Unemployment/Poverty/Crime/Welfare

[DuraniumCowboy (OP)]

I'll start off by saying the current population and economic model is pretty good, but it would be interesting if there was an optional setting to include poverty and related effects in the game.  From one stand point you could model a nation like China, vast but under-developed.  This could also reflect a lot of current fiction where there just isn't the ability to get people off of earth faster than they can grow, causing a huge demographic problems.

Some ideas:
Based on the number of available (but unused workers), there would be a chance (or a rate) that unemployed workers would become destiute.
Destitute workers would caused unrest that would be difficult to control.
Building "Tenement" installations would house destiute citizens and keep them from rioting.  Housed lower class citizens become "impoverished."
Building some kind of education installations helps turn impoverished citizens back into regular workers (available).
However, the more tenement installations you have, the harder it gets to train impoverished folks to get back in the work force.
There would also be a crime rate proportional to the numbers of lower class citizens, and you guessed it, you can build police or prisons to help with crime (or maybe just use ground forces - stomp, stomp)

Balance would be critical here obviously.

[Ostia]

AS you pointed out yourself, you really can't get people of your homeworld faster than they grow.  So ultimately your HW will become a run down slum with little wealth production.  Or rather, any populous planet will become this.  
(Check it out, Welfare/police is pretty expensive, even when done at an optimal level.  Keeping 500m people under control is already an task in itself, not to talk about 5000m)

With all the new buildings and what-not you want to introduce to deal with it micromanagement would drastically increase.  Personally I prefer my management on the ship side, with economy being a means, not an end in itself.

[JacenHan]

Also, in a lot of fiction, available workers aren't unemployed, they are those that are working non-vital jobs in the civilian economy and can be easily moved to government service.

[Theodidactus]

This is going to tip my hand a bit in regards to the fiction I hope to be writing someday but one thing you need to think about is how this concept jives with the setting of "Aurora" as a whole. In a universe where fusion power is ubiquitous, you have to work pretty hard to imagine the circumstances that would cause "poverty" to arise, since it would be frankly trivial for a world government of 7 billion united earthlings to create a system that provides free power worldwide...certainly easier than, say, constructing 50,000 ton ships and getting them into orbit, or altering the atmosphere of an entire planet. A central conceit of the space opera is that nation/states work out problems like this, and go on to bigger and better things like jumping around in space.

Now it's of course very easy to imagine up reasons why this utopian future doesn't happen (so the very best space operas actually do have a lot of this. My favorite current example is "Harvest of Stars" by poul anderson, and in my auroraverse, most of the "fun" comes from simulating political rather than military manuvers. I keep the universe mostly to myself but some fiction comes out) but for many players, they're playing worlds where things like poverty and destitution have been eliminated...more like star trek than firefly, if that makes sense. It's annoying to imagine an alternate future where poland controls the whole world and is spreading out into space, and oops, you've got serious problems with the economy back home.

All this is to say that if this mechanic existed, it would have to be something you could disable, else you'd piss a lot of people off. They're gonna be like "This is the $)*&$%#ing future, we have robots that can cook and clean and cost 1% of our GDP to pay for, why do I have to worry about welfare recipients, I want to find %)$*($ing aliens!" Shoot for something more like my (shamelessly plugged) political system: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,7348.0.html, something that exists, can be fun, can be turned off, but even when it is on, it doesn't dominate gameplay.

[alex_brunius]

This is going to tip my hand a bit in regards to the fiction I hope to be writing someday but one thing you need to think about is how this concept jives with the setting of "Aurora" as a whole. In a universe where fusion power is ubiquitous, you have to work pretty hard to imagine the circumstances that would cause "poverty" to arise, since it would be frankly trivial for a world government of 7 billion united earthlings to create a system that provides free power worldwide..

One word: Capitalism.

Using the technology and resources we have available today it would be extremly easy to provide every human being on earth with food, shelter over their head and access to fresh water (basically eliminating extreme poverty).

For an average of roughly $20 per person in Africa it is possible to ensure access to fresh water is within 1 km.

According to UN 2013 roughly 800 million people lack access to fresh water.

So the cost to solve this problem today, permanently would be $16 billion.

This is close to 0.1% of US annual GDP or 2.3% of annual the US Military budget. Heck there are even a few people with enough assets on their personal bank book to solve this human misery all on their own...

( further reading if you still think this does not apply to all poverty )




Regarding Aurora I don't think poverty/crime is necessary to simulate. But it would be nice if unemployment was more involved somehow.

