by Max Barry

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Current Betas

Beta Archive

[001] Banning Religion affects ReligiousnessIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Consider whether religion is officially banned when assessing citizen religiousness.

[002] Religion ignored by Scientific Advancement/PrimitivenessSUPERSEDED

Proposed Change: No longer consider religiousness when assessing nation advancement/primitiveness.

[002a] Religion ignored by Scientific Advancement/Primitiveness + Adjust PoliciesSUPERSEDED

Proposed Change: No longer consider religiousness when assessing nation advancement/primitiveness + update policies.

[002b] Religion ignored by Scientific Advancement/Primitiveness + Adjust Policies + Fix IT industry measurementIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: No longer consider religiousness when assessing nation advancement/primitiveness + update policies + correctly calculate the size of the IT industry.

[003] Employment math fixIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Correct mathematical error that prevents nations from displaying the correct workforce participation rate when it should lie in the range 52%-62%.

[004] Weaponization IMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Consider effect of compulsory military service. Reduce "gun explosion" effect whereby nations with more than 1 gun per capita tend to collect extreme numbers of guns. Reduce effect of opposition to Defense industry and anti-crime, especially when gun ownership is encouraged/mandatory.

[005b] Black Market: Raise cap, fix scaling, reweightIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: (1) Increase maximum recordable size of Black Market by losing one significant digit of precision. Most nations will show a very minor difference due to rounding; nations with current Black Market sizes of 9,999,999,990,000,000, may show large increases as they are able to display their true scores. (2) Correct a mathematical error causing some nations with Black Markets that are a small percentage of their total GDP to exhibit opposite-than-expected results under certain conditions. Those nations can show a fairly large change in percentage terms (around -50%) although the effect in absolute terms is fairly small. (3) Increase the importance of Corruption, Law & Order funding, and Economic Freedom; decrease the importance of Political Freedom.

[006] LifespanIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Major reworking of lifespan modeling. Less important: the environment, political corruption, and citizen niceness. More important: citizen health, economic strength, poor incomes, and government spending on health and welfare. Executing the elderly has less effect in nations where citizens rarely reach 65+ anyway. Brand new, ordinary-ish nations have lifespans in the high 60s rather than low 60s.

[007] Campaign Finance Law decreases Corruption & increases IntegrityIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Normally, less political freedom is associated with greater government corruption. This beta reverses that effect for legislation that specifically restricts the influence of money in government. It also includes Renormalization (beta 013), which monotonically increases all nations' scores that lie between 1.2 and 40.0.

[008a] Income Inequality: Rescaling + Policy impacts of feudalism and slaveryIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Feudalism and slavery directly contribute to wage inequality. Also apply harder scaling via more checks on nations approaching the maximum value. In particular, this downscales nations that are currently at or near the maximum value but do not have Feudalism and Slavery, have generous Welfare spending, or have not addressed many wage-related issues.

[009] Rescale AuthoritarianismIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Change unit of measurement from Stalins to milliStalins, with 1,000 milliStalins per 1 Stalin, which provides greater granularity. Additionally, scale more strongly as nations approach zero. Together, this fixes a current problem where many nations score 0.00 Stalins despite having different levels of underlying authoritarianism. All nations will show large increases: those currently on 1 Stalin or above will show rises of approx. 100,000%, while those with fewer Stalins, particularly if close to 0, will show greater rises.

[010] Agricultural industries: Decrease effect of EnvironmentIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Reduce the multiplicative effect of environment on industry size in Cheese Exports, Trout Fishing, and Beef/Agriculture. This has flow-on effects to the broader economy, affecting all industries, government departments, and tax rates.

[011] Average Disposable Incomes (New)IMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: A new World Census scale that measures average incomes after tax. For comparison purposes only, "Average Income" (pre-tax) is displayed below as "Old," although that continues to exist unmodified as its own scale (#72: "Highest Average Income"). Nations with no income tax show identical pre- and post-tax incomes, while nations with 100% tax rates show 0 income.

[012] TourismIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Recalibrate the measurement of nations' attractiveness to tourists, with reference to environmental beauty, culture, safety, and national personality.

[013] RenormalizationIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Correct a flaw in a scaling algorithm that can cause displayed scores to move very rapidly within a particular window, despite only modest moves in the underlying value. Affects many scales to different degrees. This beta is not comprehensive and previews only the most significant changes. This is a monotonic change; i.e. it will alter scores but not ranks.

[015] State-Owned IndustryIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Minor change to the weighting of internal factors when determining the proportion of industry that is private vs government-owned.

[016] Extend top and bottom range of Economic EfficiencyIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Allow Economic Efficiency rating to exceed 0-100, reverting to the system used pre-2016. Nations with scores between 0-100 are unaffected. This fixes a problem with very large numbers of nations hitting either extreme and not tie-breaking sensibly. There will be no theoretical lower/upper limit, but the plausible min/max is around -5/105. Nations' Economy rating on their front page and default Trend page are unaffected.

[017] Civil Rights: Drop tracking of crime-related freedomIMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Delete inconsistent tracking of freedom relating to crime, which is currently measured in a redundant and haphazard way.

[019] Patriotism (New)IMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Flags saluted per person per day.

[020] Hunger (New)REJECTED

Proposed Change: World Census takers carefully assessed the cleaness of post-prandial orphan bowls to see which nation's hungry have the rumbliest stomachs.

[021] Food Quality (New)IMPLEMENTED

Implemented:

Proposed Change: Professional food critics checked out thousands of restautants and home kitchens and called it "work", judging ingredient quality, creativity and diversity of food.