It is a limitation of democracy2 that it does tend to reward a tax and spend approach due to it’s inability model private sector provision of services such as schools, healthcare etc. This would need to be addressed in any sequel…
With income segments of the populace being modeled, each private acquisition becomes a function of “how much they can afford?” and “how many of them are there?”
For our purposes, the wealthy can afford anything. Middle class can buy everything they need, but they’ll buy more and better when they’re flush. It’s the poor who may have to (or mistakenly) skimp on things like preventative healthcare and pay for it with poor health that then puts the whole population at risk of epidemic.
In my game, I simply replaced each government owned program with a tax-credit scheme. To keep them simple, each tax credit policy is defined to move just as much money as its analog (depriving the gov’t of tax revenue is treated as a gov’t expense), and each has the same direct benefit (even though a libertarian would argue that competition would drive quality to improve). What’s different is in the happiness (or displeasure) caused to voting blocs.
For example, my edu tax credit would empower parents to choose their favorite school flavors, so parents are happier even if schools aren’t intrinsically superior. Liberals and Religious are bothered by each other when they collide in public schools, one always angered by edu policies pleasing the other. Therefore, both gain happiness when allowed to go their separate ways.
But, the edu tax credit is not all sunshine and lollipops: Rabid unhappiness appears among socialists and unions. For socialists, whose raison d’etre is reshaping society, centralized indoctrination is one of the essential cornerstones. For unions, who have the public school system wired, privatization is a political dagger to the heart.
Hey, have a few ideas.
FOREIGN AID
Foreign aid can be both sent out and received. Receiving foreign aid comes in three forms; NGOs, the IMF and World Bank, and national governments. The IMF and World Bank would provide loans for economic stabilisation and development respectively, but would attach various conditionalities, some of which may not always be in your best interest. An example might be repealing a subsidy program, reducing regulation, or changing your tariffs. Sometimes, for example if you don’t have the funds to invest in healthcare or you are dangerously close to the debt ceiling, you’ll have little choice but to run to them. The World Bank has, to its credit, a lot less of a “one size fits all” approach than the Monetary Fund, and will not always require economic liberalisation, but can carry the same drawbacks as foreign direct investment and may leave a project half-way through, forcing you to either pick up the cost or let the program fail. Foreign governments also often provide loans with conditionalities, although these are more likely to involve trade and military policies than the internal reforms pursued by the IMF and World Bank. NGOs give indirect aid and are very helpful in the response to crises, but are very minor and completely beyond your control (they can also call attention to your less savoury policies.)
ECONOMIC SPECIALISATION
Each major section in your economy has its own “progress” level and own degree of prominence, running all the way from a developing economy with a mostly agricultural economy that is unable to compete internationally, to a developed “jack of all trades master of none” economy, to an economy specialising in one or two particular industries like banking or manufacturing where it excels. Depending on the natural resources, climate and skill set of the country, as well as the demands of different population groups, it is your choice how to go forward. A highly specialised economy brings its own advantages (that sector will be very prosperous, for example, boosting GDP and making that industry’s workers and investors happy) and disadvantages (for example, if that sector crashes, you’re boned).
In order to develop a specific sector, you can invest in it, provide tax breaks for it, encourage foreign direct investment, protect it with tariffs and barriers on foreign competition while it grows, or simply let the market do its work. Each of these choices has its own strengths and drawbacks; for example, the free market option pleases capitalists, the IMF and encourages foreign investment independently and requires no direct costs, but is very unreliable, while foreign direct investment both brings new skills and assets to your country and improves foreign relations, but do not invest in the struggling sectors of your economy (a rural-urban gap is likely), try and push for weakened labour and environmental laws, and ship most of their profits back home.