I however would suggest doing it the other way around. Have high unemployment reduce population growth and change migration demand/supply levels so people will move from unemployment to new land where there is a high demand of workers.

That would give the added game-play benefit that all you as the government need to do is provide jobs in a remote new world, and the colonists will follow using private infrastructure and colony ships all by them self.

If you settle two worlds at the same time and one is your future capital world filled with shipyards, industry, factories and maintenance facilities with such worker shortage that salaries are 2 x normal, while the other world is a deserted listening outpost, where do you think people would migrate to realistically speaking?

[Theodidactus]

I could provide a bit of a rebuttal there, but unfortunately it would derail a bit of the thread, so if you'd like to discuss it, we should probably go to the off topic section.

[Haji]

There are two problems with this suggestion. First, I'm always assuming that the people who are not employed by me are mostly working.. somewhere. I know there are two more employment sections (agriculture and service industries) that are supposed to cover this but I often begin my games with "realistic" populations (like, say 7 billion) but relatively small industrial sector (1000-2000 CI) to keep things interesting. Which means that 15%-20% of the population is unemployed... which I'm pretty sure is on the level of the Great Depression. And it actually gets worse with time as my population growth always outdoes my ability to produce new workplaces. As such, if I did not assume that those "unemployed" people are working, I would have my worlds in a constant state of economic disaster.

The second problem is much bigger. Basically your suggestion would require an enormous amount of re balancing - one that I fear could not be actually done. How do you balance the welfare issues for a world with 500 million people, 7 billion people and 12 billion people? Because I was playing campaigns with all those starting conditions. And what about colonies that are planted with the sole purpose of having a population growth but no industry? And if I begun with a truly large nation would I even be able to keep up producing all those new installations or would I end up having more and more problems even if I was dedicating 100% of my industrial output to solve them?

In the end, considering the enormous amounts of starting condition's possible (like the new campaign I'm setting, where one of the nations have a population of over twenty billion spread among a dozen systems and a couple of dozen planets, compered to a 'standard' start of five hundred million on a single planet) I believe it's impossible to properly balance the new installations you're proposing.

[Arwyn]

Skipping the politics, which is a no no here, the underlying idea has some merit.

Actually some of that could be modeled with the current "political stability" factor, by modifying that.

A lot of dystopian sci-fi focuses on exactly that scenario, a massive socialist system straining under poor management, huge social welfare costs, and thowing people off of the homeworld for just about any excuse to cut down the massive overpopulation problem (Christoper Nuttal's stuff comes to mind). All of those factors could be modelled into an adjustment of the political stability factor. As stability decreases, production, wealth generation, and control all decrease.

This happens right now with colonies. If you have too much overpopulation, or not-enough protection, than the stability starts to decrease. Thats corrected by either solving the underlying cause, or dropping military units on the colony to stop the decay.

Same effect could be done with the current system, merely by adding causality that would cause it to drop.

Massive unemployment? Stability starts to decline.
Racial wealth goes negative? Stability starts to decline.
Crime would be harder to model, except say as a an additional item that when stability drops, and stays depressed, crime can be generated. That in turn acts as a brake on stability increases, making it harder to correct in the short term.

Quick fixes would be ye old repression, as modeled currently, fixing the underlying issue (time and money), and possibly some new leader stats.

Throw in Theodidactus's political system idea, and you could have a pretty interesting RP setup for WHY the humans/betas/bug-eyed monster player races are scouting and colonizing the stars.

[Theodidactus]

Skipping the politics, which is a no no here

Valid. I will just add that the economics of space-opera like settings is actually a subject of academic discourse that people like, study and get jobs teaching (no joke). Here's one of the foundational papers if you're interested. You might recognize the author: https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf

A lot of dystopian sci-fi focuses on exactly that scenario, a massive socialist system straining under poor management, huge social welfare costs, and thowing people off of the homeworld for just about any excuse to cut down the massive overpopulation problem (Christoper Nuttal's stuff comes to mind). All of those factors could be modelled into an adjustment of the political stability factor. As stability decreases, production, wealth generation, and control all decrease.

What I was trying to say earlier is that this scenario you're describing fits virtually none of the campaigns i've actually seen on the forum. I think most players would find it bothersome, rather than cool. I personally would love it, but it doesn't jive well with either a "united planets" scenario or a "country X themed scenario" which is what most of the fiction I've seen really is.

