[Rejected] Beta 020: Hunger

[Candlewhisper Archive]

Well, that's what betas are for. Probably safe to say this one is not working right now.

[Aelyria]

Yeah, count me as really confused and not especially happy with this as well. Despite having an excellent economy, super high employment, and both large Fishing (6th percentile) and Agriculture (4th percentile) industries (even my cheese exports are high), I would definitely end up being in the top 5% of the world for hunger. Plus a very high average lifespan. The only food-related things I'm *low* for are soda, pizza, and obesity, so it's really hard to see why my nation should have crippling, beyond-most-of-the-world food shortages. Having examined the stats, it frankly looks right now like it's just "are you a big nation? If yes, high score."

I do think it makes for an interesting question though. Pe Perhaps it needs to have greater scaling, or factoring in poor incomes and more food industries (cheese, fish, pizza)?

[Trotterdam]

This one is potentially contentious, as it more or less compares your food production output to your population.

Not really fair. All industry stats are already implicitly per capita, since they don't scale with population, so dividing them by population again doesn't make sense.

[Merconitonitopia]

This one is potentially contentious, as it more or less compares your food production output to your population. The design intention was to have a stat that increases by itself over time, but I admit, there's flaws to that.

The points you guys make are good ones, I may need to revisit the numbers

Candlewhisper, I would like for you to clarify what you mean. Do you mean to say that hunger is not measured in proportion to population, meaning that higher population nations will have more hunger simply because there are more people to be hungry in the first place? (In the same way that a higher population means a higher Economic Output, ceteris paribus.) In that case, this would be misleading, as most would interpret the census otherwise. Or do you mean to say that it is proportional to population, but that more populous countries suffer more pound-for-pound because they will have a harder time feeding all those people? If so, this appears to overlook that agricultural output is measured in per capita terms. Or perhaps you meant something else?

[Land Without Shrimp]

My score seems...very low?? 1.04 here. Not sure if I should be happy with that or not, haven't really looked at other nations yet.

[Krusavich]

I think VoVoDoCo hit the nail on the head. Most 'developed' nations with very low/no income tax are fully fed, while similar nations with very high tax rates (>95%) are not. It seems that high tax nations need fairly extensive welfare programs to make up this difference.

It makes sense somewhat, but it is a little jarring. Many of these high tax, high hunger nations have great stats for health, life expectancy, average poor income, etc. It just seems like an odd combination with something so basic as high hunger.

For myself, I thought health covered stuff like making sure people were fed but that evidently isn't the case. I mean, I wouldn't say a nation could be classified as very healthy while having a hunger issue...

I really don't know how this can be resolved cleanly. I guess we'll just have to start writing issues to raise welfare massively to confront this new hunger crisis

[Outer Sparta]

I think VoVoDoCo hit the nail on the head. Most 'developed' nations with very low/no income tax are fully fed, while similar nations with very high tax rates (>95%) are not. It seems that high tax nations need fairly extensive welfare programs to make up this difference.

It makes sense somewhat, but it is a little jarring. Many of these high tax, high hunger nations have great stats for health, life expectancy, average poor income, etc. It just seems like an odd combination with something so basic as high hunger.

For myself, I thought health covered stuff like making sure people were fed but that evidently isn't the case. I mean, I wouldn't say a nation could be classified as very healthy while having a hunger issue...

I really don't know how this can be resolved cleanly. I guess we'll just have to start writing issues to raise welfare massively to confront this new hunger crisis

Many nations that have high welfare still are in the top 1% of hunger, so they don't even take welfare into consideration.

[Candlewhisper Archive]

Yeah, this one doesn't work, I hadn't crunched it properly. Limited understanding of the game mechanics when I assembled it, a few years back.

Like I said though, that's what betas are for. Expect this one to be shelved for now.

[Socialist Ancomistan]

Glad this one is shelved