Ideas to mitigate the problem of economies running out of people

[TheFlemishDuck]

In what world is running out of peasants not realistic? What country do you live in that has a lot of peasants? The economic development of every country on earth has involved the population moving out of subsistence agriculture. I'm honestly fascinated what you have read for you to make such a statement.

its easy to run out of peasents to begin with if your using no automation for one. But i think the point is that there is a moment one can achieve relatively early all considered where you did apply all tech and automation that you could, and your population is working as productive as it could, and then what are you going to do with your construction sector and the massive resource machine that is behind supplying it with construction materials if there just arnt any more peasents to still work in more industry? Like sure there are things you could do to free up labor here like deconstructing universities and construction sectors, but the point is that with exponential growth some players can achieve high tech full employment well before the end of the game, like hitting a ceiling, and its like "your economy is done now", lest you pull in immigration en mass or start conquering places and even then that might not offer enough population to soak up the sheer economic growth capacity your construction sector can offer.

heack it can almost feel like hitting a post scarcity scenario, although we can interpret what we want with SOL. If one can achieve a high GDP per capita one will often be able to fund the state purely trough GDP minting late game and have a tax free society to boost further consumption, which can boost some further GDP growth and minting in an autartic situation. What else are you going to spend money on if you completed the research tree and everyone is employed in the best job possible? Armies i suppose, though when achieving certain sizes as large country's your 1000 unit army might become rather affordable in regards to the kind of income your getting. I'm not saying all players will get to this point, or with all nations, but the things you can do with nations like Russia if you build up a lot of momentum early on can have you wind up in situations where you just dont know what to do anymore with all your money and your massive construction pool. Especially the tech thing, if you really can bloat your state budget to be able to build 100's of university's early on and create massive innovation overflow pfff things get rediculous sometimes.

 

[Secret Master]

heack it can almost feel like hitting a post scarcity scenario,

I do want to point out that it might look like post scarcity for your POPs, but it sure as Hell isn't for your resource buildings.

Sure, I can automate more, but even if I'm #1 oil producers and importing a ton of oil, I still don't always have enough to run maximum automation (and best PMs in relevant buildings).

I'm not sure what you would even call it in economic terms, but it's like a post-scarcity consumer economy with Malthusian limits capping your ability to free up labor. Like, it can be so lopsided sometimes that I wish I could build synthetic oil plants just to employ people by bringing down the cost of the oil used to automate factories that free up the labor going to the synthetic oil plants....

I think I need a nap.

 

[yurcick]

it's like a post-scarcity consumer economy with Malthusian limits capping your ability to free up labor. Like, it can be so lopsided sometimes that I wish I could build synthetic oil plants just to employ people by bringing down the cost of the oil used to automate factories that free up the labor going to the synthetic oil plants....

I think I need a nap.

it’s hard to imagine that it was much worse between 1.1 and around 1.5 IIRC. But it was.

 

[Froonk]

Population density and employable workforce were absolutely concerns in this era. However this running out of people is a late game issue and I think the issue is downstream from other problems, namely that resource buildings have a limit but production buildings don't. So you can make endless production chains everywhere as long as you have available resources to support it which higher-tech PMs only make more efficient per worker.

I think there are two main issues here and I repeat this a lot about a lot of economy related systems:

1. Qualifications

If there were less employable engineers and machinists, there would be less employed laborers, this would be a lesser problem early in the game (where running out of people is already not a problem) because the ratio of engineers & machinists to laborer would be lower. In general this is needed for production buildings to be relatively more valuable compared to resource buildings.

2. PM costs

There are no costs to changing PMs to more efficient ones, you can tinker it however you want. If switching PMs had an upfront cost this would make more efficient labor thus more efficient factories more limited, there would be less factories overall which would make them more valuable.

Overall the dynamic between resources and production is honestly reverse of how it should be, it's like this in all stages of the game but this becomes especially obvious with more efficient PMs.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

I do want to point out that it might look like post scarcity for your POPs, but it sure as Hell isn't for your resource buildings.

Sure, I can automate more, but even if I'm #1 oil producers and importing a ton of oil, I still don't always have enough to run maximum automation (and best PMs in relevant buildings).

I'm not sure what you would even call it in economic terms, but it's like a post-scarcity consumer economy with Malthusian limits capping your ability to free up labor. Like, it can be so lopsided sometimes that I wish I could build synthetic oil plants just to employ people by bringing down the cost of the oil used to automate factories that free up the labor going to the synthetic oil plants....

I think I need a nap.

Well there is certainly a difference here between the "lets do the China with 1 billion pop run" and "lets play a small nation and focus on high GDP per capita maybe trough massive foreign investment" with tiers in between lol. I wish we could automate financial districts, companie HQ's are better especially the ones hitting 500 productivity and i dont want average 70 productivity manor houses its not gud enuff!!! I have to say though playing a small nation that does foreign investment is significantly more laid back than having to add buildings in the queu in batches per 50 every so few days that the game pass trough.Just watch the districts tick up ... and the cosumer imports increase...

I doubt you have a scaricity of coffee though ...

