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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #11 - Employment and Qualifications

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Happy Thursday and welcome to another deep-dive into the guts of Victoria 3’s economic machinery. This week we will be talking about Pop Professions, specifically how and why Pops change Profession. While this is an automatic process, the mechanics of it is still crucial knowledge to keep in the back of your head when building your society. Perhaps you want to ensure the population in one of your states are able to take on Machinist jobs before embarking on a rapid industrialization project there, or perhaps you want to ensure you don’t accidentally enable too much social mobility in a country already prone to uprisings against their true and lawful King.

First, a quick recap. In the Pops dev diary we learned that all Pops have a Profession, which determines their social strata and influences a number of things like wages, political strength, and Interest Group affiliations. In the Buildings dev diary we learned that buildings need Pops of specific Professions to work there in order for them to produce their intended effects on the economy and society. Finally, in the Production Methods dev diary we learned that different Production Methods change the number of Profession positions available in a building. So how do Pops get assigned to these spots?

Our approach here differs a bit from previous games. Victoria 1 and 2 has the concept of a “Pop Type”, a fundamental property of Pops in those games that defines most aspects of their existence - what function they perform in society, what goods they need to survive vs. what goods they desire, what ideologies they espouse, etcetera. Pops in Victoria 2 autonomously change into other types over time depending on their finances and the various needs and aspects of the country. Providing access to luxury goods in your country permits Pops to promote more easily. Generally speaking, higher-tier Pops will provide better bonuses for your country as different Pop Types perform different functions. By manufacturing or importing special goods and educating your population you would turn your simple, backwards Pops into advanced, progressive types in ideal ratios, which maximizes these bonuses to increase your competitive advantage.

Pop Types from Victoria 2: Aristocrats, Artisans, Bureaucrats, Capitalists, Clergymen, Clerks, Craftsmen, Farmers, Laborers, Officers, Slaves, and Soldiers.
poptypes-v2.png

Victoria 3 Pops instead have Professions. These are in some ways similar to “Pop Type”, but the ideal ratios and economic functions of those Professions differ based on the building they’re employed in and the Production Methods activated. The fundamental difference between these two approaches become clear when considering the Bureaucrat Pop Type/Profession in Victoria 2 and 3. In both games, Bureaucrats increase a country’s administrative ability. But in Victoria 2 Pops promote into Bureaucrats independently in relation to the amount of administrative spending the player sets, while in Victoria 3 Pops will only become Bureaucrats if there are available Bureaucrat jobs in Government buildings, usually as a result of the player actively expanding Government Administrations.

Professions in Victoria 3: Academics, Aristocrats, Bureaucrats, Capitalists, Clergymen (temporary icon; will be changed to be more universally applicable), Clerks, Engineers, Farmers, Laborers, Machinists, Officers, Peasants, Servicemen, Shopkeepers, and Slaves.
professions-v3.png

The latter approach gives the player more control over where these job opportunities are created, and combined with Production Methods cause demographic shifts to have stronger, more localized effects that are easier to predict and understand. It’s also more flexible, permitting the same Profession to cause different effects in different Buildings given different Production Methods. So in Victoria 3 higher-paid Pops don’t by their very nature perform a more valuable societal function than lower-paid Pops - rather, each acts as a crucial part of a Production Method’s ‘recipe’. Each of these roles require the others to be effective - without enough Laborers to shovel coal the engines the Machinists maintain stay dormant, and without seamstresses to work the sewing machines the Shopkeepers don’t have any clothes to sell.

Buildings adjust their wages over time in order to achieve full employment with minimal wage costs. As employment increases, so does the Throughput - the degree by which the building consumes input goods and produces output goods. By the laws of supply and demand, this makes a building less profitable per capita the closer to full employment it gets, so at first blush it might appear irrational for a building to pay more wages just to reduce their margins. But since a “building” does not represent a single factory but rather a whole industrial sector across a large area, and we assume the individual businesses in that sector compete with each other rather than engage in cartel behavior to extort consumers, this adjustment of wages to maximize employment makes sense. However, buildings won’t increase wages due to labor competition if this would cause them to go into deficit, so there’s little point to expanding industries beyond the point where they’re profitable.

Employees are hired into available jobs from the pool of Pops that already exist in the state, but unless they’re unemployed these Pops will already have a job somewhere doing something else. Pops can be hired under two conditions: first, they must be offered a measurably higher wage than the wage they’re currently getting from their current employment. Second, unless they already work as the required Profession in another building, they must also meet the Qualifications of that Profession to change into it.

