Enjoy!
1 Like
I think happiness of voter should be weighted average from Middle Class and Poor/Wealthy class too, just like now everyone is partly liberal/conservative or partly socialist/capitalist.
Are there more voter groups, where voters belong partly to x and partly to y (like socialist/capitalist split)?
I think Flat and normal Income taxes could be removed and replaced with three income taxes:
For Poor, Middle Income and Wealthy.
Poor is 0 - 0.333 max income, and Wealthy would be 0.666 - 1 max income, and middle class being in middle.
Poverty line tax relief or something like that would mean incomes between 0.x - 0.333 being taxed by income tax - that is untaxed between 0 and 0.x
It would reduce impact on Poor people.
The overlapping groups are:
liberal/conservative
socialist/capitalist
poor/middleincome/wealthy
Now I have this capabiltiy, once ti 100% works and displays text right… it might be possible to revisit the income tax/flat tax policies.
If you have a policy that boosts or lowers poor/middle/rich income, when in the simulation is that assessed?
https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2020/06/23/democracy-4-the-fixed-income-rewrite/
Now you can lift everyone out of poverty (that is no one ends up with >50% Poor membership) 
That is until inflation and debt crisis attack.
Unless you have space/automated economy or have big mineral/oil wealth
Positive situation called “high tech economy” could exist.
It would be caused by automation, two space programs, technology and education and some more stuff.
There is a situation similar to that already, I think its called ‘technological advantage’.
Then this one could make automation and stuff bit more resilient to high taxes, since some costs are lower.
There is brain drain, corporate exodus, tax evasion and other tax related situations.
They all could be reduced by presence of technological advantage.
High productivity could have similar effect too.
There could be policies to combat bad situations related to taxes too - there is one but its not enough.
Interesting. I guess you are saying that because, for example, the US had high productivity due to science investment, decent universities and so on, it can toerate higher corp taxes and income taxes because the companies who would normally leave for europe dont want to leave behind all that technical know-how… I should check this is in the simulation
That’s really cool!
You may have mentioned in this video, but does the amount of disposable income contribute to your GDP in terms of how much money is being spent domestically? I certainly remember increasing earnings for all demographics in Democracy 3 only increased travel frequency with no impact on the economy.
Im not sure increased disposable income neccesarily leads to increased domestic spending automatically. Its a very complex topic. For example in China, increased disposable income often leads to a higher rate of personal saving. And in many countries, especially smaller ones, more disposable income will fuel consumer spending, but a lot of the value of that extra spending ends up overseas where the products that are bought get made.
Ideally, for an economy, increased consumer spending should go on services in an advanced economy, as most of the value is then kept local to that country. But thats very variable depending on the economic mix of the country in question, and also depends a lot on local wage costs, tarrifs and so on…
2 Likes
That money is eventually going to become foreign investment though. For example, the only thing you can spend dollars on, in the end, is buying stuff from the Americans or investing in the American economy. So they’ll eventually make their way back.
Some of this is just how cause and effect work in the Democracy system. You can’t have income directly impact GDP, because GDP directly impacts income. You’d get an infinite loop. Of course, that infinite loop of everything people spend becoming someone else’s income is what drives the economy in the real world, and is what the Democracy economy is an abstraction of.
@cliffski How will poverty work under the new system?
Someone on this video was saying, that incomes aren’t distributed as bell curve, trough its better than linear distribution.
Distribution should be something similar to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#Income_distribution
Or this:
Sharply rising, peaking early then falling more and more slowly, and then bump at end since incomes are on scale of 0 and 1.
Yup, I will adjust this before we ship. Just need to mess around with a graphing calculator
1 Like
@cliffski How will poverty work under the new system?
I think it will be derived from income data, same with equality simulation and extreme poverty situation.
For inequality poorest 20% average income could be compared with richest 20%.
This would mean taking averages of incomes of poorest and richest people - 800 voters of 2000 and doing richest/poorest average income ratio…
Ratio of 1 would be perfect equality, normally it ranges between 3 - 10 - richest 20% of people having 3 - 10x higher income than poorest people.
Poverty and Extreme Poverty would be influenced by percentage of people in low income range.
> 90% Poor - Extreme Poverty (at this point all income goes to survival)
> 75% Poor - Poverty
> 50% Poor - Poor
> 25% Poor - Lower Middle Class
< 25% Poor or < 25% Wealthy - Middle Class (Modest, safe and nice life)
> 25% Wealthy - Higher Middle Class
> 50% Wealthy - Wealthy
> 75% Wealthy - Filthy Rich
> 90% Wealthy - Multimillionaire (at this point almost all income goes for fun and savings and investment)
I am dissatisfied with the current way we are measuring poverty in the game, but we need a lot of balancing and testing of data with the current system before I think it would be a good idea to revamp it.
2 Likes