Social Model v3.0

[alms66]

Originally posted by Lord God Jinnai
That seems completely backwards. Higher autonomy means they'd have more control over themselves and less likely to feel the urge to break away.

I think it's supposed to be a higher urge to break away over time (feeling that the central goverment doesn't do anything for them anyway), but I don't get why Laurent mentioned riots. I don't think there are supposed to be riots associated with this, just the potential for the province to become independent.

[Lord God Jinnai]

That would be NRF or PWF though, not SDF.

[alms66]

Originally posted by Lord God Jinnai
That would be NRF or PWF though, not SDF.

From the Riots Model:
Self Determination Feeling (SDF): Unhappiness caused by the unfulfilled desired of having more influence in the decisions affecting the province. Includes the discontent caused by an ineffective local govt when this is caused in time by the incapacity of a (distant) central govt of being sensitive to the province's local problems (see more on govt's administration in the govt model). People's objective is to increase their power over the central govt and/or empower the local govt. If high enough, independence may also be a goal.

The the second sentence in conjunction with the last sentence, along with the people's objective, is why I said it should get higher over time. That would be NRF "linked" by SDF. As for SDF itself, it simply states that the citizens want more say in the government's policy making. I'm just not sure that having riots is the best choice for all cases of SDF. I think the problem here may be that PAL or lack of autonomy, really has only a little to do with why people would have SDF.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Self Determination Feeling (SDF): Unhappiness caused by the unfulfilled desired of having more influence in the decisions affecting the province. Includes the discontent caused by an ineffective local govt when this is caused in time by the incapacity of a (distant) central govt of being sensitive to the province's local problems (see more on govt's administration in the govt model). People's objective is to increase their power over the central govt and/or empower the local govt. If high enough, independence may also be a goal.

Okay that makes some sense if all those things are true, but just being decentralized shouldn't continue to raise this. A weaker central authroity allowing people more control over their local area to varying degrees generally makes people more willing to accept foriegn rule. Its when they interfere a lot, especially in ways the population doesn't like, that they dislike it. Historically until recently this was the way most large empires were formed.

[Mark_Everson]

I have commited a code update to implement PCI, my number 5 above. I'm part way through the administration one. Since other code elements are called "Administration" and "Government" I have called the local govt level of admin infrastructure "Admin Level". Suggestions welcome for a better name. It should be like 14 characters or less.

[LDiCesare]

Take your time Mark, I have ended up deciding my current implementation of the model couldn't scale up nicely so I am rewriting (refactoring) a lot of it... The end result should be easier for me to maintain and probably faster to run. Since I'm checking everything at square level now, I also think I'm going to use this refactoring to then regroup stuff by province, so there'll be only one event of a given type per province rather than the enormous amount (several per squares) that we have now.

Increased Autonomy reduces the required administrative stuff to get the equivalent value. So increasing PAL has 2 effects in Rodrigo's equations: Increase likelihood of revolt, reduce costs of administration.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks for letting me know that there's no rush Laurent. I should finish the first stab at is this week. If it starts to get close to when you need the changes and you haven't heard from me, please let me know.

[LDiCesare]

(edited)
I misinterpreted one equation (SDF) - never mind this post.

[LDiCesare]

I finally ended coding the social model with only a few omissions: Independence should be checked in neighbouring provinces, poor welfare feeling is not in, and I think there's also something with army betraya or something which requires some averageing over all social groups of the civ which I didn't do.
The result is, as expected, that the game is very unstable.
I have a few issues with the model and some proposals now that I saw the model in effect:

First of all, "Verbally exposing discontent" should, in my opinion, be ditched. It has no real effect, and the player has better means than receiving a popup to check for discontent.

Second, National Rebellion Feeling I have many problems with. It appears a lot in the Delenda scenario. This is because Latins have some high nationality rating in their cultural profile. It could be corrected by lowering this, but I don't know whether it's the way to do it. My other gripe is there is nothing you can do against this feeling. In the code, there's nothing, and in the model the only solution is to create a new nationality and hope people will decide to join it. I guess nationalistic feelings shouldn't happen before quite late in the game (they typically didn't exist before Napoleonic Wars in Europe, or maybe theHundred Years War in France).

