "Immigration Rules" Effect on Immigration Is Not Displayed

Democracy 4 General Discussion
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The game does not display a “Private Airline Industry” among industries in this version.

Fully funded State Airlines increase Air Travel by 8.34% at a low cost of $4.02 billion. They do not affect unemployment. So, it may be inferred that they increase total air travel by lowering costs, and that the jobs displaced from the theoretical private airline industry are equal to the jobs added to the State Airline industry.

So, this appears to be working in a logical manner, effectively as a subsidy to air travel. To the extent that it is a subsidy, it should perhaps also marginally decrease unemployment, if we are to assume that the State Airline industry is equally or less efficient than private industry at providing air travel, but increases the size of the air industry by reducing its costs. It also increases Tourism, and Tourism itself should perhaps lower unemployment, as Tourism itself is an industry.

State industries are usually less efficient than private industries, depending on how they are run, and never more efficient except in cases where they eliminate redundancies. This is what particularly concerns me about the State industries which reduce total employment by eliminating their less-efficient private industries within the game, which are Energy, Telecoms, and Water. I can sort of imagine how State Telecoms could be more employee-efficient than private telecoms, in an environment where private telecoms is operating grossly over-redundant systems providing the same service from competing private telecoms.

To my knowledge, private energy and water industries do not, however, generally operate redundant competing infrastructure that could make them less employee-efficient than a consolidated public industry. My knowledge may be limited, here - I can imagine a sort of Ayn Randian nightmare world where there are three perfectly good power lines being run in the same area, but I had the impression that power generation is usually a local monopoly and so it tends to be infrastructure-consolidated and therefore labor-efficient.

I cannot even imagine a situation where competing private water lines are being run in the same area, and if State Water Industry is to continue to be more employment-efficient than a Private Water Industry, we should try to find some evidence to support that theory. It is difficult to immediately find data-representative headlines to answer that question from search engine inquiries, as these seem to immediately return studies funded by various interest groups seeking to justify their presence in the water industry.

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Rare earth mining will create new jobs in a way that is entirely isolated from the effects of banning coal. Miners will be created, or destroyed, in order to adjust their volume to meet the demands of extraction industries. Since rare earth mining would be a new extraction industry, it will always reduce unemployment in the real world.

Size, Cost and Employment of Rare Earth Mineral Extraction

From a few minutes of looking for data on this, it appears that the size, cost, and employment of the rare earth mineral industry is negligible.

MP Materials, which operates the Mountain pass mine in California producing 15% of the world supply, employs 350 people, with a market cap of 6.7 billion. Wikipedia states that it has received $12 million in government contracts to try to get it moving.

Data on the Chinese side of this industry, which appears to constitute all of the global rare earth industry aside from MP Materials, is less transparent.

As a new industry, it appears to be very efficiently mechanized, with marginal employment. It appears to be profitable or near-profitable, with marginal public costs, and it appears to be a very small industry.

So, having looked at this since my last post, I now strongly recommend that the game devs look into this data, and attempt to find some Chinese data (good luck on determining if any Chinese industry is net-profitable after public investment) to confirm the theory that rare earth mining should have a much lower, marginal cost within the game. Its current in-game costs are significant.

It appears to me that this is a politically significant issue, because of environmental concerns and because of the national embarrassment of failing to domestically extract a strategically significant raw material, or the domestic pride of successfully extracting it, similar to what you would expect for uranium extraction. However, it does not appear to be a significant issue in terms of costs and employment, as the public cost and employment of rare earth mineral extraction appears to be marginal, due to the profitability of the industry, the mechanization of extraction, and the very small size of the industry required to meet the demand for rare earth mineral products.

Employment Effects of Banning Coal

To your point, statista reports that the American coal industry employs 42,117 people. This is not much, and if I understand the situation correctly, this volume of employment is highly relative to US labor laws, as coal extraction is an old and highly unionized industry. I strongly suspect that union interests have resisted mechanization, to the extent that the industry probably employs far more people than would be needed if it were politically capable of employing modern mechanization, in the same way that new industries such as rare earth extraction employ these by default.

Whether or not banning coal will have any effect on unemployment in any country, comes down to the question of whether or not coal is extracted, or imported. In the United States and Britain it is extracted, but for many other countries, it will likely be imported. It also comes down to the question of whether banning coal will mean diverting energy demand to nuclear, oil and gas, or renewables, and then the question of whether or not the replacement energy source will also be imported or extracted (as in the case of oil and gas) or whether it will be produced domestically, and in that case, whether the local production or extraction is more or less efficient.

