I did see your opinions and ideas in previous posts. I should have commented them clearly. Sorry for that.

About EP, the thing is control over economic activities is redundant for all State-held activities. The State does have control over that and the question is how it will manage it (point 8 in my list). By management I mean deciding what to produce and in what magnitude. This will probably be managed by the ruler with some guidelines from the govt setting. So, EP would make sense only for the private sector. And in that case, the State has essentially two strategies. The first is to affect markets trying to produce redistribution of wealth, in which case I believe it's covered by SP. The second is to affect it trying to regulate markets where the free-market approach has problems, like in presence of monopolies or externalities like polution. In this case there's no politics in it. It's just a matter of market efficiency and everybody wants it, so EP wouldn't be needed.

Of course Ruler's pol.power has nothing to do in these matters. Your example of anarchy doesn't help because anarchy means absence of govt, and therefore a discussion about econ govt policies has no sense.

I prefer to take EP out immediately if it appears to be useless.

As for minorities, my proposal is in fact very much the same of what you say. I was trying to put it as a conclusion since the three of us seem to agree on how to proceed.

About the spreadsheet, I know there're several thoughts in there. I'm not overlooking your attempt, it's just that you never explained exactly what you were doing. We were left to discover your proposals digging in the spreadsheet equations, which is really boring and complicated. The first post in this thread (yours) does not describe in whole how you're managing the govt-econ interconnections and a lot must be understood from the spreadsheet alone. It'd be very helpful if you explain how the 8 points I mention are answered by your spreadsheet. Sad you're leaving...

I'm glad you made it back! It looks like we are pretty much in agreement on some of the main issues. Just to clarify a little bit, and make sure we are really in agreement I will make a couple of statements. If they match your understanding of the accommodations we have come to, then great. If not, just let me know and we will hash things out.

I think we might as well wait for Axi to return before we try to go much further than this. His notion of the junctions between the government and economic models is much more complicated than anything I was considering. So I will make some comments here, but I move that we just wait for Axi's return before going much further with this.

I also agree that we should get rid of economic planning. I think it is just too subtle our concept for an economic/government model like ours that most of necessity be somewhat simplistic.

Tax Rate: so I think we agree that the tax rate taxes income of all sorts. In contrast, private property of 0% would mean that this state owns all the capital and infrastructure. Does that sound right to you?

Slavery: your statements sound good. The only point I would make is that I kind of like F. Smith's suggestion that this move to a percentile scale like all the other things. I think the way we will present these things to the player will be mostly through sliders anyway... if you were to replace the 0-2 scale with one from 0- 100% where you divide the result by 50, it seems to me the outcome is pretty much the same. And I think we can agree that there are many shades of slavery that are possible and have existed throughout history.

The other issues at the top of your post (before the numbered list of the econ/government interactions) I basically agree with.

I see at least we two have a well settled agreement on most of the stuff. I think too we should wait for Axi. I'm going to mail him to let him know we're standing by.

EP: Yes, get rid of, once Axi agrees.
Tax Rate: Agreed.
Slavery: The range for this is something we've discussed before. I once accepted your suggestion of having a larger range representing different levels/types of slavery, but Axi said that one of the coolest things of slavery in game terms is that it can be abolished. And I agree. That's a discrete change in the variable hardly obtainable from a continous variable ranging 0-100%. So, I vote for discrete. We can express it in the 0-100% range anyway, where the political actors can take only discrete values like 0%, 25%, 50%, 100% and never something in between, but I believe it isn't ness.

Tax Rate: I think we should wait until infrastructure is included and the riots model is implemented. Only then will we know exactly if we need to extent government control over tax rate. I feel that any class will be willing to pay as many taxes as it is needed to pay for the services it gets in return. If a class gets systematically "exploited" (f.e. if the LC pays taxes that go into armaments or if the UC pays taxes that go to social security), then it should demonstrate economic discontent(even if their income is rising); it could even rebel (taxes were the pretext for the American Revolution, weren't they?). If a class benefits from taxes it doesn't pay (f.e. the MC in my first example or the LC in the second), then it should support the ruler. Should it also actively support a higher tax rate? Again I say we should wait and see.

quote: Tax Rate: so I think we agree that the tax rate taxes income of all sorts. In contrast, private property of 0% would mean that this state owns all the capital and infrastructure. Does that sound right to you?