TAX CREDITS
Tax credits are an excellent way of pushing for free-market solutions to problems. Want to promote energy independence? Tax credits for micro-generation, clean energy research, and energy conservation. Want free-market solutions to healthcare? Tax credits to employers to give their employees coverage. Want to promote educational choice? You get the picture. These tax credits are not without drawbacks though. Firstly, there is the cost. Secondly, they contribute to tax evasion. I would like a system where tax evasion is made more likely by the complexity of your tax code. A simple tax code with few credits would not leave many opportunities open for off-shore tax havens, while a convoluted mess of loopholes, levies and fees would both encourage and assist tax evasion. I also think tax evasion should be made a “permanent” variable (like oil demand, poverty and the like.)
TARIFFS
Instead of just a single tariff policy, nations will be able to adjust the tariff rates on specific products. Most nations will start off with at least a few tariffs. Tariffs are a double-edged sword; they protect and promote the growth of the domestic industry being protected by tariffs, please patriots and trade unionists, and raise revenues, but still harm international trade, anger capitalists and hurt international relations.
OMNIBUS BILLS
If there is a major issue facing your nation (poor education or healthcare, a terrible tax code, a struggling economy), you can propose an omnibus bill to sort it out, fixing it all in one swoop. Omnibus bills allow you to implement or change several policies at once in one large package. Due to their power, omnibus bills have several drawbacks; firstly, they magnify any negative opinion impacts (imagine the anger at Obamacare compared to smaller healthcare steps like the SCHIP expansion or the HITECH Act), secondly you can only do two every three years or term (whichever is shorter), and finally they carry a large political capital cost. It is possible to go into the negatives with omnibus bills (leaving you impotent for some time) or to curry support to reduce that cost. Receiving the support of legislators to reduce the political capital cost might require all manner of concessions: sunset provisions on key sections, exemptions or breaks for certain industries (coal-friendly legislators might request tax relief on a new carbon tax for coal mines, for example, and the sugar lobby might request subsidies in exchange for supporting a free trade deal exposing them to new competition), or anything else. They might even request plain and simple pork barrel spending.
There’s also the “rider”: Similar to the omnibus bill (that may pass several policies for a cost less than their sum), the rider is something that would never pass on its own. Instead, it’s buried deep within a popular and vitally necessary bill that may be completely unrelated.
Another trick: The legislature passes a bill that is so vague that its victims don’t realize until too late that they should have opposed it. The executive branch (in a smoke-filled room behind closed doors) later “clarifies” the law by issuing “regulations” to implement a profoundly unpopular policy.
Vague laws are really abdications of power from the legislature to the executive. In the US and other constitutional republics, a strict reading of the Constitution would void such laws, but Constitutions are old-fashioned and obsolete, so nobody enforces them anymore.
Riders would be a good idea. And yeah, in order to recognise that unpopular bills can get smuggled through, there will be a “buying in bulk” discount in terms of political capital with omnibus bills, that increases as more items are included. Of course, the bigger it gets the more it’ll be hated.
With Democracy 3 announced, let’s get this thread going again.
Some of the policies in D2 (such as stem cell research) are already “dated”. D3 might try to generalize a bit more. Try “pure research” (things that edify without having a target invention in sight) and maybe “human experimentation”, which would cover all those moral dilemmas that offer miracle cures at the possible cost of (sometimes embryonic) human lives.
However, if you really want to ignite controversy in the life sciences, then look into cloning (both organ replacement and human replication). How about legalizing “baby sales” (somebody deliberately conceiving on behalf of another)?
Just posting to point out that I moved this to the new D3 forum, and that yes, a more general research policy would make more sense…
Some Miscellaneous suggestions
I second the idea of not having to “x” any screen. “ok” or “cancel” buttons near the sliders, anything to reduce the need for repetitive large diagonal mouse movements (sounds lazy i know but …)
integrate cabinet screens with policy screens.
have an overall score which takes into account progress on all your national stats plus current popularity
show projected trendlines on your national stats.