I neither dont when i'm at 30 Sol with a society, and at that rate your only consuming 8x more consumer goods than a country with 16 average SOL. Its not an issue for trade to have the AI pump your country full with consumer goods, its when i would like the AI to have a consumer market of its own that its going to be more scarce to see them having a 30 SOL society. Nah plenty of coffee and tobacco and thee to go around thats for sure. They dont nessecarily ask for much oil as a consumer good, though while i might want to have all my pops in financial districts i would be hard to ignore on car and radio production because the AI might ignore it too much, yeah that car demand is also disproportionate enough. Afaik if you get it enough into rich man territory you can have like 75% of families own a car by game end too. But hey, with the right set up your late game society looks like it could beat our contemporary standard of living practically.

 

[Amina144]

Am I the only who doesn't use automation PMs at all? I feel like they are not worthwhile at all, the manpower you save is just needed to be used elsewhere to fullfill those input goods. And plus the gameplay loop is too heavily designed around converting as many people as possible from peasants. I only used them in this certain point in midgame when you actually run out peasants to convert. But then quickly the pollution + lack of resources + overpopulation means I just disable automation PMs again just to not deal with unemployment.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Am I the only who doesn't use automation PMs at all? I feel like they are not worthwhile at all, the manpower you save is just needed to be used elsewhere to fullfill those input goods.

It might be different depending on the country, but generally most country's will want to go heavily automated "eventually" as it results in a high increase of productivity per worker, pretty much as a means to top of the potential of their country if they would hit that limit to growth. That it needs other inputs in turn isnt really an issue, the proportional savings are big enough and can also be applied to resource production like mines. What is more important is that you get a society with high paying jobs in part trough high base wages given to professions and in part trough high productivity per worker leading to more wage increases. You similarly get more GDP per capita, more output per worker really, hence that if you can afford it and feed it the required resources and keep on fully employing pops trough further economic expansion then its worth it. If you cant economically expand enough that you cannot keep full employment while automating then it's of more questionable utility, which is something that can more easily occur at stages of the game for underdeveloped pop rich countries or those that can pull in very large immigration waves. Alternatively you simply might not have access to the coal or oil to further automate but thats another matter.

 

[IsaacCAT]

Automation is the single most important tool to increase wages

 

[Don_Quigleone]

Personally, I would caution against anything too drastic.

I think instead a better approach might be to subtly change how wages are calculated.

Currently, wages are rock bottom until peasants run out, which was an improvement over release. However, this has the effect of causing buildings to be more profitable and generate more reinvestment then they probably should.

Instead, wages should probably increase a bit more gradually. Instead it would be better if each state had a set base wage which is identical across all buildings in that state. This should be calculated with a somewhat more nuanced calculation then what exists currently, with wages ramping up when <5% of employable pops are unemployed/peasants. As the set wage increases, some buildings in the state should be rendered unprofitable and start downsizing, until employment comes into equilibrium.

This change should also push up government wages across the board, making it more tricky to sustain a surplus as you approach full employment.

 

[yurcick]

Says "let's not do anything too drastic".
Proposed bombing the labour market to hell and building it anew.
Leaves.

 

[Secret Master]

Says "let's not do anything too drastic".
Proposed bombing the labour market to hell and building it anew.
Leaves.

In fairness, I'm not even sure what a good model for wages looks like in the early game given how peasants actually function right now. :shrugs:

 

[SpardaSon21]

Maybe not 250k, but it did employ "more than 100k people" at it's peak in the 1930s per the Ford website.

I agree with what others have said RE artisan production and when discussions of artisans have come up in the past, I was of the opinion that they should come from urban centers, which should create small numbers of more "advanced" goods. Subsistence farms produce basic clothing/furniture/food, urban centers should produce small amounts of luxury clothing/luxury furniture/groceries.

Yeah, and when it was built it was the largest vertically integrated factory in the world, producing not just for its own needs but elsewhere.

Afaik if you get it enough into rich man territory you can have like 75% of families own a car by game end too.

Actually pretty close to accurate for the USA. According to a quick look online 60% of families had a car in 1929, and there's this chart.

Looks like by about 1936 we were close to one car for every 4.5 people, or just about one car per family, and that's with the onset of the Great Depression causing a collapse in ownership.

Personally, I would caution against anything too drastic.

I think instead a better approach might be to subtly change how wages are calculated.

Currently, wages are rock bottom until peasants run out, which was an improvement over release. However, this has the effect of causing buildings to be more profitable and generate more reinvestment then they probably should.

Instead, wages should probably increase a bit more gradually. Instead it would be better if each state had a set base wage which is identical across all buildings in that state. This should be calculated with a somewhat more nuanced calculation then what exists currently, with wages ramping up when <5% of employable pops are unemployed/peasants. As the set wage increases, some buildings in the state should be rendered unprofitable and start downsizing, until employment comes into equilibrium.

This change should also push up government wages across the board, making it more tricky to sustain a surplus as you approach full employment.