Diverting coal dependency into nuclear dependency would be much more labor-efficient. Diverting it to renewables would be much less cost-efficient, but I do not know if it would be less labor-efficient.

So, it seems like it would be complicated to model this for the game, since it raises the question of what is going to replace coal, and there are options there. If this should be modeled, then I suppose that banning coal should increase “Energy Demand”, which the game does not model, instead of increasing “Oil Demand”, which it does increase.

It would be more theoretically accurate if banning it marginally reduced employment, but increased the undisplayed “Energy Demand” variable, which would then increase the Energy Industry or the costs of the State Energy Company, which would then increase the demand for oil and gas, nuclear or renewables depending on their relative presence in the economy, which would then finally potentially increase employment depending on which alternative energy source was used to replace coal.

This seems pretty complicated, and the net employment change is marginal, so the best thing to do here is probably nothing.

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Thank you for your answer, it was really informative.

I think balance is important even if it is minor, as there are already many minor effects in the game (they add up).

I had much earlier a balance suggestion for Japan (a country specific adjustment), there is only one small island off the coast of Japan which is rich in rare earths, so the cost of rare earth mining should be much higher in Japan than the average.

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I would also like to see all minor effects modeled in the game, but this does not seem like a development priority, as there are major effects which remain unmodeled in the current version. It would also increase the opacity of the game, as ideas for new proposals show their effects on terms of “increase” or “decrease” but do not display magnitude.

I originally suggested that they display magnitude, but it was pointed out that this would hugely decrease the learning curve, and hence engagement with the game. This makes sense in a way, but if this opacity is to be maintained, it would only be increased by the modeling of highly marginal effects.

The costs of rare earth extraction should be highly variable depending on country, but these may also be difficult to model. It is highly likely that prospecting for rare earth minerals has not been seriously undertaken by many countries. Japan is fully economically integrated into the United States and so may be content to rely on the assumption that the United States will inevitably secure its rare earth minerals to the necessary extent, and inevitably share those with Japan to support its regional trading partner and vassal state ally.

Therefore, Japan has little incentive to even prospect for rare earth minerals, and it is possible that, if for some reason they decided to attempt to extract rare earth minerals, they would make an investment in prospecting which has not yet made, and discover a more efficient source of them in their highly mountainous country than what has been hither-to discovered.

This same logic applies to all EU countries - as long as the EU as a block has the ability to produce or import rare earth minerals, no individual vassal of the union has an incentive to even prospect for rare earth minerals to the extent necessary to discover extraction prices so that they may be modeled in the game. I support sending game developers out into the Alps to dig around for rare earth minerals in order to more accurately model the potential costs of German rare earth mineral extraction, but this is probably a very low priority for game development.

Most of the world seems content to import these resources from China. China, and now the United States, seem to have an incentive to extract these for reasons which are primarily geopolitical / security related and not economic, and the rest of the world seems content to depend on these superpowers.

Rare Earth Mineral Crisis

In light of these discoveries, it seems to me that the “Rare Earth Mineral Crisis” is a fake emergency. It could be an emergency for the United States, if it had poor relations with China, but then it would be solved at a trivial cost, and in the real world, is already being solved at a trivial cost.

For any of the economic partners (The UK, maybe France) or vassals (maybe France, definitely every other playable country in this version) of the United States, their governments should assume that they will never have a rare earth mineral crisis, because if they were to have such a crisis, the United States would solve it for them at a trivial cost in order to support its partner/vassals. Even low “international relations” would not affect this, as these would simply be poor relations with countries outside of the NATO/EU block.

Saudi Arabia and Israel are both examples of countries with very poor “international relations” due to kinetic disputes with their immediate neighbors and questionable to flagrant abuses of basic human rights, but this does not significantly alter the commitment of the United States to its economic and military interests in the region, and therefore even these countries can reasonably expect to be supported by the United States in terms of rare earth mineral extraction, if ever the Chinese were to particularly care about their international reputation, which they clearly do not.

Foreign Relations and International Reputation

To this point, the game seems to consolidate the concepts of “Foreign Relations” and “International Reputation” into one game variable, called “Foreign Relations.” In reality, these two variables are mostly independent. Foreign relations are primarily driven by economic and security concerns, whereas international reputation is driven by the perception of human rights abuses, democracy and so on.

