Hello, I played for 6 consecutive re-elections on Germany. What disturbs me is that unemployment doesn’t seems to correlate with poverty; i.e., despite the lower unemployment i got (I reached even zero, unlocking a badge!), poverty continued the same. It seems that alcohol and cigars taxes, plus some welfare state benefits, are the only things that can alter poverty.
Is that a bug or a particularity of Germany?
No it’s not specific to Germany. The mechanics work the same for all countries but the membership of this and that group at the start and the starting policies, income, debt and deficit are different for every country.
Isn’t that a little unrealistic? When people are emploeyd, they tend to be out of poverty, even if they are poor - in a long run. As I see in the game, unemployment has only 8% effect over poverty. Even if everybody is employed, with wages and prodctivity on the rise on a continuous GDP growth - as for others indicator - people would get stuck on poverty, unless you set a group of welfare policys. That seems unrealistic.
And for that, overtaxing alcohool and cigars doesn’t seems to set people to quit smoking or drinking. It rises poverty levels! I forget the guy’s name whose theory is well known for increasing demand when prices get higher. I think that theory was set to cigars and alcohool. Despite the consumption falling (on alcohool specially), the poors and poverty increases. Only the riches stop drinking and smoking? Overtaxig doesn’t affect other groups (like med and high income)?
Here in Brasil, overtaxing cigar droped cigar sales by 1/3. Certainly many of them were poors and that surely helped poverty going down. I have no statistics for booze.
It’s pretty realistic that you can still be poor while employed. Good example is America where people sometimes need to hold down 3 jobs and work 60 hours just to make ends meet. If you have only 1 of those jobs you are employed but poor.
Thanks for the answer. My question was that Unemployment has no effect on long terms in Poverty. It has only 8% effect when 0% Unemployment. Others indicators, like poor earnings, wages and GPD, were on the rise, but Poverty could only be eliminated when canceling Alcohool and Cigar taxes. I haven’t analysed with high rates of Unemployment, but I don’t think it will lead to high Poverty rates. Let’s try…
The problem is that the job system is very simplified in Democracy 3. In real life, we can compare quite easily France and America. America tackled the job issue with a spirit of “jobs at any costs” meaning that a full-time job can easily be paid below the poverty threshold. France on the other hand had a spirit of maintaining by law a minimal quality of work and revenue. The result is that poverty is less severe in France than in the US but the unemployement is more severe.
Many states had policies facing unemployement by providing part-time or precarious jobs. Effectively reducing job security and quality to reduce unemployement. Is it worth it? Some say yes and some no…
Other job-related simulations should be in there.
I agree. So, what you are saying is that jobs correlates to poverty in a manner of payment. One may have job, but low wages still can’t eliminate poverty. Well, that’s fine by me. Unployment has an impact over poverty, but wages should have too.
There is a dilema that adds a minimum wage system. A policy allowing you to choose between legalised partial jobs, full time jobs only, minimum wage system or a liberal wage system would be awesome.
Reducing unemployment has a relatively small impact on reducing poverty so the changes might not look very noticeable but taken with other antipoverty policies, it’ll help to keep poverty under control. So when you go to raise a high alcohol tax, sales tax, or tobacco tax there will barely be an increase in poverty, if at all. I think it does work the same way for all countries but I could be wrong. That’s what I think though.