Last, I have problems with the displaying of events. There are more messages (per province) than there were in Demo 8 (with squares). This is because there are almost systematically 3 or 4 events launched by the same social group for every social group for the same reason. Among them, verbally exposing discontent is systematic and uninteresting. So I need to be able to show the events in a more streamlines way. There is the map filter, but the details should also be easier to read and navigate through.

[LDiCesare]

I checked the display and found out the problem was an error in my code. The only problem left is the National Rebellion Feeling.

[yellowdaddy]

National Rebellion Feeling

Perhaps the solution lies in using a different term for NRF.

You say that nationalism only existed post Napoleonic era/100 yrs war.

Yet human feelings haven't dramatically changed, so perhaps the feeling that we call Nationalism has always existed by another name?
Perhaps by coming up with that different name might help understand the emotion in game context and help reveal solutions to the problems?

First thoughts about it, without getting too deep or digressing too much, is that NRF is an economic-driven thing.

Nationalism: devotion and allegiance to a group defined by the shared characteristics of a race, language, history, or culture

So you have the EG, Religion, Language as factors in a game that define Nationalism - or perhaps it should be renamed "Groupism" or "Exclusivism" - an Ethnic Group is an Exclusive Group.

I would suggest that "Rebelliousness" occurs when expectations of economic growth are not met. (I base this on my own academic studies of economics and politics).

Nationalism is almost like religion, and I think the way to neutralise it is though increasing expenditure on Education - that could include building Education infrastructure as well as increasing funding to education, or even restructuring society (if such a feature is to exist in the game) so that teachers have higher status.
One might try and change the religion to one where education is more important - again through funding policies which encourage growth in another religion.

I'm not a programmer (yet), so I can't put this in coding terms; but in essence I'd say the opposite of "Nationalist Rebellousness Feeling" is Education and Economic growth.

[LDiCesare]

I would suggest that "Rebelliousness" occurs when expectations of economic growth are not met.

That's a possibility, but I wonder whether this is not supposed to be captured by the Poor Welfare Feeling:
The definition of this event is:

Discontent mainly because of bad economic situation (poverty), but also includes the welfare produced by the level of civil rights and the administration effectiveness (see more on administration in the govt model).

(I base this on my own academic studies of economics and politics

If you have a pointer to a document or thesis that gives a short summary for non academics, I'd be interested in reading that.

Nationalism is almost like religion, and I think the way to neutralise it is though increasing expenditure on Education

That's an interesting idea.

again through funding policies which encourage growth in another religion.

I'm not sure we have that in yet. But doing this should definitely be a possibility (ce.g. reating a new state religion like the cult of Amon).

so I can't put this in coding terms; but in essence I'd say the opposite of "Nationalist Rebellousness Feeling" is Education and Economic growth

Coding terms aren't important, equations are, but the terms to put inside the equations are even more important, and you're providing good ideas for these. I'll try to see if I can put an equation using these terms and post it here.

[yellowdaddy]

Rebelliousness:

Well, I read a book by Marcus Noland called "After Kim Jong-Il" (for one of my last university modules), and he was talking about why the North Korean regime, and regimes in general had either not collapsed, or collapsed.
Poverty, civil/human rights abuses and government ineptitude, does not precipitate revolution.
However if they occur in concert with economic growth and then a sudden economic decline, then you have a powderkeg.
(Based on this theory, China is headed for major civil unrest in the coming years as energy sources to drive their overheated economic growth are subject to increased competition, and seeing them prop up odious third world regimes in Africa and Asia in order to secure energy resources.)

I'm afraid this is an academic source, but I don't think it's too much to take in for you lot.

http://www.iie.com/publications/chapters_preview/369/2iie373x.pdf

up to about p28 is most relevent.

