Split out ownership from employment

[Panagean]

With the (wonderful!) announcement that AI-investment is coming to V3 1.2, I think it's worth highlighting some issues that emerge with owners being employed by the factories that they own (and benefitting from their ownership stake as supplemental employment income).

• (In 1.2) capitalist pops will invest to produce more capitalist pops, rather than make themselves richer
• (This is because) Each capitalist can only own/be employed in one factory
• Building new agricultural buildings ultimately creates new aristocrats as a kind of supply/demand process - this isn't how inherited aristocracy works
• You can't simulate out-of-state ownership, or partial-government investment, or foreign investment
• Mass shareholder capitalism is harder to represent

I would instead propose:

• Capitalists and aristocrats cease to exist as an employed population: they are pops that do not require a job that will only exist if the SoL generated by their dividends is enough to support a high quality of life (i.e. the marginal increase of *also* taking a middle-class job is not worth the hours spent and lost leisure).
• It is much harder for pops to promote into aristocrats, though aristo-pops can grow naturally over time
• Each industry in each state has an extra tab summarising all of the pops (and potentially also governments) which hold ownership shares in that business: this is originally entirely upper-class aristocrats and capitalists
• Middle-class pops gradually enter ownership roles (and therein create a possibility to promote to capitalists) as they participate in the investment pool and potentially as a freebie as others invest in expanding their industry (i.e. representing the promotion of senior managers and engineers into more senior roles)
• The investment pool participation thing is complicated, but there could be a handwaving solution where the pool prioritises in-state contributors and pops making large per-member contributions first in terms of who gets allocated ownership slices, with potentially a minimum cutoff to avoid fragmentation and some randomness to avoid self-reinforcing total winner-takes-all behaviour
• To avoid processor-hogging, large shareholders will gradually "buy out" smaller shareholders from the reserves of the business to avoid pop fragmentation

This would hopefully result in:

• A both more competitive and more monopolistic model of C19th capitalism and its surrounding politics
• More interesting behaviour after the exchange of territory, resulting in mixed-ownership or infamy-producing seizure of assets
• A framework for introducing much-requested foreign investment

 

[Froonk]

On top of all these great suggestions, more I play Victoria 3 more I realize how much of a roadblock having aristocrats and capitalists as employees is to other game systems. Such as adding financial sector with banking and stock market. It is really imperative ownership and employment be made separate qualities.

I would even suggest removing aristocrats and capitalists from "qualifications" altogether and instead make it a type a pop switches to if said pop has a certain level of wealth and derives a greater portion of their income and wealth from ownership revenue and profit dividends rather than wages. Which of course would require a system for other pops to invest but ultimately would add a lot to game's economic dynamics. This would mean also aristocrats would be much more persistent and capitalists would require a society with large amount of capital ownership.

Latter factor, capitalists requiring capital ownership, would also prevent colonies from minting thousands of local aristocrats and capitalists. Because the society would require a certain level of capital accumulation and money velocity to have capitalists in the first place. You could have regions starting with different levels of capital ownership and thus better create the core-periphery dynamic. If you colonize a region, your aristocrats and capitalists would become the owners of plantations and mines, deriving profit and moving capital back to core instead of locals becoming enriched by state investment by qualifying to be aristocrats and capitalists.

I think the gross misrepresentation of colonialism, including inadvertently presenting the idea of colonialism developing colonized regions is one of the biggest issues of the game. Which ties to biggest lack of the game currently which is financial sector and representation of capital.

 

[Panagean]

Thanks! Agreed on all fronts!

 

[MarKarev]

I would instead propose:

• Capitalists and aristocrats cease to exist as an employed population: they are pops that do not require a job that will only exist if the SoL generated by their dividends is enough to support a high quality of life (i.e. the marginal increase of *also* taking a middle-class job is not worth the hours spent and lost leisure).

I totally agree. I do however wonder how we should simulate how the Aristocrats could have high government positions (or how government officials were granted titles) or served as military officers if they are to become "self-employed".

 

[Panagean]

I totally agree. I do however wonder how we should simulate how the Aristocrats could have high government positions (or how government officials were granted titles) or served as military officers if they are to become "self-employed".

This is a very cool idea - how do you think it would play out in game?

I have been thinking recently (without yet having delved into playing it) about the way the Better Politics Mod simulates IGs more as insitutional forces than can lend weight to political movements but don't always have to, and "reactionary aristocrat character leads the armed forces Institution and therefore politics does this" feels like an interesting way of modelling how both political aristocracy works and how institutional groups work in a contested 19th century pseudo-democracy.