Which means that 15%-20% of the population is unemployed... which I'm pretty sure is on the level of the Great Depression. And it actually gets worse with time as my population growth always outdoes my ability to produce new workplaces. As such, if I did not assume that those "unemployed" people are working, I would have my worlds in a constant state of economic disaster.

Historically unemployment higher than 20% has been almost universally catastrophic for superpowers, smaller nations can get away with unemployment pushing 50% (like modern bosnia and some other balkan states) but they end up having to outsource virtually all state functions.  A quick and dirty and probably nationalistic way to put it is that other countries can get away with higher unemployment than the superpowers can, because the superpowers pick up the tab for the big ticket items like navies (which keep piracy down) and peacekeeping operations (which at least in theory stand in for police when things get bad). In aurora, you're playing a superpower, there's no other bigger fish that can come in and take care of things for you, no one else that can play police or space commander. So applying present models forward means that above 20% (which is about normal for starting out, I think) a world would quickly become unmanageable. Even a super well paid, well armed, well financed military can't compete with 2 million John Q's/Apple thieves (these are two common examples of what happens when abject poverty gets that high. Feel free to look up John Q. Hyperbolic but a good example of what happens)

but of course we're able to imagine basically any scenario we want for the future, so projecting forward isn't the best idea. My platoons of ground troops are certainly capable of "pacifying" millions upon millions of people, but I always assumed that was more through diplomatic/anticorruption measures than phyiscally acting as a police force and shooting dissenters (because if you think about that for more than 5 second your head would explode. I don't care what phasors my heavy assault infantry are armed with, 10,000 of them aren't controlling the eastern seaboard). I think most players would rather handwave away the real implications of a Post-Scarcity economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy) but it might be fun to put something in. When I come up with suggestions, I always try to make sure it's the most generic thing possible and therefore able to accommodate the broadest number of possible campaigns.  I'm not sure this is.


as trivia and to answer the question above the united states briefly edged up over 20% in the great depression, and that dominated virtually all the government's attention and policymaking for the next decade. This was historically a very lucky break. The french revolutions of 1789 and 1848 were both brought on by comparable unemployment rates.

[Arwyn]

What I was trying to say earlier is that this scenario you're describing fits virtually none of the campaigns i've actually seen on the forum. I think most players would find it bothersome, rather than cool. I personally would love it, but it doesn't jive well with either a "united planets" scenario or a "country X themed scenario" which is what most of the fiction I've seen really is.

True, very true. The point being that the suggestion above drew a response that basically said "too difficult", that it would be difficult if not impossible to model, and my suggestion was that it might be more feasible than that.

I like have the option for additional complexity. After all, Aurora by far is much more complex than any of the extant 4x games on the market by a wide margin. It also has a resultant steep learning curve, and a commensurate large number of fairly smart adherents as a result.

I would love to see the politics and diplomacy expanded. Any additional features added to the AI subroutines would also be great. The current discussion around limiting NPR surveying was a pretty cool, as that resulted in the NPRs being channeled toward the players, picking up the games activity early rather than later and preventing NPR sprawl and slowdowns.

A system that helps explain the "why" of the interstellar aims of a PC race would be neat fluff, and great for additional RP. Since Steve is actively interested in such systems, its not a bad idea to kick it around and see what may show up in game at some point.

As far as the unemployment numbers, I agree and the examples you gave are quite good. Arguably, the PC race in Aurora would be a "superpower" since they dont really have any competition, or other powers to contend or ally with (in a basic non-mult-faction start). The effects of long term unemployment are corrosive socially, and thats one of the challenges presented when you start looking at long term effects of either repression (making folks mad long enough = some form of revolution) or compensation (buying off the unemployed via social welfare/the Dole) both end up equally ineffective in the long run.

This isnt new by any stretch. Various historical empires struggled with this issue repeated. The phrase "bread and circuses" was coined as a direct result of the Roman Senate, and later Emperors, buying off the populace with subsidized or free grain and entertainment. It eventually corrupted large portions of the economy, and eventually led to serious economic decline in conjunction with the devaluation of the Roman denarii, as the Roman government lessened the amount of silver in their currency by adding higher quantities of base metals in order to print more coins (sound familiar? ).

The challenge from a game perspective is that it could provide and interesting dynamic for the player to work around. In addition to the cost of fleets/trade/exploration/colonization, the underlying economy would have to be monitored. A lot of 4x games do this already.

If the player isn't interested, it could be a toggle just like the spoiler race, so you could select spoilers, political systems, and advanced economics, for example, or none at all.