Slavery: I also agree with myself The range should remain as is.

EP: When I first came up with EP, I wrote:

quote: - Economic Planning (EP): (0-100%) This will define how much of a command economy we have, or how much the state will be able to control investments, trade, production, the prices of commodities and the labor market. It must not be confused with PP: An ancient despotic rule will have both EP and PP low. Pharaonic Egypt would have somewhat more EP. The Byzantine Empire would have both high PP and EP. ... EP must not be confused with PP chiefly because low EP will mean lower control over all of economy, both private and public.

Anyway, if I understand correctly, you weren't even thinking of replacing EP with R.pp. Well, the govtecon model needs some way to control the extent of direct player intervention in key socioeconomic areas such as: Working Hours, Product Distribution, Investment in Kapital, Redistribution and, later on, investment in various infrastructure classes. If EP won't do, then what?

The spreadsheet: Rodrigo feels lost in it and I don't blame him. Maybe I should have written a more detailed text about it, but there is really nothing special to it, it's all just bookkeeping (some of it redundant), which should be obvious. The points which are not obvious I tried to explain in my posts. After all the discussion here and the updates that we are bound to make to the govt model, I will try to recompose the spreadsheet and, if I can, I will incorporate the econ model and take a first shot at modelling infrastructure. All this of course will have to wait until I finish my vacations.

A quick reference to the 8 points mentioned by Rodrigo:

1)Role of Tax Rate: For the time being, it is arbitrarily imposed by the state upon the whole of production, both public and private. It is one of the two sources of income for the state; the other is Public Profits

2)Effect of PP: It has no other effect than to determine what part of the Kapital (and hence of the Profits) belong to the UC and the MC. Obviously it affects the demographic size of these classes and, sometimes, the UC income.

3)Effect of SP: It regulates Working Hours, Wages and the level of exploitation of the Underclass (relative to the LC), it effects Product Distribution in favor of Labor and it controls Redistribution. It is also planned to set minimum investment in certain infrastructure classes.

4)Demographic shares for classes: The (not so perfect) implemetation I have made is analysed in one of my previous posts.

5)Econ behavior for classes: The economic role of each class conforms to the definition of it's economic contributions. This should be expanded to include ownership of sites. The investment profile (in kapital) currently depends only on income and it isn't class specific. The actual investment of privates also depends on player intervention and on Private Property.

6)Econ behavior for minorities: Minorities, or, as we have agreed, the portion which is under exploitation provide only labor. They generally work more (in population and in Working Hours) and they are paid less. The cannot invest in kapital and they cannot move to other classes. Otherwise, their behavior should be the same as everybody else's: dependent of the income.

7)Govt's Investment agenda: Investment in kapital is currently tied to that of the private sector through PP. Investment in infrastructure should be differentiated, according to the private/public character of the infrastructure class. The actual implementation is TBD.

Welcome Back! Sorry you feel lousy, but we will take you in whatever shape available .

Your ideas on tax rate seem to be what I had in the beginning. There is a tax rate, and an 'effective tax rate' that includes what the govt gives back. Is there further distinction between your post and my original that I'm missing? I know you don't like it if what the govt gives back is not valued as highly by the people as what they could buy themselves. That is just a philosophical difference between us that won't be resolved here, or likely ever.

EP:
In my view the government can exercise whatever level of EP that is desired If it can pay for it directly through a subsidy. You want the price of housing to be low, say X per unit, then the govt will make up the difference if the price. So I view EP as redundant in this simple model where there aren't really many rules and regulations explicitly handled. This is clearly a simplification of what happens in the real world. But that's the nature of a game... This abstraction can handle everything you talk about except perhaps working hours, since it would be Very expensive to pay for all those hours people might work during.