Which is funny since in places that had a relative population scarcity (like the USA did for a good chunk of the game's time frame), there simply weren't enough hands for everything that needed to be done, hence the push for automation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturing

The laboring classes are comparatively few in number, but this is counterbalanced by, and indeed, may be one of the causes of the eagerness by which they call in the use of machinery in almost every department of industry. Wherever it can be applied as a substitute for manual labor, it is universally and willingly resorted to ... It is this condition of the labor market, and this eager resort to machinery wherever it can be applied, to which, under the guidance of superior education and intelligence, the remarkable prosperity of the United States is due.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

Which is funny since in places that had a relative population scarcity (like the USA did for a good chunk of the game's time frame), there simply weren't enough hands for everything that needed to be done, hence the push for automation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturing

Wages being higher would make automation much more potent, while in game it's usually a bit "meh".

 

[SpardaSon21]

Wages being higher would make automation much more potent, while in game it's usually a bit "meh".

Yup, historically the USA had a combo of high wages and high SoL powered by a combo of labor shortages, automation, and education. In 1870 the USA had an 80% literacy rate, and that's including the 80% illiteracy rate among the blacks who had just escaped chattel slavery five years earlier.

For a world comparison in 1870 Sweden was 80%, the UK 76%, France 69%, Italy at 32%, and Spain at 30% literacy rates for adults.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Wages being higher would make automation much more potent, while in game it's usually a bit "meh".

Not sure what your frame of reference is, the sheer difference between the lowest and highest wages i could record for a single pop type are huge. I am often having stark wage differences between colonies and mainland which means that the mainland typically do get automation and the colonies very often dont. Which is to say automation is quite interesting when the wage cost is relatively high in an industry and potential a waste and a detriment when wages are very low because of exploitation, it nicely differentiates between labor intensive and capital intensive industry.

Rather, perhaps one might argue that wages dont really hit levels for most AI country's that otherwise would have been reached in real life, simply also because they dont reach as high as a SOL as they likely would have in history.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

Not sure what your frame of reference is, the sheer difference between the lowest and highest wages i could record for a single pop type are huge. I am often having stark wage differences between colonies and mainland which means that the mainland typically do get automation and the colonies very often dont. Which is to say automation is quite interesting when the wage cost is relatively high in an industry and potential a waste and a detriment when wages are very low because of exploitation, it nicely differentiates between labor intensive and capital intensive industry.

Rather, perhaps one might argue that wages dont really hit levels for most AI country's that otherwise would have been reached in real life, simply also because they dont reach as high as a SOL as they likely would have in history.

The problem is that wages are a bit all or nothing. In a given state they're either really high, or rock bottom. This is because of the way wages are calculated. Either buildings have all of the negotiating power or pops do. There's never an equilibrium between the two.

You also never see unemployment due to wages being too high.

 

[TitaniumMan91]

Yeah, and when it was built it was the largest vertically integrated factory in the world, producing not just for its own needs but elsewhere.

If you think of the buildings as specific buildings, sure, but I don't; I think of them as something akin to sectors. I'm not building "A" farm, I'm building an entire faming town. I'm not building "A" car factory, I'm building the factories the assemble the cars but also make the engines and transmission and the tires etc.

 

[Jamey]

I'm not really sure that with the game's mechanics there's a good way to represent actual homesteading. You'd need to basically unlock the same PM's for subsistence farms as specialized farms have, especially in places like the USA that rapidly adopted mechanical means of harvesting and processing due to constant labor shortages, especially among the smallholders. We certainly didn't have large-scale factory farms in the early 1830's when mechanical reapers went on the market, after all. Even then you're still likely to wind up ahistorically urbanized, despite having economically productive and self-sufficient family-run farmsteads, aka financially profitable subsistence farming. If you look at the various censuses the USA undertook, even as late as 1900 over half of our "cities" have under 100k people living in them, and you're looking at an inverse of that in this game, even in agriculturally dominant areas.

Fun fact: even now the USA has a great many small farms, despite the continual land consolidation process that's been ongoing ever since the advent of the factory farming system.
View attachment 1278750
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_FarmsFarmland.pdf

Given that definition, I’m surprised that there aren’t more small farms.

I know it’s popular in rural areas of California for people to lease out extra land to grow wine grapes or other crops because of various legal benefits to being a small farm.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Automation is the single most important tool to increase wages

Welll ... technically productivity is. Company headquarters with 500 productivity pay out some mighty wages, but there is no automation to apply there, however if you manage to make most of your poppulation working in successful financial districts and company's they will beat a country that has a normal economy and is highly automated in wages and sol easily. But its also with foreign investment that the difference becomes noticable, people working in financial districts that get 100 productivity get better wages than people working in manor houses with 70 productivity, and company headquarters that have 500 productivity pay far more wages than company headquarters with 200 productivity or financial districts with 100. This matter is more than important enough for the min-max success of a foreign investment game run that i would take a lot of care, caution and preparation in such a game to launch my companies of choice (those i think will perform best) in a way that is most optimal for their growth. The resulting differences in wages and sol can be significant if you take the best choices there.

 

[PedroLuiz]

No matter what band-aid you apply into the system you will never beat the simple math that
same employment per construction point + cheaper construction points through tech + more investment = too much employment in the end game
And that's before you factor in that a third of the workforce should be at the urban centers instead of industry