Social Model v.2

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Whitemage:

An official welcome to Clash!

On your point about allowing advocates for various religions pick religious requisites, I think its a good one. My only quibble is that both religious doctrine and real-world actions of religious agents change over time. So I think we may need to weigh things so that a historical balance is struck rather than just using contemporary values to represent GRW.

[LDiCesare]

HI. This is my first post so please bear with me.
One thing I loved to build in civ was Women's suffrage.
I always thought it a little bit stupid that it was a wonder (what if the city of Rome is taken, Roman women cannot vote?).
I rather find it to be a social advance, and I see nothing about like it in the social model.
There is ethnic and religious discrimination, but no sexual discrimination. Why?
I do not think sex fits in ethnics, and certainly not in religion.
Women (maybe men in certain cultures) have been deprived of access to (mainly) political power (e.g. the king of France refused that the throne be inherited through women, which led to 100 years of war with England). Women were not allowed to be scholars in the middle ages so there is discrimination in terms of science too. The same is true for managing property (most entrepreneurs were men till very recently), and the military.
Shouldn't the social/govt model take that into account?
A "simple" way could be to provide a % involvement of the discrimined-against-sex in various affairs (politics, production, military, science, others?).
Additionally, in times of war, women have been known to take the place of their husbands in factories to build the bullets for soldiers, so this social change (that a woman can do "man's work") gave a bonus to the civ that had found it.
Can we think of adding sexual discrimination in the model? Typically, you could lower discrimination in times of war to get better production.
You could basically double the ((wo)man)power of your civ by raising the figures (though of course the cultural trend would probably not be 100% equality in most cultures).
Hope this isn't off-topic.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi LDiCesare. Welcome to the forums!

I think that's a great suggestion... you're right, we've overlooked something potentially big. And it should be relatively easy to include. Lets see what Rodrigo and Axi think, but I'm all for it!

[axi]

I have thought about this issue myself too. This falls under the sort of discriminations that occur between members of the same family: discrimination against women, minors, the elderly, the mentally and physically unfit. These discriminations are the reason why only only part of the total population are the economically active population.

This is included in the govtecon submodel, where APP (Active Population Percentage) is a parameter which enters in the formula which calculates the manhours from the working classes populations. As to how this parameter will be computed, it will probably depend on the "Tech Model", that is on various technological and social advances, but at this moment, we have not figured out how. Two points though:

1. This must be outside the player's direct intervention. No real leader has ever changed this type of discriminatory status either drastically or on purpose. This is a social evolution thing.

2. There must be some trade-off, otherwise one would want the less discrimination possible, to raise his APP. Since non-working family members are doing valuable work inside the family, like the upbringing of children, housework, etc, we can make a high APP raise somewhat the costs of education, recreation and housing and give a slight penalty to happiness, like overworking will do. Women's Suffrage maybe good for the economy but bad for the family...

Glad to have you here Laurent. Frenchmen are scarce in Apolyton...

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"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

[VetLegion]

Laurent are you female?

But I think the female movements, suffrage etc fits to folder History Simplification Needed. Clash is well known for its detail I know, but often wonder where the limit is. You have decided not to make a world simulator and this is kind of thing that fits to world simulators.

Dont take me too seriousely though, I am a casual lurker and I havent even read the Social Model - but I am going to.

[Twinge]

My vision is that at the most detalied level, clash would almost be a simulator (not quite most likely, but pretty close)... this is for the user to decide, and most players will probably play on a detail level less than the extreme...
so basically i think gender discrimination should be included, in some form... although throughout history its usually women being discriminated, it can go the other way to, and that should be kept in mind (example: in some indian tribes, the women were the only land/home owners, and controlled most of the tribes descisions)

[Lord God Jinnai]

I think there is a point there and its one ive thought about...check the social advances or technologies thread and u'll see something there, if not it should've been there. Anyway the only the i would say is that all that was said could easily be said for men in a matriarcial society (and there were them in the past...the Amazons FE).

As for a suffrage, i don't like that idea for several reasons 1> if its used in the civ way its a physical rather than social manner 2> the monument might not apply to everyone...err every civ 3> the suffrage implies a instantanious realization and/or change in attitude that is permenant which history tells us is never the case.
[This message has been edited by Lord God Jinnai (edited January 08, 2001).]

