How To Prove Keynes Right: The TNO Economy Guide

Fun fact: the branding image for this guide is called "Super Jumbo".

If you have no idea how to run a nation's economy, then you're in the right place.

How To Read the GUI

Surprise economy GUI jumpscare!

This is your economy GUI, where you manage your country's economy. Looks complicated, right? Well, don't worry, it's not. Well, it kind of is, but it's really easy to understand at the same time.

I've number-coded each part I'll be talking about for your convenience, starting with

1, 2, and 3. Your Inflation, GDP, and Debt

The easiest to understand out of these three is your GDP, so I'll be starting with that.

Your Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is "the market value of all the final goods and services produced in a specific time period" (i.e. a year: thanks, Wikipedia) by whatever country you're playing. In more simple terms, it's how much money your country is making in a year. There are two measures to your GDP's value: your real GDP growth and your nominal GDP growth.

Your nominal growth (n) is the projected growth of your nominal GDP, i.e. how much money you're reporting, in a year. This is boosted by national spirits, focuses, decisions, money creation, trade, and the total combined GDP value of all of your states and all "Misc income" boosts, your "GDP contribution" (GDP * 0.135), and your industrial contribution (I have No Clue how this is calculated) as well as your "taxable population" modifier which is either 1 or 0 depending on your women's rights, poverty, education, and child labor laws multiplied by how much money your government is actually taking in. Your nominal GDP determines how many production units you can get, though I haven't found a decent calculation. That sounds complicated, I know. Don't worry. The computer does all that.

Your real growth (r) is the actual growth of your GDP, i.e. how much money you're actually making, in a year. This is your nominal GDP growth subtracted by your current inflation: this is the number you have to pay attention to. For example, let's say your GDP is, nominally, growing at 5% each year, but you have 2% inflation. This means your GDP is, in reality, only growing by 3% each year. Simple, right?

Your Inflation rate is, according to the IMF, "the rate of increase in prices over a given period of time". In-game, inflation is a lot simpler than that. All your inflation does is subtract itself from your nominal GDP growth, which results in your real GDP growth. Inflation rises due to money creation, unchecked spending, and sudden increases in GDP growth, i.e. by cheating or annexing another country. Your inflation will always rise with your GDP, and while counting your pennies is a decent choice it's not always the practical one. As long as your inflation rate isn't higher than your nominal GDP growth, then you're good.

Debt is, simply, how much your government owes to foreign and domestic creditors. This doesn't make sense for every nation to have, but apparently everybody does. Anyways, your debt is increased by spending while under a deficit and decreased by spending while under a surplus. More on that later (when we get to your reserves), but for right now, the amount of debt you can take on is impacted by your credit rating. Higher credit ratings let you take higher and higher amounts of debt (to the point where that number can be infinite), and lower credit ratings do the exact opposite.

4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Your Economic Sphere, Yearly Deficit/Surplus, Surplus/Deficit Rate, Expenditures, Revenue, and your Reserves

Your Economic Sphere determines who you're allowed to trade with. A nation in the CPS's sphere would get less favorable rates and sometimes even be unable to trade with nations in the OFN or Einheitspakt, for instance.

Your Yearly Deficit and Surplus numbers are important! If you're spending more money than you can take in, i.e. spending a surplus that's too large (which is represented by the green text turning red), then your inflation and debt are going to grow out of control. At the same time, if you're hoarding too much money, then your reserves will be bloated and you'll not be re-investing as much money back into the nation: resulting in your growth plateauing. You should never have an excess a mount of money in your reserves, and it's always prudent to use it to either pay your debt or invest back into your country to raise your growth directly. You can see how much your yearly deficit/surplus is compared to your real GDP growth by analyzing the Surplus/Deficit Rate percentage beneath it.

Your Expenditures and Revenue are how much you're spending and making in a year. It's generally wise to keep your military expenditures as low as possible and your civilian expenditures as high as possible: a healthier and happier population results in less poverty, more population growth, and a more active economy, meaning your economy will grow faster. Military confrontations are so rare in TNO that it's not worth keeping your money high on it while playing any country that's not Russia or the USA before the '64 elections. Below this are the Tax and Austerity buttons: civilian and military austerity should always be on, and so should tax cuts if you can afford them. Tax cuts decrease income but increase growth, and civilian and military austerity both increase income by reducing spending: generally, you can get the GDP growth from cutting taxes for a pretty good deal since the vanilla factory system means so little in TNO.

Finally, your Reserves are the money you're not spending. Hoarding too much results in plateaued growth, and as long as you have debt then all the money that is either actively in or would go to your liquid reserves are instead used to automatically pay down your debt: this isn't a bad thing. If you want to, you can turn this feature off and instead manually control it, which could be useful if you're in dire need of GDP growth.

10. Economic Crises

TNO has seven economic crises: six are vanilla, while one is exclusive to Burgundy. Your seven vanilla ones are

• NEGATIVE REAL GROWTH: Your real GDP growth is lower than your inflation rate. Either increase your GDP growth and/or lower your inflation.
  
• INFLATION CRITICAL: Your inflation rate is so high that your money is becoming worthless. Either reduce spending, stop printing money, and/or reduce inflation.
  
• EXTREMELY HIGH DEFICIT: You're spending more money than you can afford. Reduce spending.
  
