I've developed BI software for a few government agencies. I can tell you, with 100% assurance, each and every government and military organization runs on spreadsheet-like software. Ideally without pie graphs. Pie graphs are the devil's work. Pie graphs lead to bad decisions. 3D, multi-level donut graphs with gradients are enough to make me cry.
The limiting factor is accuracy of information. Census data, and all reports derived from it, includes the margin of error. If there are too few individual data-points to be statistically valid we need to suppress elements from the output. I'd love to see something similar in a game. "Where the hell did all these rebels come from??? The census didn't include them!" Can be answered with "Rebels don't fill out census forms, doofus." And a smart governor would notice the discrepancy between food consumed and population/taxes reported.
That being said, ministers never see the actual raw data. They are fed canned reports which summarize the same data in a few dozen different ways. And they have meetings with people to go over what's going on based on these reports.
The idea that the player should have to click on dozens of systems to gather some fairly basic information is revolting. This is a game, but by not providing the information the player needs, this turns it into a chore.
Can the people advocating NOT including a ledger honestly say that MOO2 is playable without the ledger screen? While you can play without it, it becomes much less fun and certain features, such as moving pops, would be much more challenging.
