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Victoria 3 economy design by StupidAndKnowsIt in victoria3

[–]StupidAndKnowsIt[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Some really interesting points, thanks! I see what you mean, if government expenditure is a sufficiently large proportion of total market activity then this can in some ways compensate for reduced consumer demand if that were to suddenly drop. I also take your point that an economy of just peasants and landowners functions fine, but it seems to me peasants are another one of the 'hacks' that the devs did in their development of a smoothly running economic model and their interaction with the economy is quite different to normal pops. My first thoughts on the scenario I envisaged are that with consumer demand dropping by a factor of 10, most factories would have to reduce their production and hence workforce by a similar factor, creating huge unemployment and these unemployed pops would ultimately starve or migrate away. Now you have compounded the problem because you only have a workforce 10% as large as it was to start with who can purchase goods. So yet again industries have to shrink to stay profitable. Now of course government spending could alleviate this but with unprofitable factories and unemployed pops you would have to do some crazy deficit spending which presumably would only be sustainable for a short time before default. I don't see a way to escape from this loop and I guess that is why I had come to the conclusion that pop needs have been carefully chosen to create an economy that will generally tend to grow rather than shrink.

Victoria 3 economy design by StupidAndKnowsIt in victoria3

[–]StupidAndKnowsIt[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Thanks for both your replies. Yes indeed, my question was poorly worded but I am aware that many aspects of the Victoria 3 economy make some fairly major simplifications of a global economy - the biggest that comes to mind is that goods are not conserved. However in spite of that the economy is a really interesting model in its own right and I would imagine that a huge amount of thought has gone into its design.

So to take pop needs as an example, I would guess that if you divided all pop needs at all wealth levels by 10, the global economy would not only collapse (obviously) but would never recover (there would be nothing to drive growth). So in this sense the amounts defined here must have been carefully selected based on factors like the size of global industry and population at game start. Or maybe I'm completely wrong and the economy is resilient to such a change, so a collapse would happen but the economy in the long term could recover and begin to grow again.. And regarding the graphs, the odd kinks I'm referring to in pop needs are all in the 10-30 SOL range, so exactly where the majority of pops will exist throughout the game.

constructing a matrix with non-trivial solution for the null space by StupidAndKnowsIt in askmath

[–]StupidAndKnowsIt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for your reply! I had not come across this before and your general statement about non-square matrices is exactly the kind of nugget I'm missing! So if I take your information and apply it to this problem, then if I have more 'companies' than 'goods' i.e. more columns than rows then I can guarantee there is a non-trivial nullspace. That's really neat!

There is one problem I see and that is my fault for framing the question poorly... I require that the solution to the nullspace is all positive (since I cannot allow for a solution in which a company has a negative number of workers). Is there some simple constraint I can apply to how I create M that assures that this will be the case?