• CRITICAL DEBT: Your debt is too high. Reduce spending, run a surplus, and pay back your debt.
  
• BLOATED RESERVES: You have too much money in your reserves. Start running a deficit to pay it off to your debtors and/or invest as much money as you can. You can only invest one time per year.
  
• FISCAL CRISIS: Well, you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥.
  
• BURGUNDIAN FISCAL CRISIS: In around 1963, Himmler shoots his own economic minister. Burgundy is in a permanent state of Fiscal Crisis from this point onwards. Have fun.

How to Prove Keynes Right: or, Recap

You want to maximize spending as much as possible while keeping inflation as low as possible. To do this, max out your social expenditures and reduce your military expenditures to their maximums (or as high/low as you can get without that "YEARLY DEFICIT" turning red). If you can afford to, cut taxes; if you have to, raise taxes. Always be on either "Fresh Off the Presses" (for GDP growth) or "Count Our Pennies" (for inflation reduction). Debt is automatically paid if you have a deficit or if you have reserves while you still have debt, but always keep an eye on it. The higher your credit rating, the more debt you can afford. Watch out for fiscal crises and do your best to counteract them. Raise and lower taxes as necessary. If not at war, always be on both civilian and military austerity.

[jamcarmody]

That said, you *do* want to cut taxes, always, as often as you can, and as far as you can: your productivity will more than make up for it!
Odd that I and Mr. Keynes agreed on *anything* but chronologically-speaking, his stance and mine simply discerned the same reality; thing is: to do so solvently, what you *need* is a self-growing economy, and that only ever happens via private property, capitalism, not state-run anything.
To a statesman, or those who'd strive for that career: figure yourself being a customer for your workforce to get the necessary gear; not unlike a head of the national executive branch arranging to buy military hardware; a single government contract, fulfilled, is almost always easily sufficient to set a corporate titan for life!

[jamcarmody]

Though, what you're dealing with in the game is *macroeconomics* which roughly *really* translates into *resource* economics as the primary currency- and the factories: those are the things that process the resources.... so the answer really is to build a rather large amount of good quality civilian factories... as for building military factories: those're probably going to have to take priority on order of buildings laid out; but only because if you want a self-sustaining and ever-increasing economy: you want civilian, grass-roots, capitalist focus on your economy: none of the state-run economy garbage- as that is always what that sort of scam to the government always *is*, view it as drugs: a means to enslave you as the head of state to a gang!

[jamcarmody]

Well, in regard to economics, you really have two options: you can go with the self-sustaining one that Conrade Adanaur did in regard to West Germany at least: and that's basic capitalism; which will work 100% of the time at least, or you can try to maintain that while going with "Central Planning" as the Marxists foolishly tried to do, every single time, and ensue things like the Holodomor famine-murder sprees, with the predictable result of your country self-destructing.

[jamcarmody]

What you may not know is that FDR *tried* Keynes method, and it caused a depression *within* the depression, it made it worse; these methods never ever work- nor does any centralized government control of economics; bar none.

[jamcarmody]

To be blunt, simply put: go totally with the private property principle, and as the proverbial head of the country; subcontract *everything*, the civilian industrfalists will know their trades better than you'll know their trades for sure... or go the pathway of Stalin and Mao and induce massive failure on all fronts, such as mass starvations and the collapse of your labor-force.
In the end: you really only have those two main pathways; but the one that works every single time is to really reduce the government sector.

[jamcarmody]

Plus, the mere *year* that Plymouth went fully *Capitalist*, defined by private property and yes, each man chose his own employment; the economy *thrived* and as such societies are more just in *all* dimensions thereof, by any metric at all, we're left with the conclusion that yes, Marx was dead wrong on all accounts.

[jamcarmody]

Greed does not explain that; bizarrely, in fact: greed is truly the primary "virtue" (such as it is) of the Marxists, and all collectivists at that. What that is, arguably to them, if put into economic means, is an idea of reinvesting; preposterous, and somewhat demeaning to make a financial matter of human life, but that'd clarify their motives, as well as any argument that'd fit the conditions.

[jamcarmody]

Think it through critically, every single time Marx's ideas've been put into practice; what has happened? Complete and utter failure.
If anybody wanted to design a program to destroy a state, society, region, or culture, you *cannot* do a higher-quality job of discerning the program to do such damage than a command economy, which's *precisely* what Marxism in practice is; combined with overt *stealing*, via "Redistributing the wealth"... now some of that kind of thing *can and does* occur, legitimately, say some rich man decides, as many're historically prone to doing, to go into philanthropy; that's that to a T, and since he's oh, giving away the fruits of his own labor, or the work he bought, (hence legitimately his, as is anything bought the property of the buyer, so long as the sale's legitimately able to have been truly free to be done)... that's what's going on.

[jamcarmody]

The Plymouth Colony when set up was categorically of the same model as Marx sided with, and like every single time his ideas've been put into action: the result was the same: full-on collapse.
Capitalism works, no other system has any hope of success. Simple as that.
Marx sided with slavery, he was really remarkably pro-slavery, as he laid out... you failed to research this matter at all to speak of.

[WATCH LAIN]

"In the second type of colonies-plantations-where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labour, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it."

as well as, of course, actually reading marx.