These Steel Mills don’t pay as well as the Arms Industries, but they do seem to offer better terms than the Textile Mills and resource industries in the same state - with the notable exception of Fishing Wharves, who also need Machinists to service their trawlers.
steel-mills-hiring.PNG

Wages are set by individual buildings in response to market conditions. A building that is losing money will decrease wages until it’s back in the black. A building that has open jobs it can’t seem to fill will raise wages until it either fills the necessary positions or runs out of excess profits. As a result, different buildings in the same state will compete for the available workforce. What this means in practice is that a large population with the necessary Qualifications to perform all the jobs being created in the state will keep wages depressed and profits high. Only when industries are large or advanced enough that they need to compete with each other for a limited pool of qualified workers are wages forced to rise. This rise in wages also comes with increased consumption, which increases demand for goods and services that some of the same buildings may profit from in the end.

A Pop’s Qualifications measure how many of its workforce qualify for certain Professions, and updates monthly depending on how well their current properties match up to the expectations of the Profession in question. For example, at least a basic education level is required to become a Machinist while a much higher one is required to become an Engineer. Conversely, the ability to become an Aristocrat is less about education and more about social class and wealth. Buildings won’t hire Pops who don’t meet the Qualifications for the Profession in question.

These 981 Machinists qualify to become Engineers at a rate of 4.08 per month. Their Literacy is nothing to write home about but they at least meet the cut-off of 20%, aren’t starving to death, and benefit substantially from already working in an adjacent field. All factors and numbers are work-in-progress.
machinist-quals.PNG

If some Paper Mills required more Engineers and this Pop was being considered, only the amount of qualified Engineers they’ve accumulated so far could be hired. Currently that is only 85 (not shown). If those 85 were all hired, this Pop would then end up with only 896 members left in the workforce of which 0 now qualify to become Engineers. Since all recently hired Engineers used to be Machinists, all 85 retain their Machinist Qualifications. Furthermore, if 512 members of this Pop qualified to be Farmers before the hire (52%), of the 85 of them who were newly promoted to Engineers, 44 of these new Engineers are also qualified to become Farmers.

To be considered for a “job” as Aristocrat a Pop must have at least moderate Wealth, and the more Wealth they have the faster they will develop this potential. Unlike many other jobs Literacy is not a requirement for being accepted into the aristocracy, but an education does make it easier. Bureaucrats and Officers have an easier time becoming Aristocrats than other members of society, while Pops who suffer discrimination on account of their culture have a much harder time. Finally, if a Pop does not meet the minimum Wealth requirement, they actually devolve any prior potential for becoming Aristocrats. This means that down-and-out former nobles robbed of their land and forced to go unemployed or (perish the thought) become a wage laborer will - over time - lose their ability to return to their former social class. All factors and numbers are work-in-progress.
officers-quals.PNG

Like all Pop attributes, Qualifications follow the Pops as they split, merge, move between buildings, migrate, and die. If you had previously developed a lot of potential Bureaucrats in your country but ran into budgetary problems and had to shut down your schools, over time those Pops who have already developed the Qualifications to become Bureaucrats will die off and not be replaced by newly educated ones. If your Capitalists in a given state had been underpaying their local discriminated employees to the degree that nobody gained the Qualifications to take over for them, and then some of those Capitalists move away to operate a newly opened Iron Mine in the next state over, rather than promoting some of the local discriminated Laborers to the newly opened jobs they will simply leave the spots open (and the mines underproducing) until some qualified Capitalists move in from elsewhere to take over.

Qualifications are entirely moddable by simply providing the computational factors that should go into determining how the value develops each month. If you want to make a mod to split up the Clergymen Profession into individual variants for each Religion in the game, you could make the Imam Profession dependent on the Pop being Sunni or Shi’ite. If you wanted Aristocrat Qualification development to be highly dependent on the amount of unproductive Arable Land in the state the Pop lives in, you could do that. An event option or Decision that makes it faster and easier to educate Engineers but harder to educate Officers for the next 10 years? Absolutely.

