Wealth gaps and average incomes

[Katie Boundary]

I recently observed something very weird happen: I imposed a tax for the purpose of punishing manufacturers who entomb their products in too much packaging, and this somehow caused a dramatic increase in the incomes of my poorest citizens, leading to speculation as to how all this stuff works and how it should work...

Wealth gaps should be calculated exclusively as a function of average income of rich and average income of poor, with those two stats being the ones that are actually affected by issue options. Making the rich poorer should not somehow automatically make the poor richer.

Wealth Gaps is calculated entirely by dividing Income of Rich/Income of Poor. What happens is that increased economic freedom generally raises rich income and decreases poor income and vice versa for a decrease in freedom, thus changing wealth gaps.

Actually, from my experience, it is pretty clear that the game first calculates Average Income and Wealth Gaps, then calculates Average Income of Poor and Average Income of Rich as derived stats from those two - instead of calculating incomes for various segments of the population first and then calculating Wealth Gaps as a derived stat, which would probably be more realistic but also harder to model.

This is evidenced by the many times that an issue option caused significant opposite-direction changes to both Average Income of Poor and Average Income of Rich, but only a much smaller change (or even none at all) to Average Income. This seems to be a very common side effect of issues that affect Economic Freedom, in particular.