The United States drone strike policy, and a theoretical border wall policy, do and would drastically impact their “International Reputation”, which may at most impact tourism. I am not even certain about this relationship. I cannot quickly find a graph of US tourism per year, but I strongly suspect that, if examined, it would show no significant change for 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, which greatly impacted their international reputation.

These policies do not, and would not, affect their access to international trade and foreign investment. Joe Biden could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot someone, and the United States would not lose any trade or investment. People get money by being exclusively concerned about money, and people and States with enough money to engage in trade and investment are generally not concerned about shootings on fifth avenues.

Tourism, Gambling, GDP and Employment

“The U.S. travel and tourism industry generated over $1.6 trillion in economic output in 2017, supporting 7.8 million U.S. jobs.”

In retrospect, it appears that the employment effects of Tourism are marginal, but the profits are significant, and so it is accurately modeled by the game to the extent that the game is not trying to model very marginal effects on the magnitude of the DEA.

Wikipedia also states that the Gambling industry employs 1.7 million people in the United States, and so it appears that this is inaccurately modeled in the game. In the game, it reduces unemployment, however the real industry appears to be far below the employment threshold required to be modeled. It reports a 92 billion profit. If all of this profit were from the gambling of tourists, then the game would be accurate in modeling it as an increase of GDP.

However, this may be inaccurate, because domestic gambling does not produce any goods or services in the sense of real GDP, and simply circulates money. Gambling is effectively a private taxation industry, which imposes a regressive tax on the domestic population, reducing their disposable income. Hence, any direct profits generated from domestic gambling are offset by the reduction in disposable income which would have gone to other sectors of domestic consumption. Domestic gambling is a private tax bureau, not a real productive industry.

I cannot find any data on the percentage of foreign tourist contributions to the profits of the Gambling industry. This would be the only part of the industry which would increase “paper” GDP, since in this special case, it would be imposing its regressive tax on foreigners, thereby increasing the total money available within the economy, as opposed to simply circulating it.

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Tax Shelters, Revenue and GDP

Currently, the “Tax Shelters” policy has a marginal cost of $3.97 billion, when fully funded. It should not have a cost, and in fact, generate significant revenue. Tax shelter countries are invariably very wealthy in the real world, though they are usually very small. By becoming a “Tax Shelter”, a State shelters foreign capital which would otherwise not enter into its domain, and may then levy taxes upon this capital, as long as these taxes are low or marginal compared to the tax regimes from which they offer shelter.

The case of Luxembourg comes to mind, here.

So, it seems to me that “Tax Shelters”, which in the game increase GDP but expend revenue, should actually generate revenue but not affect GDP, or affect it only marginally. Aside from employing well-paid lawyers and accountants, a Tax Shelter policy does not generate any new goods or services within a country, and so does not significantly increase its real GDP. It simply acts as a significant source of tax income, by allowing taxes to be levied on foreign capital. This may, in turn, indirectly raise local GDP by allowing local disposable income to be raised through tax breaks, credits, reductions and deferments, or investment in local infrastructure.

I suppose that this is a source of confusion for game development, as “GDP” as documented in the real world does not differentiate between real GDP of total goods and services, and paper GDP representing what is purely financial.

… Upon reflection, this question of classification applies to several areas. For example, a public bureaucrat working in the tax bureau is not classified as providing a good or a service, hence is not classified as raising on-paper GDP. However, a private bureaucrat effectively levying taxes on foreigners by operating a tourist casino or a tax shelter is recorded on paper as providing “financial services” and hence contributing to on-paper GDP, even though his work is not different from that of the public bureaucrat, and he is essentially pushing papers which generate revenue but do not constitute real goods or services, and hence real GDP.

Since the game GDP directly affects things like employment, poverty, and tax revenue from taxes mostly levied on real-economic activities like sales tax, it may be more accurate to keep the game GDP model as only representative of real GDP, and exclude paper-GDP policies like this from affecting it directly, and simply reclassify them as sources of direct State income.

To the extent that the State may fail to directly tax this income, it would simply raise the disposable income of the Wealthy, which would increase the demand for goods and services, but not their supply, hence increasing their prices, hence increasing State income from other taxes, without increasing the real GDP. So, it would still ultimately be classified as State income, and not an influence on the availability of real goods and services, which is what game GDP mostly models.