Have an actual start date (chosen at the start of the scenario) and then show the current date instead of turn number.
have a cabinet putsch as one way of losing the game (variation on the assasination), make the link between pressure group>cabinet members sympathies> loyalty stronger
party membership could be explicitly tied to available cabinet members. (i find party membership not very useful/interesting as is)
cabinet members effectiveness should be fixed, and the loyalty of highly effective ministers harder to keep.
have a more events and dilemmas based game, where advisors/cabinet ministers/pressure groups compete for your attention, and you spend most of your time deciding who to favor. Be able to play through without going to the upper right menus at all.
i generally dont agree that the policy simulation needs to be more complex. i would like to see it more accessible to 12 year olds - it is a great educational game.
I think that there can be a gap between the visible UI complexity and the “real” underlying game-model complexity. When playing in a mode simulating “the fog of war”, much of the modeling should be hidden from players just as it is hidden from real-world presidents. A player would be able to see the direct effects between policies and measurable (visible) stats, but all indirect and unmeasurable effects would simply happen without any visible linkage.
If such a fog mode is developed, then the game will need a debug (analysis) mode so that developers / modders / advanced students of socio-economics can “see under the hood”.
Having a debug mode also suggests having a replay feature whereby a player can stop at the end (or in the middle of) a game and then use debug mode to re-watch from the beginning and see what was really happening behind the scenes. It might also help debugging to allow pausing, and to allow a player / designer to resume play from any point of a recorded game (repeatability).
I think that if you get re- elected by a small margin (less than 10% possibly), it should weaken the government,by limiting the amount of political capital generated. Governments in real life with marginal majorities have been very weak.
High budget deficits and high national debt should have a negative effect on capitalists and GDP, even before a debt crisis is reached.
Inner-city riots should make you unpopular with everyone. Especially the self-employed ( small businesses suffer the worst from looting.)
Capital gains tax- a tax on profits made from when you sell something. Popular with socialists, unpopular with capitalists and wealthy very unpopular with the self employed.
I mentioned that somewhere before, so I concur. The converse is also true. I’d like to see an x^3 function of a number that can vary from -1 to +1 so there’s a non-linear effect that’s kind of level in the middle and exaggerated at the extremes.
Come to think of it, X^3 of -1 to +1 would be a nifty function for many occasions.
High spending in general, regardless of the source of funding, represents resources being diverted from economically-driven activities to politically driven ones. Except for some specific projects (like roads), that’s a negative for an economy.
However, we probably don’t want to muck up our entire model with wild guesses at GDP negatives in all of our policies. Instead, what we want is something like a “resource pool” simulation near the heart of the economic model. This simulation would enforce something like “conservation of mass”.
The economy (and imports) would feed the resource pool, which in turn would feed all of the activities that use economic outputs (government construction projects, consumption, capital formation and exports). Whenever a government policy increased something like consumption, then fewer resources would be available for other things (like capital formation).
Tricks in this setup would be:
A) It’s about real goods and services, not money. Since fiat money can be created and destroyed, it’s not always a precise measure of the goods and services being redirected.
B) Each diversion needs to be measured once and only once. In a complex model, a cluster of policies and their underlying simulations could accidentally account for resource diversion multiple times (or let something fall through the cracks). Besides being methodical himself, the game designer would need to clearly communicate the methodology if the game is to be modded successfully.
I can see this model working via the three “incomes” (low, mid and upper class). Each class would command a different fraction of economic output, and each would allocate its resources differently. Some government policies would transfer resources from one class to another, while other policies would “nudge” one or more classes to change their allocations (by affecting parameters used in their formulas).
The resulting indirect effects could be deliciously subtle, complex, and (best of all) frustratingly counter-intuitive to policy makers, especially ham-handed ones.
There was also something tried during the FDR administration that will probably never be tried again (but we could model it just to show how harmful it was). It was called the “undistributed profits tax”. Any profit (already having been taxed as income) that a business failed to pay out as dividends would be taxed again. What this meant was that building a business (and creating new jobs during the depression) was effectively fined. The harm was so catastrophic and obvious that New Deal Democrats in Congress repealed it themselves (it became law by default without FDR’s signature).
