Though there are some points I don’t agree or equations can’t see its reasoning, your ideas generally look interesting and thankfully feasible.
- ‘Animal Spirit’ or speculative behaviors should be possible to implement in your mod. Let’s see an example.
Just a few lines of simulation.csv would be enough to implement fluctuations shown above. It might take some fine tuning to get properties you need though. If you want more cyclic flux, you consider using global economy as a base or create simulations for that.
- For income simulations, though there already are 3 income simulations at the economy section, they might be unable to represent what you intend for several reasons. A) there are 2 kinds of income effects and ones with
_fixeddon’t affect these simulations. They do have impact on disposable income curve but no impact on Low/Middle/High Income simulations. B) Middle Income won’t represent actual income of middle-income voters for another reason - they also have other voter identities and thus have even more income modifiers, leading to different income level by different memberships. C) as people get or lose their income the ratio of poor/middle/wealthy will also change so just adding them up might give different results or even a chance to cheat the system (like boosting low income when nobody is deemed poor anymore). Though, this won’t be a big deal if you are going to see those who are poor with the original income to be poor. Just keep in mind that people’s income changes rather drastically in this game, at least in the disposable income screen. - I also agree that it would be nice if labor market segregation or income gap among workers. I’ve recently tried adding unemployment as an additional factor of the wages-to-income link in my income adjustment mod (Lists of proposed changes to income simulations +misc) and made the poor more vulnerable to unemployment so that high wages & high unemployment would mean wider gap between the poor & middle income. Your Labor Bargaining Power approach sounds interesting too but unsure whether higher LBP will mean less pay for the middle income.
- It looks quite likely that income-boosting measures outside wages will effectively become a GDP stimulus. I guess it may need more factors to curtail consumption such as Inflation or dedicated Consumer Price.