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Slider Maximums are Too Efficient

There is not an incentive in the game to implement/fund most policies in a nuanced manner - they are best fully funded/implemented, minimally implemented (as in the case of State Housing, which generates a modest profit when minimally implemented) or cancelled.

For example, if I consider reducing fully-funded Public Schools from maximum “Student Laptops” down to the upper threshold for “Modern Textbooks”, this would generate 7% additional unemployment, at a savings of 35 billion, for a cost-employment ratio of 5 billion per 1% employment, which is extremely efficient.

It is very difficult to wastefully over-fund anything in this game. Back in reality, there are usually political incentives to wastefully overfund things in excess of the practical benefits of funding them in a nuanced manner.

Inflationary and tax policies are the only real examples of where nuance is required.

Compulsory Water Meters and the Water Industry

This policy does not currently harm the water industry. It should do this by reducing unmodeled water consumption.

Labor Shortage Crisis

It is impossible to cause a labor shortage economic crisis by reducing unemployment to zero. I cannot yet reduce unemployment to zero without running an average deficit, but even where I choose to do this, it does not cause a crisis. In reality, according to conventional wisdom, unemployment, like inflation, should be optimally “low, but not too low” and if a real government were to somehow find the money to create full employment through make-work policies, this would cause a labor shortage crisis which would devastate the remaining private industries.

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Tourism, GDP and State Revenue

The observations on Tax Shelters and Gambling, as being a source of State income, or private income, hence price inflation, hence State income, without being a source of real GDP, may apply somewhat to Tourism.

Tourism, without creating significant employment, generates significant revenues. The real services industry provided to tourists is somewhat more substantial than those of the gambling industry, but still appears to be trivially substantial in comparison to its revenues, compared to traditional, “productive” industries.

I am unsure how this should be classified - it appears to be a question of the wealth, or “luxury spending” of tourists. To the extent that tourism consumes real goods and services, it increases real GDP by employing the people involved in these services. To the extent that it compromises luxury, cultural or eco-tourism, it represents very little demand upon the real economy, and simply represents the injection of foreign liquid capital into the domestic market.

As in the case of the profits generated by a private financial company offering tax shelters, this is best quantified as the absorption of foreign liquid capital into directly or indirectly taxed prices, hence State income, and not quantified as real GDP.

The employment/profit ratio of US Tourism seems to imply that it is mostly a punitive wealth tax levied against foreigners. I believe that the data for that included domestic tourism, which the game “Tourism” model does not consider, and so the tendency of game-represented Tourism to simply be a private tax industry levying taxes against foreigners, and not a real productive industry, and therefore a source of State income but not real GDP, is even greater.

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You’re stating that the rare earth metal crisis can be solved at trivial cost, essentially in the game, it is, except for the high pp the policies cost. But my question is, how do you define “trivial cost”?

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Would you like to open a separate post with tourism in mind, your thoughts would valuable to Cliff and you could include them there. It might crowd out your own discussion about immigration here.

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I define “trivial cost” according to the $12 million in public investment which Wikipedia states has been made into the Californian mining company which is currently extracting 15% of the world’s total rare earth mineral supplies from a single site.

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I think I’m destined to roam from topic to topic. I originally started trying to make single threads for each new topic, but I hit my thread limit. Ultimately, I think the most significant common denominator of my suggestions is the fact that I’m the one making them. As long as I’m making them, I’m making a huge volume of total forum inputs, and I’ll inevitably run out of juice in less than a week and abandon this forum forever. Probably.

Anyway, as long as one of the devs has engaged with this thread, it’s visible enough for me. You’re more than welcome to paste anything I litany out here into the thread discussing it - I nominate you as my press secretary.

Minister Loyalty Based On Policies Within Their Purview

As far as I can tell, a minister’s loyalty is no more increased or reduced by their support for or opposition to policies which are added or removed within the purview of their ministry, than it is for policies outside the purview of their ministry.

Should this really be the case?

If I were a “Religious”, “Commuter” supporting Minister of Transportation, and I was instructed to implement a range of commuter-friendly policies within the Department of Transportation, would I resign just because the government put the pedal to the floor on gay marriage, abortions and transgender in other ministries?

