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- Does not the Bureaucracy Situation encourage liberal/laissez faire politics?
Because the number of laws should not necessarily affect bureaucracy, right?
I mean, things get complicated when we have very complicated rules on unemployment benefits but not by the very existence of it as such. Like, in a way low unemployment benefits should generate more bureaucracy than high benefits: with low benefits one can assume strict rules and controls on who actually gets benefits and how much; whilst high benefits I would associate more with looser rules and more generosity so less inclination to screen recipients as if everything depended on it.
In fact, there are clear evidences of "neoliberal" policies of increased "efficiency", cost cutting in welfare spending/healthcare/education actually increasing bureaucracy: in Holland we partially privatised healthcare and introduced a vast array of efficiency stuff which is now leading us to a very complicated system of healthcare insurance providers with all marketing/different prices/policies and so forth. Meanwhile your average doctor or nurse in Holland spends up to 30% of his/her time doing paperwork because they have to account fo every single action they perform (so they do not do more than necessary, thus cutting costs). That is still not mentioning the many managers there just to keep doing reorganisations that might somehow squeeze some more money out of the system.
As this happened healthcare spending was being cut.
I do approve of some kind of bureaucracy situation but the current one is a bit too "simple", and it just encourages neoliberal policies (which in the real world have actually led to increasing bureaucracy - the story I told in healthcare, trust me, is the very same in education, with all civil servants and any other part of economic life in Holland and elsewhere).
Right now there is only one single policy in Democracy 4 that I can well imagine lead to more bureaucracy: paradoxically, it is the Welfare Fraud Department, maybe also Body Cameras (disputable).
I mean, bureaucracy (as a bad thing) does not so much have to do with the share of government expenditures as fraction of gdp or number of different policies. It has to do with the way it is being implemented, with how complicated policy makers choose it to be, with things like "how much trust is given to those executing the tasks at hand - less trust generally leads to more controlling/surveillance of workers).
It should not matter whether there are 40 or 60 policies active in a nation.
What matters is whether a single 1 policy has 100 paragraphs of rules/applications, or 10.000 different cases and exceptions and so on.
And again, in a way those that are getting less funding then have to be very particular as to who gets funds and who doesn't (rather than the other way round, counter-intuitively).
Normally I see the point that a game can never really be 100.00% realistic. But this simplification is a particularly dangerous one , because now it leads to a very strong bias in the game that is not reflective of the real world.
Dear Developer, As much as I appreciate the idea of a Bureaucracy Situation, I implore you to take a further look into the way this "situation" is simulated. If the Bureaucracy situation is to be a justified part of the game, we should not judge by the number of policies as such, rather by stuff like "general trust in society", "ministers(?)", and whatever else there is.
I think we DEFINITELY need to model bureaucracy, as my italian friends assure me that running a business there is close to futile, and this does have real world effects. I also encounter it a fair bit (not as bad in the UK).
One thing that I thought of when reading these posts is that OMG. Universal Basic Income should DEFINITELY reduce bureaucracy! In a sense, it already does, since implementing it means you can (hopefully) scrap unemployment benefit, housing benefit, pensions and child benefit (4 policies into 1!), but I think the universality aspect means its super-easy to implement, and thus deserves an extra modifier to reduce bureaucracy,
Also I totally agree that welfare fraud departments are definitely going to be bureaucratic, so we should absolutely include a positive modifier on bureaucracy for them too.
I think its worth me adding in (at some point) a special targeted policy that clamps down on bureaucracy. Like a policy-simplification department, or maybe 'anti-bureaucracy initiative'. Maybe it would involve little money, but a hefty amount of political capital to implement, as almost by definition, there would be opposition to it form the kind of people who agree to implement policy!
Plus, if it really bugs you, its easy to add an override (like italy has but in reverse) to reduce bureaucracy. Or you can edit the main config file
\data\simconfig.txt
BUREAUCRACY_PER_POLICY = 0.003
make that lower, or even zero :D.
Thank you for your answer. Very much appreciate it. I think your suggestions are good and yes i do think that some kind of bureaucracy model is indeed interesting.
However, I do believe that maybe there should be a bit more done about it still. After all, this sort of simulation does need a certain amount of realism in order to be worth it (because the whole point of Bureaucracy simulation is indeed realism). And the current approach does very much encourage small government (especially strongly discourages social engineering stuff as I see: many small policies such as in Sweden - but Sweden is still much less bureaucratic than Italy whilst Italy is much less big on this social engineering I'd think so this is why it matters for realism).
Yet the notion that smaller governments (with fewer departments/policies) somehow reduce bureaucracy (and let alone bureaucracy in the world OUTSIDE of government, in the private world), is not correct: also not incorrect but also not correct.
In fact, it is often the case that when government steps out, or increases the involvement of private enterprise (private healthcare insurance, stuff like this, or tuition fees and grants i guess), that is when the thing becomes complicated. It *might* become more efficient but often increased surveillance and explosive increase in number of managers offsets that "efficiency".