I personally take the view that economics ultimately defines pretty much everything in society, and all your game models will work best when they adhere to economics that we see happening in the real world.


Nationalism:

Nationalism, is religion, as is Communism, and practically any other political ideology; alternatively, you could just as well say that religion is politics - particularly when you are talking about pre-industrial and in fact pre-information age societies (pre-industrial being a transition phase from genuinely superstitious societies to the sort of "metaphysical philosophical" societies that we in the developed world live in (i.e. we stop praying to lucky trees, and start trying to "find ourselves").
So in game terms, religion, nationalism et al should come under a category called "ideology" and behave similarly - ie, they are neutralised by increased funding into education.

When I was talking about "funding another religion", I was specifically thinking about Confucianism - an ideology which places high value on education.
I am thus implicitly arguing that Confucianism has "de-religionising" effects on society; increases conformity; and suppresses rebelliousness.
So I'm not really talking about funding for example "The Cult of Amon" in order to negate the effects of the religiousness of nationalism. I'm being more specific - that the ideology of nationalism has to be supplanted by an ideology which values education more.

[yellowdaddy]

DIFFERENT SUBJECT

From the Riots Model: Self Determination Feeling (SDF): Unhappiness caused by the unfulfilled desired of having more influence in the decisions affecting the province. Includes the discontent caused by an ineffective local govt when this is caused in time by the incapacity of a (distant) central govt of being sensitive to the province's local problems (see more on govt's administration in the govt model). People's objective is to increase their power over the central govt and/or empower the local govt. If high enough, independence may also be a goal.

I think we refer to this as "Scottishness."
In a word, I'd call it "Separatism."

That seems completely backwards. Higher autonomy means they'd have more control over themselves and less likely to feel the urge to break away. Of course you might never be able to integrate them into your society if its too autonommous.

Correct, see Scotland.
Devolution (ie increased autonomy for the countries which make up the parts of Britain which are not called England) in Britain has resulted in a significant collapse in the electoral fortunes of the seperatist/nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland.
Language (not so much cultural) domination, as well as economic centralisation on London are probably large constituent elements of the ingredients of the glue that keeps the UK together.
Inevitably, it all comes down to economics (e.g.: Scotland would become poorer if it was separated from the UK) provinces will not cecede if it not in their economic interests to do so.

I have commited a code update to implement PCI, my number 5 above. I'm part way through the administration one. Since other code elements are called "Administration" and "Government" I have called the local govt level of admin infrastructure "Admin Level". Suggestions welcome for a better name. It should be like 14 characters or less.

Why not just abbreviate it to "Local Govt"? If you want a one-worder, "Bureaucracy"?

[LDiCesare]

Summing up things as I understand them:
-We definitely need the Poor Welfare Feeling and its PCI-based equations to model unrest - for this I'll have to wait for Mark to implement the PCI code. Can be corrected by getting a better economy (I'm not saying it's simple to achieve nor immediate, but that's a solution)
-Self Determination feeling: The equations should lower that feeling if the local government has more autonomy. Can be corrected by giving more autonomy to the province. Note that such a change should have the effect of better local government effectivity and thus better economy (at least trhough less wasted taxes).
-Nationalistic Rebellion Feeling: Could be lowered by education.

In general, economics effects could be considered as a multiplier to NRF and SDF.

I also think that NRF and SDF should in fact be pooled together somehow: SDF are people who want autonomy, thus change the regime from the inside, while NRF are those who want to overthrow it and become independant instead. We could have a total of nationalistic feeling which would then be cut into self-determination vs independentist feelings.
We could use province autonomy (little autonomy = more self determination and less independentist feeling, high autonomy = more independent feeling but lowers the overall nationalistic feeling),
ethnic discrimination (nationality being discriminated against is more likely to revolt),
being the dominant nationality (reduces totally independence feelings, doesn't reduce autonomy),
province isolation (more isolated = more independent feeling).
Social groups which have a share of power would also have hiigher chance of wanting increased autonomy versus independence.
Education level would reduce the overall feeling.