A breakdown of all Pops in Lower Egypt that qualify to become Engineers. Of course, any openings will be offered to existing Engineers first, and not all of the remaining qualified Pops would actually be interested in the job - though if it was lucrative enough, perhaps some Aristocrats on a failing Subsistence Farm would consider a career change.
potential-engineers.PNG

The intent of Qualifications is to signal to a player what capacity for employment they have available among any subset of their population. They cannot, for example, conquer a state filled with under-educated people they also legally discriminate against and expect to immediately build up a cutting-edge manufacturing- and trade center there. These efforts will be throttled by their inability to employ the locals into highly qualified positions, meaning they have to wait for members of their already qualified workforce to migrate there from the old country to take on any high-status positions created for them. But by building out their education system, paying Bureaucracy to extend their administrative reach to the new state through incorporation, and changing their Laws to extend citizenship to these new residents, they can start to build this capacity also in the locals.

In summary, Qualifications is the mechanism by which access to education and your stance on discrimination - in addition to many other factors - impact your ability to expand different parts of your society. It is also the mechanism that sorts Pops logically into the economic (and thereby political) niches you carve out as you expand, ensuring your laws and economic conditions inform the social mobility of Pops based on who they are. It’s quite subtle, and you might not even notice it’s there - until you run into the challenges caused by rapid industrialization, mass migration, conquests, colonization, and other drastic population shifts.

That is all for this week! Next Thursday we will finally get into how all this economic activity translates into revenue streams for you, when Martin presents the mechanics governing the Treasury and national debt.
 
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Global market access will be another variable clone of market access, just that this applies to the market region instead of affecting the state.
From the reddit post, that doesn't seem to be how it will work. Trade between national markets will be performed as transfers in specific goods. The trades will be implemented as buy orders in the source market and sell orders in the destination market. Different laws will affect the maximum number of goods traded.

But we don't know any of the details. Like who gets to control or approve of trade deals? Are the deals for a specific quantity of goods? Is there a transit cost and who pays for that? Having a trade port in another nation's market seems like it gives you a back-door to importing/exporting from their market - does that apply to England that has a tiny island in the French market?

Presumably there are going to be some mechanics that determine how much control a nation has over import/export for it's market and how much importing and exporting it can do - it's all to be revealed.
 
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As two separate POP types? No. You can do the same thing with laborers and shopkeepers without losing anything.
a lumberjack never had the same political impact that a carpenter.

the interests of a peddler (trader, retailer, comerciante) are opposed to those of any artisan (tailor, small looms, blacksmiths)
 
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They were literally laws in Victoria 2: Protectionism and Free Trade were party policies, not sliders. What was a slider was how high you made tariffs, but there is no indication we won´t be able to do that here.

There are artisans in the game: it´s just that they aren´t called artisans. They are other pops doing artisanal jobs in buildings with artisanal Production Methods
not really the same, you still could have -25% in tariffs as a protectionist and +25% as a free trader.
 
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a lumberjack never had the same political impact that a carpenter.
A laborer working in a carpentry building won’t act like a laborer working in a forestry building.
the interests of a peddler (trader, retailer, comerciante) are opposed to those of any artisan (tailor, small looms, blacksmiths)
A shopkeeper working in an urban center won’t act like a shopkeeper working in a Textile building.

The Profession system is much more flexible than the old POP type system from Vicky 2.

not really the same, you still could have -25% in tariffs as a protectionist and +25% as a free trader.
And how do you know similar things aren’t possible in the current system? You don’t, because none of us do. We haven’t seen how trade works yet. Claiming tariffs are gone at this point is absurd.
 
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Why was it changed?
it was too chaotic. artisans/industries looked for profits, so all found the sulphur industry profitable which in return broked the global economy.

Artisans were heavily reworked, and after that the protectionism/free-trade for them didn't make sense anymore. that is why free trade always had more support in the elections that protectionism.
 
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it was too chaotic. artisans/industries looked for profits, so all found the sulphur industry profitable which in return broked the global economy.
Wait sorry, I was under the impression from your posts that militancy of artisans was directly impacted by tariffs (as opposed to say being indirectly impacted because their ability to work would be limited if they had to rely on imports to produce their goods... a situation that I am pretty sure still exists in Victoria 2 today).

Sounds like there was a lot of changes but I'm not sure how to separate that the issues with Artisans getting very upset wouldn't also be related to their ability to break the economy in other ways.
 
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not really the same, you still could have -25% in tariffs as a protectionist and +25% as a free trader.
This doesn't seem like a very good system, to be honest. Rather than being free to move a slider however you want (regardless of the laws), and only having to suffer the downstream economic consequences, it makes more sense to have a mechanism where there can be a political struggle over raising or lowering trade barriers.
 
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Do we actually know this? I mean, we know that pops can support a variety of interest groups, but I don't recall learning if says pops working in different industries would systematically support different IGs.
We don’t know precisely how IG attraction works, but at a bare minimum they will make different amounts of money and thus have different wealth levels and political weight as a result.
 
