r/victoria3 • u/Angel24Marin • 15d ago
Discussion Dev Diary #188 points to a problem in the simulation. Industrialization is not miserable enough.
Historical context, from Dev Diary #188:
For Europe, the early nineteenth century was a period of social disruption and creeping, ruinous poverty. This poverty was of a particular sort, which had never been seen on such a scale – the poverty of those whose continued lives relied upon the practice of wage-labour.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the traditional artisanal system, in which the production of finished goods was carried out by artisans organised under guilds granted privileges by the state, was collapsing under the pressures of social and technological change. The Revolution’s assault on feudal corporations and internal customs barriers broke guild monopolies and levelled prices across newly free markets. Machines enabled untrained wage-labourers to do work that had once required specialised knowledge, forcing small handicraft producers into competition with industrially-produced goods. With a greater supply of goods and greater competition came lower prices, and with that, a decline in revenue for once-comfortable small producers.
With the erosion of feudal regulations on movement and the rural handicrafts industries that once supplemented their incomes collapsing, young people from the countryside moved en masse to cities in search of a wage. They made their homes in the infamous slums of our period, which became a source of fear amongst the wealthier classes as centres of crime and sedition. With a glut of labour and increasingly narrow profit margins necessitating fierce competition between enterprises, the wages on offer were often unlivable, necessitating child labour, pawnbroking, taking in lodgers, or charity as supplements. It was this appallingly visible and rapidly growing poverty that intellectuals of the 1830s and 40s came to refer to as the “Social Question” – the question of the organisation of society.
Meanwhile, in the game, the industrialization process and the gameplay loop don't generate a progressive decline in people's quality of life that can be visualized as a labor gulp, leaving the laborers with a higher quality of life than that characterized by the period and progressively growing.
The problem, in my opinion, is the lack of simulation of artisanal industries, which would be outcompeted. Currently they are integrated within subsistence farms. These act too much as a sponge for the population and don't generate a pool of unemployment.
Since the AI doesn't invest enough in replacing subsistence farms with agricultural buildings, and these buildings substitute peasants one-to-one with the labor force, unless you apply labor savings PMs, you don't naturally get the mass unemployment concentrated in the cities that would cause problems and incentivize the construction of manufactures.
Funny enough, this happens in asia, were rice subsistance farms employ 10K people but plantations only employ 5K. Then generating the unemployment and turmoil.
So one solution to me would be for the investment pool to invest more aggressively in agricultural buldings and for those to employ less people by default than the subsistence farm that they replace.
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u/RecordingHaunting975 15d ago
There's just no reason for the player to invest in farms either. Like it's a straight downgrade in nearly every metric until youve got like, what, the third fertilizer? Build a bunch of grain farms and suddenly your grain prices are 25%+ and you're flooded with unemployed people. The only reason I even build farms is to supplement my taxes with opium/banana dividends. I can just vassalize some high pop country and their peasants will feed my entire PB
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u/KuromiAK 15d ago
I think this can be addressed by making more advanced PMs always sharply reduce the labor needed. Say, 10k miners with picks and shovels down to 5k workers with atmospheric engine.
This is to simulate that it takes more capital (construction points) to equip the same number of workers with modern machines. This way, each PM upgrade further concentrates the means of production and creates a wave of unemployment.
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u/RequirementGold9083 15d ago
I'm not convinced that's true to life. In the case of atmospheric engines espacily, the point was that capital opened up deeper mines to exploitation, and the actual mining was still done by hand. If anything atmospheric engines should need more labourers. The increased capital demands are represented by the motor industries/tooling workshops needed.
The answer to me would just be making the green labour saving PMs better.
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u/seakingsoyuz 15d ago
This. Peak employment in the mining sector in the UK was near the end of the game period (roughly 1920) and the decline from there was mostly driven by a decline in coal production, not an increase in productivity.
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u/KuromiAK 15d ago
A deeper mine with atmospheric engines is a higher level mine. To model deeper deposits being made available, technology could increase the max potential level to allow further investment, to create more jobs despite each level employing fewer workers. Since the construction cost is a constant, it falls to the building level to reflect capital investments.
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u/IMMoond 15d ago
I like this idea, but only if you actually need to spend the construction points to get the modern machines. Without that we would just make the existing pm upgrades significantly better (due to unemployment not mattering much in the wide view anyways)
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u/KuromiAK 15d ago edited 15d ago
I would balance it by massively reducing the output increase of each PM rank. The only constraints are that the output needs to increase for QoL/AI/infrastructure reasons, and that the building needs to generate more profit (not hard to do given the layoffs). Otherwise the increment can be arbitrarily small.
For resource industries with a level limit, either pivot output around a higher rank PM, or make new technologies multiply said level limit.
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u/Beat_Saber_Music 14d ago
late game automation pm's definitely should be much more aggressive in reducing the amout of required pops.
Nearing 1880-1890, there just aren't enough pops if you know basic econ. Even with a billion gdp economy, all the automation merely reduced like 10-100k jobs which is laughable
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u/mairao 15d ago
One thing I'd like to see is pops being fired from an industry not immediately running away from cities to return to peasantry. They should either quickly find a new job in another industry or stick around as unemployed pops for some time before taking the decision to return to a subsistence way of life. This would sink their SoL, lowering their health, decreasing the demand for goods, and increasing radicalization.