[Richard Bruns]

I had always assumed that gender discrimination was a defined variable in the model. I think we should definitely have it. I generally agree with axi's post, but with a couple caveats. Players should have some ability to alter this, and we should reward the player for ending discrimination. The economic, social, and scientific benefits should be pretty signifigant, to represent the increased happiness and productivity of more people in the society.

The ill social effects mentioned come not from lack of discrimination but from a work environment that is not family-friendly. I had planned on a "management" technology that tracks your society's ability to manage employers and the workplace. Higher levels mean more productive and happy workers, and less ill social effects from economic activity. So if you end discrimination while you still have a low management tech, the extra work will cause problems. But if the management tech improves, and you have better work environments and time schedules for the employees, the ill effects are mitigated.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Um not to stop what your doing Rich, but like anything else social (including religions which i disagreed with at the time) if you want social behaviors not to be seen as better or more advanced then it should apply to everything, icluding discrimination, whether or not you or I think otherwise because if we make one exception we have no valid reason not to make many more that are considered by many today to be more socially advanced, but not all.

[Twinge]

Also: If you want to make it realistic and be controlling a human society, it would be impossible to completely eliminate discrimination. It's against human nature to never be jealous, pejudice, or discrimitory. You could get pretty close, though.

[LDiCesare]

Is it possible that units of a same civ fight one another? For instance feudal lords can fight among themselves, and there are also civil wars. Can provinces decide to take over neighboring friendly provinces, or raid them, or upheave in the model?

[Mark_Everson]

I'd Like to include such things. Ideally the code should be able to handle them anyway for flexibility. In the mil thread I've given an idea for how this could work.

[Richard Bruns]

quote: 2. There must be some trade-off, otherwise one would want the less discrimination possible, to raise his APP.

I simply want to model the positive effects that we have seen that result from less discrimination. I got the impression that axi wanted to artificially make anti-discrimination laws less helpful than they really are. If players want to raise APP, anti-discrimination laws are a proven real-world way of doing so.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Rich:

I'm not diagreeing with you, its just that there are disadvantages to nondiscrimination. But first know that as a race, humans cannot exist without discrimination of some sort. It is what allowed us to survive earlier in evolution by discriminating and leaving out the weak and also in against other animals. Today it may not serve a positive role many may view, but it is ground into our genetics like a mother cleaning up the house before a baby is about to be born which dates back to earlier times when sanitation was a problem.

Anyway some of the negative side effects would be for those who build structures, if non-descrimination against people w. disabilities were to be enacted, then things would cost more money, even from the start. This is important for the economy model also because say you have a group of people who cannot do the job as well, but that is because of the people they hire (ie poorer, older, slightly diabled people) vs a company that hires well able people, but they don't happen to be too many of the type in the former group simply because they can't work very well, not because of who they are, then in an antidesc socitiey which has no laws for it, which group would be hired?

Basically in order to have 100% no desc. then everyone would haveto be treated as uni-sexed, uni-aged people, only looking at the abilities of each person. That may sound good, but that would mean no specail treatment for women who got pregnant (no more than any other reason to need to leave work) and they wouldn't be able to ness get time off. Treating them diff would be desc towards them in that way, because men cannot get pregnant. Is that what you truly want?

There are other things like, FE discriminating against certain business types (tobacco, alchohol, sex) that won't be allowed in certain areas in the city, say near schools or not allowing minors accress (i know some of that isn't true in other countries). Just because socitiy as a whole agrees with it, doesn't make it non-discriminatory.
[This message has been edited by Lord God Jinnai (edited January 13, 2001).]

[Mark_Everson]

Hmmm...

I think you may have found the wrong forum. You must have in mind www.perfect_world_simulator.com . I expect they will never have a product, because even as computational abilities grow, so does the complexity of the world...

We, on the other hand are trying to make a game that in some poor, limited way reflects reality. Hopefully we'll have something good in another year or so. The goal is to make Clash realistic provided the modeled reality is fun for the player, and can also be managed computationally. So because we can't model something perfectly isn't a reason to not put it in IMO. Basically I'd use the 80/20 rule. If you can model 80% of the real effects with 20% of the effort, that's the place to stop.

So IMO 100% non-descrimination should be possible in Clash (if we include the broad definition of non-desc. at all). Getting there would be very tough, and it might have some small downside as well as the oft-mentioned upside.

[Edit 4/01]
This thread is near the 150-post limit, and Gary has started another. So I'm going to lock this one to keep things simple. Please go to
http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum21/HTML/000360.html

for further discussion of the social model.
[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited April 20, 2001).]