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Wait sorry, I was under the impression from your posts that militancy of artisans was directly impacted by tariffs (as opposed to say being indirectly impacted because their ability to work would be limited if they had to rely on imports to produce their goods... a situation that I am pretty sure still exists in Victoria 2 today).

Sounds like there was a lot of changes but I'm not sure how to separate that the issues with Artisans getting very upset wouldn't also be related to their ability to break the economy in other ways.
artisans in victoria 2 have a hardcoded bias towards the protectionism. but they still have the impact on their everyday/life needs. what changed after the first patch, was that the high tariffs had a positive impact in the artisans who used local good to produce new goods that could sell locally.

after the rework, the tariffs stopped "protecting" the local production, so even with the intial protectionism bias all the artisans become free-traders.

what I mean is that prepatch the artisans organically were upset about low tariffs because they would sell less local goods, which is historically correct.
 
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artisans in victoria 2 have a hardcoded bias towards the protectionism. but they still have the impact on their everyday/life needs. what changed after the first patch, was that the high tariffs had a positive impact in the artisans who used local good to produce new goods that could sell locally.

after the rework, the tariffs stopped "protecting" the local production, so even with the intial protectionism bias all the artisans become free-traders.

what I mean is that prepatch the artisans organically were upset about low tariffs because they would sell less local goods, which is historically correct.

I do need to clarify because a challenge with using the term "Protectionism" because I'm not 100% sure if you're talking about the Victoria 2 policy (which simply lets you have a particular range of tariffs or taking a protectionist outlook. You can still have up to 25% tariff while in "free trade" which would still be philosophically protectionist position).

When you say Artisans in V2 are biased towards protectionism, are you saying they prefer governments that have the policy (whether or not tariffs exist) or that artisans would support a government that had a 25% tariff more than if they had a 0% (and especially a -25%) one?


I agree that the issues surrounding tariffs in Victoria 2 don't do much for protecting the local production, but I'm curious how it used to actually do that. My point/curiosity is that you're saying they spent time/effort to change a system that would have functionally worked better for how tariffs worked than the current implementation.
 
But not all artisans are shopkeepers in the game: laborers are too. If you wanted to have a separate POP type for artisans while still reflecting the class division among them, you would need to create two POPs: master and journeyman/apprentice. Two POPs that will disappear quickly in most countries doesn’t seem worth it, especially with how much more flexible professions are in the Vicky 3 system.

Nitpicky post incoming. I know probably no one cares about this level of detail other than me. I apologize for being obnoxious.

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I found where you got this information. In the production method DD, it shows employment switching from laborers making non-luxury clothing to shopkeepers making craftsman sewing. So, I can see why you would think that laborers would model journeyman/apprentice craftsman.

I want to update my take on this. I can see two options:

Option 1:
Laborers represent unskilled labor. Basically, anyone who can thread a needle.
Shopkeepers represent journeyman and master craftsman.

Option 2:
Laborers represent journeyman/apprentices working without master craftsman supervision.
Shopkeepers represents masters and journeyman/apprentices working with master craftsman supervision.

I don't think that it really matters which option is correct. However, if you look at the DD, it shows that non-luxury clothing employed 400 laborers and craftsman sewing employed 400 shopkeepers. So, the groups moved as a collective.

Master craftsman typically did not do everything themselves. They had journeyman and apprentices who performed large parts of the work under their supervision. So, shopkeepers cannot just be master craftsman otherwise craftsman sewing should have both shopkeepers (to represent masters) and laborers (to represents the journeyman/apprentices working with the masters).

Also, while I struggled to find information on this, my impression is that master craftsman weren't super numerous. I am not saying there weren't plenty of them, but I think that there were far more journeyman/apprentice level craftsman. So, if shopkeepers is going to be a large group (my impression is that it is quite large), then it has to include some journeyman and apprentices as well as just masters.

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Okay. I am done arguing about this, since probably no one cares except me.
 
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you are talking about the behaviour post-first patch.
Naturally. I didn't play Victoria 2 1.0 :) and the release-day behaviour of Paradox games is frequently weird and funky and broken.
 
Okay. I am done arguing about this, since probably no one cares except me.
Wrong. I do.

Nitpicky post incoming. I know probably no one cares about this level of detail other than me. I apologize for being obnoxious.

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I found where you got this information. In the production method DD, it shows employment switching from laborers making non-luxury clothing to shopkeepers making craftsman sewing. So, I can see why you would think that laborers would model journeyman/apprentice craftsman.