In this case, I might not be completely satisfied with the government, but I would certainly be satisfied with the job I was doing for the government. I would be mildly or cautiously loyal, because at the end of day, I would not have any objection to anything I was being ordered to do, and I would consider that I was doing a good job for the benefit of my country, or at least the parts of it that I cared about. On the other hand, if I were instructed to implement policies destroying the lives of the commuters I so love and cherish, while fanatically religious policies were being implemented outside of my purview, I would resign.

I think that most people have this similar concept of loyalty - that they greatly appreciate being permitted to do something which they believe should be done, and deeply resent being ordered to do something which they believe is wrong, much more than they concern themselves with what is going on in other departments. Most people are much more tolerant of their boss doing things they disagree with, than they are tolerant of being asked to do things they disagree with doing.

Therefore, I recommend that minister loyalty/disloyalty effects be increased for changes within the purview of their ministries, and reduced for changes outside of their purview.

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Ha, ha! I’ll be sure to pass on your good word. :slight_smile:

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Wages and Industrial Automation

Wages are not currently modeled as a positive contributor to industrial automation. They are, in fact, that. The alternative to automation is employment, and the decision to automate is the result of cost comparisons between employment and automation. The cost of employment is wages.

Displayed Crime Effect For Prison Regime is Duplicated

When “Prison Regime” is inspected, it shows two effects upon two variables which are both displayed as “Crime”.

Government Subsidy for Unions and Trade Unions Restrictions do not conflict

It is possible to both subsidize unions and ban them at the same time.

It is not clear what the difference is supposed to be, between restricting trade unions, and simply setting the “Labor Law” slider all the way down to “Pro-Business.” It is possible to move that slider to the maximum of “Pro-Union”, but to also impose “Trade Union Restrictions”.

Car Usage Penalty to Environment Not Modulated by Electric Car Transition

Car usage is detrimental to the environment, regardless of the state of Electric Car Transition. In the game, the Electric Car Transition only reduces CO2 emissions. Car exhaust is not just a CO2 issue, but a smog and environmental health issue. Therefore, car usage correctly impacts “Environment” where electric car transition is incomplete, but fails to be modulated by it.

Rent Controls, But Not Other Policies, Reduce Private Housing

While rent controls reduce private housing, I would also expect property tax, mansion tax, empty homes tax, and banning second home ownership to also do this. As it is now, this leaves me with one “intervene” option to prevent housing bubbles, but no softer “tax it” options to achieve the same.

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These are valid points.

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Displayed Crime Effect For Prison Regime is Duplicated
This is on purpose, one is for the efect of keeping inmates longer in prison, and the other one is for the change in recivism rate with prison regime.

Government Subsidy for Unions and Trade Unions Restrictions do not conflict
It should? Doesn’t it make sense that some country may increase union funds but require them some things like some vote requirements?

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Displayed Crime Effect For Prison Regime is Duplicated

Well, if it’s showing me two ways in which the policy affects the same variable, it could simply add them up and show them the final tally. There are probably other policies which affect some variable through more than one mechanism, and these simply show the final aggregated value.

Government Subsidy for Unions and Trade Unions Restrictions do not conflict

It does not make sense that the Trade Unions Restrictions policy may be slid all the way up to “Total Ban” which has a 100% magnitude effect on Trade Union Membership, presumably reducing its incidence in the population to 0, while it is also possible to subsidize them. One does not subsidize that which they ban, and one does not ban that which they subsidize - unless you’re the CIA and we’re talking about cocaine.

The Scope of Public Housing

I would also expect private housing to be reduced by public housing, decreasing the size of the private housing market.

I would also think that public housing could be funded much more heavily, for a much greater effect. In the context of the game, the policy is clearly attempting to model public housing developments in the United States, which are mostly for significantly below average incomes and only made in selected sites.

It is possible to fund public housing to the point that it eclipses the private housing market, and generates significant costs, employment, and effects on middle incomes. The Soviet Union provided a real-world example of this policy, such that many post-Soviet landscapes are dominated by disorientingly identical streets after streets of the exact same building design.

In many cases, most middle-income housing occupancy is in former public housing, now privatized, and in the cases of apartment complexes, the maintenance (and I presume, ownership) of the buildings themselves remains public, even though the ownership and maintenance of the individual units within the buildings is now mostly private.

The game does not, of course, attempt to model the administrative structure of the Soviet State, but it does model extensive, imaginary-futuristic investment projects, such as hyperloops, Mars bases, and significantly funded fusion research and climate change adaption programs. It also considers the nationalization of other public goods.