[Theodidactus]

I do suggest that everyone read the wikis on "Post Scarcity economy" (earlier) and Artificial Scarcity (Best explained here through a sci-fi classic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oligarchical_Collectivism#Chapter_III) because they're pretty critical to understanding how a ostensibly democratic society that has perfected fusion would even have concepts like "Extreme Poverty". keep in mind that this is also a part of this system: some of us are playing the united federation of planets (where even a 15% unemployment rate would cause a massive political realignment forcing the creation of an involved welfare system of some kind. 15% is a big number) and some of us are playing the Drengi empire (where 50% of the population lives naked in slave pits, and can be used for a food source if necessary). The way these states are structured would have a dramatic effect on how "bad" poverty and crime are. In a functioning democracy, small demographics in dire need are a big deal. In aurora, you can't get voted out, you have to pretend to be.



I have a jerry rigged system for determining economic well being and factional affiliation that I use in my game, where poverty makes a bit more sense because each planet is a patchwork of colonies controlled by earthbound nations with navies and armies and such...I just play the police force that has a monopoly on space-based weapons. I might post it here, but it has less to do with known game mechanics (like manufacturing efficiency or whatever) and more to do with actions that I, as a player simulating the behavior of mostly democratic nations, would have to take (replacing leaders, not building things even if I have the raw materials because the labor has to be channeled into welfare). A lot of this went into the faction system I brought up earlier.

[Vandermeer]

[...] but of course we're able to imagine basically any scenario we want for the future, so projecting forward isn't the best idea. [...]

The military oppressors could be more effective, sure, but how about a change in society in general. Even in school we already discussed a model in economics classes, that the progressing automation might eventually lead to pure labor jobs becoming pretty much obsolete, and remaining are only a limited supply of intellectual occupations. A new working morale for this future might be to only work for around 3 months a year straight, while some specialist might do it steadily, and other even abandon it all. If rising education manages to finally put a bar on continuous population growth, and we reach a point where all of this stagnant number of humans can be fully provided with all necessities even with thanks to automation low employment rate, it might just work and come to this.
There is also a star trek tng episode where they find a cryo capsule of 20th century people who have difficulties understanding the origin of working morale in a future that provides shelter, food and anything basically to a quite luxury standard without having to earn it. But the captain explains that schooling your knowledge and expanding understanding is a drive on its own, as well as finding your sense in life by discovering your talent (might even just be art). I still have some problems understanding why some would under these conditions assign as enlisted in the military, but then again I have no idea of this mind set at all ( - a friend in school wanted to join the trade marine, basically leaving anything and anyone behind him despite having good enough grades to study nearly anything.... I don't get it).

I would vote that in a future of high technization it is perfectly possible to have a huge percentage of people just dedicated to whatever their humanistic business is - art, superfluous work just for the sake of fulfillment, or education, or nothing. Shuffling positions might make appear unemployment higher than it really is too, just because there aren't as much available.
It is certainly not as efficient as if everyone was using resource to the fullest "in the service of the empire", but it might just be that freedom from non fulfilling labor need that pushes happiness of a population, so unemployment could be a sign of wealth and content at this age.

Utopian, but I found it absolutely worth the thought.

[swarm_sadist]

I would just like to point out that aurora is NOT a post scarcity economy. When you say you can build a robot to take care of all your needs, this robot is not made from regular materials, but Duranium. When you say your nation has Fusion power, it's actually Sorium power. Instead of an economy based on the supply and demand of metals and rare earth metals, the economy is based on trans-Newtonian elements.

Modelling this, if you decided to expand the economy by 20%, you would not be able to do this for free. You should have to put TN resources into the economy in order to sustain that economy. If you want the +20% economy, then you should pay for that in TN. If you cannot pay for that, then researching economic expansion should be useless until you have the resources to actually invest in it.

I can see some major problems with this model but it is the simplest model I could think of at the moment. As for unemployment, perhaps making it so the service and agriculture sectors are not hard-coded to a certain percentage would make unemployment "appear" to be less of a problem.

Also, wealth needs to have more uses than simply paying for research, 1-1 for resources used, corporate subsidies and ground force maintenance.

[Theodidactus]

Also, wealth needs to have more uses than simply paying for research, 1-1 for resources used, corporate subsidies and ground force maintenance.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Wealth doesn't do enough given the vast game resources that go into calculating it. Its frustrating when you have all these civilian lines clogging up your sky for only minimal purpose.

