I’m still trying to figure out how to make screen shots work for this game, otherwise I would show you the charts that I’m going to talk about. Hitting print screen doesn’t seem to make a screen shot appear anywhere, and my old standby of Ctrl+V in MS paint is only giving me my a picture of my desktop background.
Anyways, the point of this thread is that I have a game on the go where “poor earnings” are very high, (3 grid marks away from the top in fact), and poverty is very low (2 grid marks from the bottom), but the “poor” still make up 25.80% of my population. By my definition, if somebody is earning a decent wage, and not living in poverty, they AREN’T poor. The 2 previously mentioned conditions should cause a decrease in the number of people who are considered to be poor.
Am I the only one who thinks this way, or do others agree with me?
I recognize that, and that’s what I’m saying should change. It should be possible though economic and tax policies to raise the poor up to the middle class, the middle to being wealthy, excessively tax the middle class to the point that they become poor or the wealthly to the point that they leave. It’s an aspect that is missing from this game.
is poverty a measure of absolute or relative poverty?
i.e your poor people might not be living in mud huts (in fact might be living in what we would term pretty nice conditions) but compared to your super hyper wealthy gajillionaires they are still relatively poor.
Hi there. You can definitely change the income level of people and see them move between poor, middle income and wealthy groups. The effects are indirect, through those policies and other influences which affect the low income, middle income and high income statistics.
This is where terminology becomes a bit confusing, but you can make the ‘poor’ better off without them becoming middle income, if you are raising up the lower levels of the poor. In other words, you might manage to make the dirt-poor and starving ‘slightly poor’ instead, which is obviously a good thing, but won;t show up in hard statistics like membership of those groups.
However…
It still matters, and still takes effect. Lets say someone earns $5,000 a year and is very very poor. Your combination of subsidies and tax breaks mean they effectively earn $7k. If the ‘barrier’ to place them into middle income is $20k they are still in the ‘poor’ group, but the strength of their membership is lower, and thus they are less affected by issues that affect the poor.
You can see this by looking at relative group strength memberships in the poor voter group, and observing their different incomes.