So, it would not be outside of the scope of its imagination to consider imaginary-regressive investment projects, such as middle income public housing, or public housing for most people. It does consider tax breaks for mortgages - and these, as a note, also do not increase the private housing market.

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Employment Cost-Efficiency of Social Care

With reference to the table of unemployment policy cost-efficiencies in the post this replies to, the cost-efficiency for the “Social Care” policy should be revised. It currently displays around 40, making it the most cost-inefficient employment program available. In reality, it is certainly more labor-efficient than public healthcare services.

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Environmentalist Opinion Penalty For Road Construction Not Modulated By Electric Car Transition

Similar to the effect of “Car Usage” on “Environment”, The significant penalty to environmentalist opinion for investing in road construction, is not modulated by the extent of the electric car transition.

Both of these should be modulated by electric car transition. A fully electric-transitioned car system should not directly impact the environment, and therefore, construction of roads in this environment should not be more offensive to “Environmentalist” opinions than the construction of high-speed rail, the other electric transport system, which does not and should not offend them.

"Electric Car Transition" Does Not Increase “Energy Industry” Proportional to "Car Use"

However, the Electric Car Transition does not increase the “Energy Industry”, or the cost of the “State Power Company”. It should do both of these things.

Quote, “The group found that in both states consumption of electricity would increase faster than the capacity of the grid to provide it. This would create enormous strains on the local infrastructure. For instance, hypothetically if all passenger cars were made electric today the Texas Interconnection (the Texas electric grid) would have to produce 110 more terawatt-hours of electricity per year, which is the amount of electricity consumption of 11 million homes. This amount of added demand would represent an increase of 30% over Texas’s current electricity production capacity. Worse still, the study found that California would have to produce nearly 50% more energy to make up for its current driver fuel usage.”

So, this is reported to be a very significant secondary effect of vehicle electrification which is not modeled in the game.

Speaking of the additional strain on energy production created by diverting combustion-powered transport into electric powered transport,

"High Speed Rail" Does Not Increase "Energy Industry"

I couldn’t quickly find a good estimate of the power consumption of High Speed Rail, but I suspect that it is significant.

While trying and failing to find direct data on the energy consumption of high speed rail, I did find this Wikipedia comparison of this to normal rail, which stated, in respect to the Eurostar high-speed rail, that “In Germany 38.5% of all electricity was produced from renewable sources in 2017, however railways run on their own grid partially independent from the general grid and relying in part on dedicated power plants.”

It seems to me that, if these networks consume enough energy that dedicated power plants are operated to electrify them, that the policy of “High Speed Rail”, much like “Electric Car Transition”, should be a significant multiplier on the “Energy Industry”.

Wikipedia reports that most of the energy expenditure at higher speeds is to overcome air resistance, not to maintain levitation. So, it appears that this technology should become much more energy-efficient as speeds increase, and the fixed cost of maintaining levitation becomes a less significant part of the total cost including the scaling cost of overcoming drag.

The theoretical Hyperloop should be even more energy-efficient by overcoming most of the air drag through vaccum tubes.

Energy Industry, Environment, and Environmentalist Opinion

It should be pointed out that, if tomorrow all cars were replaced with electric cars, massive high-speed maglev networks were installed to displace combustion-driven rail and air transport, and all of these systems were electrified by burning massive volumes of carbon fuels, the “Environmentalists” would be rejoicing, even though “CO2 Emissions” would not improve.

The “Environment” would improve in the sense that air quality would improve in populated areas while declining in less populated areas, but there could still be a significant cost to the Environment depending on whether the filtering of this exhaust was more or less efficient than car exhaust filtering, and on whether or not the local geography caused this exhaust to enter populated areas.

As for “Environmentalist” opinion, while the same amount of fossil fuel combustion would be taking place for transport, it would be out of sight and out of mind.

Still, some of them would be less than fully rejoicing upon noticing that the energy industry had been multiplied, and that carbon fuel combustion had been simply transferred rather than being reduced.

It seems that, if the game is to accurately model the massive expansion of energy systems that would be required to fully displace combustion-driven transport with electrified transport, then the “Energy Industry” should increase the costs of “Nuclear Fission” and “Clean Energy Subsidies”. It is not clear if this should increase the costs of “Nuclear Fusion”, but I imagine that it shouldn’t, because I imagine that the “Nuclear Fusion” effect on “Energy Industry” simply represents subsidy of Energy Industry investment into a research project.