I would just like to point out that aurora is NOT a post scarcity economy. When you say you can build a robot to take care of all your needs, this robot is not made from regular materials, but Duranium.

I disagree with this though. There's no compelling case why anything domestic would need to be made out of duranium. Could be plastic, really. SHIPS and MINES and LABS and STATIONS need to be made of these awesome science materials to have tolerances to sustain digging into the earth or whipping around at 5000kps or seeing distant objects instantly through graviton flux other awesome science things. A home care robot is a home care robot. It needs to fetch bannanas and clean things.

When you say your nation has Fusion power, it's actually Sorium power. Instead of an economy based on the supply and demand of metals and rare earth metals, the economy is based on trans-Newtonian elements.

THIS is more on point, however, what to call it is a bit cosmetic. To give an example that's more pertinent to what post-scarcity means for most science fiction: I have a hard time imagining a future where my United Nation of Earth are capable of adding whole atmospheres to planets light-years away, but still struggling to build public housing for a large percentage of the population (~15%+) back home. It's not only the case that this is weird to think about materially...it's weird to think about transpiring in any democracy that could fairly call itself a democracy. 15% of people in abject poverty is a huge and visible and readily predictable voting block. (it's about 5% in the united states, and the problem is so severe we allocate roughly a 4th of all our resources to fighting it). Regardless of what miraculous science brings it about, it's difficult to imagine a situation where humanity has itself straightened out enough to create whole worlds out of lifeless rock in a few years, but not enough to feed a third of its population.

I CAN imagine this sort of thing happening, of course, but it would require setting-specific concerns that are rather different from what I have seen in nearly all aurora fiction...but maybe we want that.



Before Aurora I played a lot of GalCiv and I really did like how it made me feel when I was at the wheelhead of a big economy, one that whimsically operated more like a "real" economy. The thing to keep in mind though is that poverty/scarcity considerations like this open the doors to a lot of stuff that could be good or bad (I would welcome it, but that's not the best indicator of its friendliness  ). Basically, you're going to want some kind of government system to go with it (IE one where you get to pick whether you're a democracy, a corporate-lead directorship of some kind, a star empire lead by a tyrannical dude in a black cape, ect) since the challenges posed by this kind of scarcity virtually demand different responses that different players will want to play: "Send them to the slave pits" vs. "Everyone has a job in this bright new future which looks a lot like star trek" vs. "To the tenement houses and dole lines for you". Galciv had a fairly cool government model which allowed for elections, and a taxation system that had a built-in laffer curve.
I've tinkered with building involved political systems for aurora but abandoned them because I felt it was too specific to how I played, and most people would find it burdensome...


...but let's ask, since the simplest way to imagine a government is a collective insurance policy against the very thing this thread is talking about (Unemployment/Poverty/Crime) do you think we should try to create a system that incorporates this stuff, my factional system, and possibly some simple mechanisms simulating elections/totalitarian leadership? or is that just silly.

[Haji]

I would just like to point out that aurora is NOT a post scarcity economy. When you say you can build a robot to take care of all your needs, this robot is not made from regular materials, but Duranium. When you say your nation has Fusion power, it's actually Sorium power. Instead of an economy based on the supply and demand of metals and rare earth metals, the economy is based on trans-Newtonian elements.

All TN elements are mined or can be bought by you. Ergo no TN elements are ever going into the civilian sector. So how can household items be made of the stuff?

Also, let's look at the tonnages. A full scale factory, of which there are only a thousand or so on a whole planet, needs only one hundred and twenty tonnes of TN elements. As such those elements are almost certainly used in only trace quantities for special hardware used in very special circumstances. The only things that seem to be using TN elements in bulk are vehicles (including missiles). As such civilian economy can very well be a post-scarcity one even if national (and very specialized industries) are not.

...but let's ask, since the simplest way to imagine a government is a collective insurance policy against the very thing this thread is talking about (Unemployment/Poverty/Crime) do you think we should try to create a system that incorporates this stuff, my factional system, and possibly some simple mechanisms simulating elections/totalitarian leadership? or is that just silly.

As far as poverty (due to unemployment) goes my answer is: no. My doubts about balancing the stuff has still not been addressed and as such I continue to believe that such a system would severely limit possible starting conditions. For example, let's say the poverty is balanced for a standard start with five hundred million people and a thousand conventional factories. What happens when I want to start a conventional game with a planet of nine billion people but only one thousand factories? In such a situation I would be crippled due to constant unemployment rate of over twenty percent. Ergo, such a start would not be feasible.