Hi Cliff, (all)
I work for a government in latin america. I’ve recently showed Democracy to a couple of senior colleagues and they think it’s fantastic. Our bosses are some fairly high profile people and we want to have a tool that lays out in very clear terms what the relations between policies, budgetary lines and the effect on the population is.
One of my colleagues is a macroeconomist with a specialty in econometrics and economic modeling, I work in public investment and international cooperation and my other colleague works in institutional design and workflow processes.
The econ guy recently finished a very complex model of our economy and main indicator projections going up to 2018. The model is pretty robust and well tested. I told him that we could try to explore if we could port it Democracy. Because I don’t know to what extent modding can help us, I’m coming to you guys with a wall of text (sorry) to get some insight from the community. In summary, I am exploring how feasible it would be to port a complex economic model into democracy. I’m also exploring how difficult it would be and the professional profile of a consultant in case we propose to get some funding for it and hoping of course that you (Cliff Harris) were involved, since its your creation really.
Now here comes the wall, which are just some of the concerns that I have for right now. Feel free to PM me. bye.
I. One of the things that first strikes me as a barrier is the need to take out all the political elements of the game and leave only the economic and social ones. The whole thing has to do with population right? In a model , there are no considerations for politics since it’s just a matter of conveying how the convergence of several factors is affecting one specific situation. The voter types right in the center of the screen would have to be changed to economic, fiscal (possibly competitiveness) and social indicators like unemployment, poverty, etc.
II. I read somewhere that the Global Economy in the game is a sine wave, which is obviously not useful in simulating a real world open economy. Could the global economy’s values be changed and its effects on indicators modified? If not, could the effect of the global economy be eliminated on domestic indicators?
III. Dilemmas, Polls, Ministers, Political capital (I know we can bring costs to 0 though) would have to be removed. Is it doable?
IV. How is population simulated and what effect does it have on expenditures…are there any automatic effects? This one is of importance since we would need our budget to be free of unwanted influences and have it be accurately simulated, or at least have us be able to do monthly or weekly data entry.
V. Charts! Could there be more!? We love charts!
I think I’m getting too ahead of myself since there’s so much stuff we would like to be able to do with it but such heavy modification I think goes into the core of the game and implies an intellectual property issue. Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope to hear from all of you. Especially cliff. Thanks for making this awesome game, but mostly for the awesome tool it could become in real world application.
Thanks again,
Hector