Finally, the size of the “Energy Industry”, once it is given room to grow to meet the demand of electrified transport systems, should directly increase “CO2 Emissions” and “Oil Demand”, and directly decrease “Environment” and “Environmentalist Opinion”, in ways which are all modulated by “Clean Energy Subsidies” and possibly by “Nuclear Fission”.

The size of “Energy Industry” should increase the costs, and environmentalist objections, to “Nuclear Fission”, though in this case, the CO2 and Environment effects of “Clean Energy Subsidies” and "Nuclear Fission’ should not be direct, but should be modulations of “Energy Industry” effects on these variables, which must be direct in order to provide the player with the “Coal-Powered Electric Vehicles” experience in choosing meme-driven policy over data-driven policy.

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Sex Segregation in Schools

For a game that lets me go full “ban divorce, ban homosexuality, ban women from driving” mujaheddin, what ever happened to sex segregation in schools?

Much like divorce, this is a battle that was fought, and lost, by religious conservatives a long time ago.

Aside from purely opinion and gender equality effects, I suspect that this may slightly improve education, since it would allow it to more precisely target demographics.

Women are, for example, acutely under-represented in STEM fields excluding healthcare, even in Western democracies with relatively progressive attitudes and policies on female education and employment, and a significant factor in this disparity seems to be that they have significantly lower interest in receiving non-medical STEM education, hence express lower demand.

If that is the case, then boys in a mixed-sex school have a significantly higher demand for this education than the average of the student population, so the school which meets this demand necessarily does so inefficiently. Even if the elective programming classes are a total sausage-fest (as they were, in my experience) they are more diffusely distributed in a mixed-sex education system than they would be in a sex-segregated education system, so they do not form local economies of scale. If they were more efficiently concentrated around demand, the scale effect would allow more efficient investment in these programs, such as by making advanced classes available in a student population where there would otherwise not be enough demand to justify their institution.

No “Health”, “Obesity” effects for "National Service"

The “National Service” policy does not currently list any effects on “Health” or “Obesity”.

A National Service is, in essence, a compulsory exercise program for adults, similar to “Compulsory School Sports”. In the real world, the potential health effects of such a policy are one of its primary attractions. After sending everyone through basic, the State could, in theory, require every adult of both sexes under retirement age to either meet military fitness standards, or do one weekend a month of training until they meet those standards.

The State could wave all of the flags it wanted to wave while doing this, but it would probably be thinking more about health care consumption as a percentage of GDP, which is 18%, than it would be thinking about military spending as a percentage of GDP, which is 3.7%.

Effects on war readiness and political convenience aside, this would be one of the most cost-effective public health policies ever devised.

National Service and Military Spending

If the game did more to model potential military conflict, there would also be room to model the relative cost-efficiencies of national services, compared to spending on a professional military, on war readiness. In the real world, these are significant, because the demand for military employment is highly volatile depending on whether or not a country is a war.

During war, the demand almost always drastically exceeds supply, and during peace, the supply drastically exceeds demand by definition. Since this is a volatile employment sector, the theoretical efficiency would be to have a workforce which can transition in and out of military employment as demand fluctuates. This is what a national service does - it creates a huge number of people who are not actively employed by the military, but who may be employed by it in the event of war.

However, since the game does not attempt to model war, there is probably no need to attempt to model this effect. The only “low military spending, low international relations” event seems to be receiving surgical strikes from an international power accusing the State of producing WMDs, and this is in effect a question of static anti-air capabilities, which are the domain of the professional military, and not a question of flexible ground army capabilities, which are the domain of a national service.

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In such a mod, by how much would technology increase under a segregated sex education system? Are the women being told to just study the bible instead of doing regular studies like the Taliban, or are they getting the same education as their male peers, like Iran and Saudi Arabia? If they are being told to read religious texts in say, Japan, the impact on their education might be lower, since Shintoism doesn’t discourage women from work (atleast some forms of Shintoism), so they would actually end up more educated than their male peers, because their male peers wouldn’t be required to have religious knowledge. If women were separated from the men, would the demand for STEM rise amongst them now that they don’t see men taking up these roles (as there’s less competition)? Does gender inequality mean sexism in game, so women are discouraged from STEM, due to a hostile work environment?

Just some questions.