Please do not take a 'first shot' at the infrastructure model, since it is already a fair fraction developed! See the econ page on the web site under infrastructure IIRC.

Whatever I will try to do on infrastructure, it will be based on what already exists in the econ model thread and webpage, so don't worry about that. I only want to model government intervention, which is the missing part.

EP: You say that the player can have as much economic planning as he wants, if he has the money to pay for it. You overlook the fact that it is not the player who will does the planning, but the govt, which represents much more power centres than just the player. They must have some kind of EP agenda, shouldn't they? Well EP is the best way to represent that. EP will be chiefly meant to limit the extent of player intervention; we don't want the player to be omnipotent, do we?

As for subsidies, they are not the only way of "pushing" a certain infrastructure class. Housing f.e. can be subsidised, but it also can be constructed and given away by the state, so can education, temples, armaments, etc. I have a feeling though that in Clash, as you say, such things might not matter. In the real world, the difference is fundamental, but in Clash, exactly because of point #8 above, there might not be a difference after all. I'll have to think some more about this.

Also i am with mark in that EP doesn't need to be in there? To answer your question how will it be handled to make the ruler nonomnipitant? Simple, use the existing goverment, social and eventually character models to modify what the player wants. So the player wants grain to be free for everyone? Well he can try that and put that in his policy, but others who control the power might not like that idea.

Why EP had all mixed up with ruler's freedom of action? EP, SP and PP were originally meant (or was it just me?) to give the shape of the economy. They have nothing to do with how powerful the ruler is.

My understanding is the political structure, plus SP and PP, determine a guideline for a spending agenda, like defining lower and upper limits for investments in military, health, etc. Within those ranges (which would be large if R.pp is high and vise versa), the ruler sets the values he wants. No EP is necessary for this.

Look Guys, I don't think that we can do any progress here simply by theorising. Only trying to create the needed functions for player control over the economy will show us if we need EP or not. Some basic formulae I have already made in my spreadsheet, using EP and I plan to use it with infrastructure too. Maybe we should dicuss these formulae one by one, to serve us as examples (even if they won't be what we will eventually have).

F.e. Working Hours for the LC are computed as follows:
WH(LC)=12-8*SP+EP*(4*WHs-2)

At first glance, the first suggestion I'd like to make -- the 'slider' for setting working hours can *not* sensibly be ranged from 0 to 1. It *must* have the actual hours in it's range (4 - 20, or whatever).

Consider the Player's choices,

"Set Working Hours: (0 or 1)"

In that equation of yours (that I don't necessarily agree with) I'd use ruler's pol.power instead of EP if what you wanted was to model ruler's power over WH.

I'm sorry to have dissappeared from the forum the last couple of days, but I wasn't really into discussing. I made a mini-upgrade to my PC (just bought more memory and a 20 gig HD), but this has caused me some trouble with my CD-ROM unit, which isn't recognised by the system 2/3 of the time. So I spend half my time trying to solve the problem (Btw, do you have any ideas about it, besides downloading the CDROM drivers or reinstalling Windows 98?) and half playing games and rearranging things in my new disc space.

My attempt on modelling infrastructure is pretty much finished, but I am (was) giving some thought on some issues that still do not please me. I also have to write a description in text. When it's all done (I don't know when, since I have to study from time to time too, I'm a student after all ), I will post a new topic, and send the stuff to Mark, Chris Wilkinson (Our new webmaster! It's about time we had an update on the web) and anybody else that might be interested (I'm sure that many of you will be).

Maximum working hours should be defined seperately by race. We shouldn't hard code them and make them the same for everybody. FE andriods could probably work 24 hours a day while humans cannot be made to work over 18 hours a day. This number should probably be defined in the Race Creation process in the population model, and of course the work hours of the different races would have to be tracked seperately.

Is the model already tracking seperate work hours for different ethnic groups or classes? I think that including this would be a good way to help model social inequalities.

The day might not always be 24 hours. Space colonists somewhere might adapt to a different day length. We might want to add this flexibility.