For Democracy 3, will something like the Afforable Care Act, aka Obamacare, be included in the game? I think it ought to be in the game. I’m interested in seeing what kind of effects it would have in the game let alone in real life! I live in America afterall. Lol.
Gov’t healthcare is in D2, so I’d expect it in D3. However, it may be worthwhile to also include a legislative cock-up like the ACA that imposes thousands of pages of new legal burdens without really accomplishing much. The amount of health improvement would be negligible, and the financial and hidden regulatory costs would be ruinous, but it could make certain pressure groups happy for much less political capital than needed for the unvarnished socialist healthcare system.
In fact, this gives me an idea for a whole raft of “politically expedient” programs that are cheap, pleasing to pressure groups, but so badly mangled that they don’t even do what their sponsors set out to do.
To have such a class of policies, we would first need to invent a mutual exclusion concept where only one policy in within a family of policies is allowed to be in force. Enacting any policy within the family would automatically repeal any sibling currently in force.
The political capital needed to enact a policy within family would then depend on which one was currently in. In some cases, a policy would make contrary siblings more expensive. In other cases, a tepid policy would be a stepping stone to stronger siblings (making them politically more affordable).
I’m wondering if a politically divided Congress might be considered in the future. Probably not best for D3 this late in the game, but if your party is the minority party it would be pretty hard to enact many initiatives that would normally have to be passed by Congress/Parliament.
I’ve already voiced my opinion in another thread regarding Private Sector relationships with government policy. A libertarian agenda should be allowed to be successful if used in moderation, much like liberal and conservative agendas can be successful if done in the same manner.
Great game…been playing it all morning. 
Some great ideas here. I love the idea of political capital being lower if you scrape through an election, although from a game design POV this can get tricky because it makes the game spin into a self-reinforcing virtuous or destructive spiral (you are doing bad…so it gets harder). I can see how it is very realistic though, and you can always steer things back to a stronger majority next time by a few compromises
I also like the idea for a capital gains tax.
What about the possibility that you can lose an election, watch the game run itself (into the ground) under AI control for a term, and then maybe “get back in” in a subsequent election?
I’m thinking that in a no-win scenario, you could make some tough decisions, get kicked out because things are awful no matter what, and then the AI can’t do any better, so you get a second chance (after a few policies have been ruined of course). From a dev standpoint, you’d need to create some decision-making algorithms to “play” the game. However, the same algorithms could also become some kind of “adviser” available to (or butting in on) players when we are in office.
I’ve blogged a bit about the capital gains tax policy here:
positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2013/0 … gains-tax/
Capital gains are a special class of income, so your first decision needs to be how the CG tax policy meshes with general income tax policy.
In the US, CG was taxed as ordinary income until a separate CG tax policy treated CG differently. Since the new policy taxed CG at a lower rate than the ordinary income, the CG tax policy was actually pro-capitalist. See the programming problems?
So, you need to figure out how the income tax policy (revenue and popularity) depend on CG policy and vice versa. The income tax will raise less revenue if CG is cut out of its income calculation. The CG tax can be pro or anti capitalist (and +/- capital-driven GDP) depending on whether its tax rate is higher or lower than the income tax policy. The popularity of each needs to be sorted so that their interaction is accounted for but not counted twice. Also, your formulas will need to work for each even when the other is not in force (i.e. one’s rate is effectively zero, so does a zero actually appear for it, and can the other’s formulas handle it?)
Take 2 aspirin and call me in the morning afternoon.
I think the simplest and easiest way is to treat capital gains and income taxes as entirely separate entities. So income tax is purely being levied on salary income, and CGT is being levied on everything else, so property price accumulation, stock market gains, and share dividends. That’s my plan, because it enables me to model the different impacts of them in a fairly clear way.