Unemployment figures

Democracy 4 General Discussion
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Hey there, first time posting so here goes nothing :sweat_smile:. It seems I have run into an odd situation:

  1. I created a liberal capitalist utopia (or distopia, depending on your viewpoint) and basically enacted every associated policy yet I have an unemployment figure of 47%. I am aware that automation, productivity and technology all raise unemployment and they are all basically maxed out, however so are basically all factors lowering unemployment (apart from the military and “socialist” policies which raise state emploment, etc.). Is there anythting else i have missed to lower unemployment?

  2. In addition I noticed that unemployment itself does not seem to be connected to the number of the poor in any way. I am aware that there is an overlap between the poor, middle income and the wealthy. However it does seem odd to me that while I have an unemployment figure of 47% only 0,05% of the population considers themself poor. Apart from foodstamps and legal aid I don’t have any social welfare policies enacted, where does all this income come from that almost half my population, those without a salary, considers itself middle income or even wealthy?

  3. My last observation is that the number of self employed does not seem to affect the unemployment figure. This doesn’t seem right to me as self owned businesses not only provide a job for the owner but also create jobs for potential employees. And while I see that there are private sectors represented in the game, namely private schools, private healthcare, the energy-, rail-, telecom- and water industries, none of those sectors would represent something like a optician, handyman or even a small chain of local supermarkets. I do not have any reallife numbers at hand but in my case 44,4% of the people consider themself self employed. Shouldn’t that have some impact on the unemployment statistic?

I have thought about some ways to adress the above mentioned situations and they are as follows:

  1. and 3. By linking the number of self employed inversly to the unemployment figure or having policies which increase the number of self employed also decrease unemployment, both situations could be remedied.

  2. First off, I don’t actually know how the game decides which income group a pop belongs to so this might be unworkable. The sentiment still stands though.
    One way could be to link the unemployment figure proportionately to the number of the poor, thus increasing the amount of poor when there is high unemployment. This is propably not possible as social benefits would have a hard time countering the effect.
    Another way could be to reduce the earnings of all income groups in relation to the unemployment figure. As the displayed income in the income groups is a mean value unemployment would have to affect all income groups, if it only affected the income of the poor for example it wouldn’t actually affect the number of the poor. This is based on the assumption that the game sorts people into certain income brackets based on their total income, i have no idea if thats true though.

Any feedback on my ideas and questions, and your own thoughts on the topic would be highly appreciated :slightly_smiling_face:

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On Unemployment under capitalistic economy: While I’d say that a government that spends money to reduce unemployment should get a better result here provided GDP is the same, I kind of agree that unemployment seems way too high. This is, in my thoughts, at least partially due to capped GDP (you can read specifics here: Interesting Effects of Productivity & Maxed-out GDP). Players still have options like reducing immigration or implementing one-child policy but I personally don’t prefer them.

On Unemployment and Poverty: Mostly agreed. This is because unemployment doesn’t actually reduce disposable income of the poor or other voter groups. The fact that Unemployment Benefits policy does boost poor earnings make this even more problematic. The poor will actually have a bit more income to spend when unemployment goes up. In that sense, I’ve personally modified the game files so that high unemployment can undermine poor earnings and possibly middle earnings. (Link: Lists of proposed changes to income simulations +misc) I haven’t made it into a mod since some of its changes doesn’t work when written as overrides instead of direct modifications. Maybe I should publish this part as a mod?

On Self-Employed and Unemployment: This was one of my suggestions in that proposed income changes post. However, I’d make self-employed voters more picky then. Minimum Wage policy & Wages simulation should put burdens to self-employers and possibly reduce their membership.

fyi) if you want to know how the game handles income group, you can read this: https://forums.positech.co.uk/t/some-ideas-on-a-post-keynesian-model-of-dynamic-economic-simulation/18282/6

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Some of the metrics in this game aren’t entirely as stated. 47% on the unemployment tracker doesn’t actually mean 47% unemployment, rather 47% of the way up the range of what this game measures. Certainly the catastrophic consequences of such a high unemployment rate are not displayed while that bar is still yellow. I figure that the zero mark represents “full employment” which is a term people bring up at around 4% unemployment. The 100% mark on the chart might mean as high as 25%, so your country is probably running 14-15% unemployment. This could be explained better in game but that’s what I’m picking up.

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Yeah all metrics are 0% - 100%