Now this is not me arguing that all liberalisation is bad and that the game should encourage people to become as big government as possible.
But I do say that right now the simulation seems to uncritically adopt the very problematic/faulty notion that somehow privatisation and less government regulation lead to less bureaucracy: and it seems to dismiss the important notion that bureaucracy also comes from the private sector (such as: in Holland you spend loads of time each year figuring out the cheapest insurances / or the thousands of lawyers that have to enforce patents/intellectual property).
And in doing so, the bureaucracy simulation (meant for realism) might then actually become self-defeating (in making the game in fact less realistic). This is not me being bugged by it but rather me thinking this simulation should be done differently in order to really help the game: sure enough I am politically left-leaning but I was also the one who said that the school meals should be less easy/less cheap (even as school meals are arguably a very socialist/welfare thing and even though I love that policy even in real life).
Bureaucracy is a fantastic simulation, but I really, really implore you to look into this. Because even with the above suggestions (they are great, I would love it if they were implemented); still the underlying trend/idea is not changed.
A few suggestions, maybe they can help/worth considering:
- tax shelters/mortgage tax relief/food stamps/vouchers/tax credits in all forms/charity tax relief - these are things that *might* increase bureaucracy (complicating fiscal rules and who gets it and who does not)
- so with immigration rules+border controls (more rules/stricter, specific rules lead to more bureaucracy, arguably)
- work safety law (Maybe??)
- welfare fraud department and other surveillance policies.
> maybe stuff like welfare policies need some kind of way to "tighten eligibility", reducing cost but increasing bureaucracy; unless we say that the slider does that. In that case there should in fact be a paradoxical situation where low food stamps for instance lead to higher bureaucracy whilst maxed food stamps only slightly increase bureaucracy.
> private healthcare should also increase bureaucracy, so with private education / in the sense that these are just as bureaucratic institutions like public health services (because of the bother with insurances, the whole "industry" behind that, the assumed focus on profits/cost minimisation (so managers cutting costs and stuff).
The thing is: private healthcare is also not free of bureaucracy. same with schools.
- maybe some new policies for new tax deductions for instance (and they can then lead to more bureaucracy - not because of increase in tax rates or introduction of new taxes, rather that the existing ones go from 10 different rules to 100 different rules/exemptions)
Such is my suggestion.
I have noticed in the Trello board that Welfare Fraud Department should reduce bureaucracy.
I hope that the above proves the opposite: such a department (you create a whole department for it!) increases bureaucracy: increases distrust of citizens (which encourages putting everything in contracts and under scrutiny because we live under the assumption that everyone is only after own gain and that welfare dependents are frauds and lazy). It increases surveillance and actually complicates the system.
It certainly does not reduce bureaucracy, because it does not abolish any rules. It only enforces them and in fact increases number of employees, rules, protocols, enforcement costs and so forth.
This reflects the supposed tradeoff of such a department: yes, you bring in some extra money, but this is traded off not just with angry poor people, but also with increased general distrust in the system and complications.
I have a fantastic example for this: Toeslagenaffaire Netherlands.
The Welfare Fraud Department of Holland started tracking people who have support for childcare of government, very agressively cracking down on any abuse. Led to very complicated systems and algorhythms, led to mistrust against citizens (later when this came out: mistrust against government because government does not trust people), it even led to increased racial tension in that most targeted people were actually targeted because the algorythm took nationality into account. There were many people involved with this and the system became so untransparent and the information provided about these practices to the parliament was so poor that in fact a few months ago, our Dutch government has resigned because of this.
And this also touches upon something else: because childcare provision was *partly* free but not all of it, there were complicated rules for who is entitled and who isn't. So here, maxing it out would have meant that it was free for all parents to use (so without the whole system of exclusion and calculations, depending on income and circumstances) and in fact there would have never been need for a fraud department let alone a massive national scandal that ended our government's term.
Same with other welfare policies: supposedly, when maxed out, there will be no such complicated rules on who gets how much; not so much focus on very specific cases so only the people that need it most badly, get it.
I do understand the theory behind the idea that bureaucracy should be high for some welfare policies, and lower or zero at their max. This does make a lot of sense, and would be technically easy to do. However, because its a game, we have to ensure that its not only accurate, but that the player understands what is going on.
I couldn't do that for all policies, because for some, its not applicable, or even the reverse. For example, raising or lowering income tax (or any tax) does not necessarily change the bureaucracy involved. The same applies to stuff like military spending or police funding.
So.... To implement this idea it would need to be explained to the player that some sorts of policies increase bureaucracy, others do not. The alternative would be to add explicit effects to every single policy, which involves a massive amount of clutter for what would be maybe a 0.5% (almost invisible) bureaucracy effect for each policy...
I think it might be worth having an explicit anti-bureaucracy initiative that compensates for the inherent anti-policy bias that bureaucracy creates. The game is often criticized for having a pro-policy bias so...its hard to get the balance right.