I want to update my take on this. I can see two options:

Option 1:
Laborers represent unskilled labor. Basically, anyone who can thread a needle.
Shopkeepers represent journeyman and master craftsman.

Option 2:
Laborers represent journeyman/apprentices working without master craftsman supervision.
Shopkeepers represents masters and journeyman/apprentices working with master craftsman supervision.

I don't think that it really matters which option is correct. However, if you look at the DD, it shows that non-luxury clothing employed 400 laborers and craftsman sewing employed 400 shopkeepers. So, the groups moved as a collective.

Master craftsman typically did not do everything themselves. They had journeyman and apprentices who performed large parts of the work under their supervision. So, shopkeepers cannot just be master craftsman otherwise craftsman sewing should have both shopkeepers (to represent masters) and laborers (to represents the journeyman/apprentices working with the masters).
Also, while I struggled to find information on this, my impression is that master craftsman weren't super numerous. I am not saying there weren't plenty of them, but I think that there were far more journeyman/apprentice level craftsman. So, if shopkeepers is going to be a large group (my impression is that it is quite large), then it has to include some journeyman and apprentices as well as just masters.

Let's look at the screenshot in question:

1629494525476.png

We can tell this is a level 4 building because it produces 80 Urbanization. Therefore, the building has loses 100 Laborers per level and gains 100 Shopkeepers. This cannot represent the entirety of the workforce. It may be as much as 10% (assuming 1000 total employees/level), but I can't imagine it rises above 20% (assuming 500 employees/level). This is perfectly in accord with what you're talking about, where a small number of master craftsman are working, assisted by many more journeymen and apprentices.

EDIT: I also disagree that laborers represent journeymen/apprentices working WITHOUT a master. Shopkeepers could still be and probably are employed even with the "Prioritize Non-Luxury Clothing" option.
 
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This seems to be touched upon by previous questions about subsidies, but I don't see it asked specifically here:
Will there be any kind of wage control laws/decrees possible? I.e. setting a minimum/maximum(!) wage? Will this be modeled only through government subsidies?

Like others here I'm concerned about the ability to model even a moderately socialist or social democrat government, if wages are always market determined.

May be answered in a previous DD, my apologies if so.
 
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All countries keep track of a constantly updating "Normal Wage Rate" that's based on the average wage rate across all non-government, non-subsistence buildings in their incorporated territory. This wage rate is used to determine the fair wage rate for employees of subsidized buildings, as well as set the baseline for what government employees should be paid. So the higher the average private-sector wage across your country (at least the incorporated parts) the higher the cost of paying government employees and subsidizing buildings will be.
Would it not make more sense for the player to be able to in some way set the wages? That way you could have command economies that artificially depress their wages compared to other countries to make their manufacturing more competitive, as happens in real life. The inability of the pops to afford imported goods (or even afford locally-produced ones that have access to the international markets) would then neatly lead to a declining standard of living relative to other countries.
It seems like this is the only way to represent that dynamic without currency markets, but please do correct me if I'm missing something :)
 
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That way you could have command economies that artificially depress their wages compared to other countries to make their manufacturing more competitive, as happens in real life.
It's an interesting thought, but I think it might clash with the price mechanism in the game. The internal price of goods won't change unless the supply/demand balance changes. So if you forced everyone to take a pay cut, then every building would become more profitable, but the price of goods within the economy wouldn't drop. So a car factory would be a bit more competitive because of the labour cost reduction, but you wouldn't have this cascading price decrease throughout the economy. So I think the effect would be limited.

The other thing is that subsidies seem to guarantee a wage floor for the subsidised industry, but some industries could still pay more than that.
 
Wrong. I do.



Let's look at the screenshot in question:

View attachment 749737
We can tell this is a level 4 building because it produces 80 Urbanization. Therefore, the building has loses 100 Laborers per level and gains 100 Shopkeepers. This cannot represent the entirety of the workforce. It may be as much as 10% (assuming 1000 total employees/level), but I can't imagine it rises above 20% (assuming 500 employees/level). This is perfectly in accord with what you're talking about, where a small number of master craftsman are working, assisted by many more journeymen and apprentices.

EDIT: I also disagree that laborers represent journeymen/apprentices working WITHOUT a master. Shopkeepers could still be and probably are employed even with the "Prioritize Non-Luxury Clothing" option.
I believe that base buildings are 5k employees / level (subsistence at 10k / level)