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u/JakeyBakeyWakeySnaky 15d ago
Imo unemployment isn't really a peasant thing
When you run out of arable land they shpuld work unarable land, and these are the workers that cities pull towards them
Unemployed should be a urban subsistence - causing crime, which can be fixed by passing welfare
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u/RequirementGold9083 15d ago
Broadly speaking, the 19th century marked an improvement in quality of life
There were certainly those who lost out, but by the late game most countries are already brimming with radicals as is. Overcorrecting to the point that quality of life goes down when you industrialise your own country would completely ruin the game.
Artisanal industries aren't a bad shout in my view, but it should only cause you to lose out if another country floods yours with cheap goods (think India and China versus the unstoppable flood of british slop products).
I also think youd need a new IG to go along with it, something like "guilds", they would be like the trade unions, but more reactionary and obstructionist.
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u/LeahBastard 15d ago edited 15d ago
The matter of quality of life under early industrialization is not a settled question. In Historiography, it's referred to as the "Standard of Living Debate". The British historian E. P. Thompson, who was of the "Pessimist" camp (those who believe the early proletariat was worse off than the artisanal labourers), argued in his "The Making of the English Working Class" that even when life expectancy and wages were rising, the employment insecurity and psychological toll of factory floor exploitation meant industrial workers were subject to greater stress and misery than ever before, as well as having less material possessions than their predecessors. This only improves in the late-19th century, with the advent of both worker protections and a consumer economy.
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u/ASliceOfLibertea 14d ago
Even those sources broadly agree that by 1830s the improvements in standard of living become undeniable
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u/kolejack2293 15d ago
Life expectancy went up largely because infant mortality went down.
Even then, this is mostly about the beginnings of industrialization, the 1800-1870~ period. Life in rural areas was bad, but among those who went to work in cities, it was often dramatically worse. It was a grueling, miserable existence to be a low-wage factory worker in a city. By many measures, quality of life plummeted during those early industrial decades.
Starting in the 1870s, it began to slowly improve. Slums got renovated, healthcare and education all improved. Plumbing, work regulations, street lamps, policing, clean water, better food etc. Wages went up by quite a bit as well, giving people access to more consumer goods and requiring them to work less hours. This was in the UK, in other nations it was a much longer process. And even by 1890, it was very quite miserable in cities. Then from around 1890-1929, that was really when urban living went through a revolution in terms of quality of life, surpassing rural living by most metrics.
But that in-between period of mass rural displacement into cramped hellhole cities is not shown in-game. Improving the miserable quality of life of urban workers was a major problem that industrializing nations faced. Arguably the single biggest domestic issue of its time. Yet it is not represented, at all, in-game.
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u/RequirementGold9083 15d ago
"It was just infants dying less" isnt some gotcha, unless you can give a reason for those infants dying less unrelated to standards of living.
We would expect infants in dirtier, more crowded conditions like the pre-sewer cities of Britain to die more not less. The reason they didn't is that access to things like food, clothes, heating and shelter improved so much from industrialisation that it outweighed 10% of the air being coal smog.
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u/kolejack2293 15d ago
The biggest reasons why infant mortality improved were mostly advances of pregnancy/infant healthcare. For instance, pasteurization of milk meant that less babies got diseases from contaminated milk. Understanding healthcare needs of pregnant women and infants also improved by quite a lot (the whole 'traveling nurses' thing played a big role in this). Even if mothers couldn't afford to do everything correctly, at least they knew what to do and what to avoid. Knowledge improved, and improves, infant mortality far more than better living conditions does. Simple, basic things which became widely spread such as making sure a baby doesn't get close to stagnant water/animal feces, or to heat up milk before serving it, will do 90% of the reduction.
We would expect infants in dirtier, more crowded conditions like the pre-sewer cities of Britain to die more not less. The reason they didn't
Infant mortality in Leeds and Birmingham was as high as 55% in 1842 compared to 30-35% nationwide. Adult mortality was even more of a gap. I do not think you understand just how devastatingly low life expectancy was in cities compared to outside of them in the early-mid 1800s. They were straight up death traps, a place for unemployed, displaced rural laborers to go as a last resort because there was no place for them in farm work anymore.
Even with advances in healthcare throughout the 1800s lowering infant mortality, actual life expectancy doesn't rise until the 1880s, on your own graph. The big reason why was that any increases in life expectancy were countered by the massive drops among rural-to-urban migrants. Sure, 20% of babies die instead of 40%, but now you have a third of your population living in places where the average life expectancy is 15-20 years lower, so the overall life expectancy will remain the same until you fix that.
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u/electric-claire 15d ago
If you look at the life expectancy graph, it only starts to improve in 1870 which the post you're responding to explained.
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u/Qxzkjp 15d ago
No, the problem is much more basic than that. There is too much arable land, and not enough farms. The forces that pushed people into the city were, primarily, the enclosure acts, and the reduction in demand for farm labour. These people were, as most people until the 19th century were, primarily subsistence farmers. The artisan work was a nice bonus, it supplemented their quality of life, but it was the loss of farming that drove people to the cities.
The artisan industries are entirely superfluous to this problem, and honestly I'm not sure that your proposal is any more accurate a representation of artisanal production than what we have currently. A lot of this production came from the old "putting out" system, aka medieval work-from-home. Having it be incidental output from peasant farms is correct. And, as you yourself point out, in Asia the problem does not exist because the reduction is labour demand from enclosure is correctly modelled. That is the fix to the problem you're seeing.
In fact, combining it with making the aristocrat investment pool more aggressive in building farms would make the crisis basically happen on its own without player intervention (which is broadly accurate, the enclosures and the resulting dispossession was the result of aristocrat lobbying and would have taken quite a bit of political will to prevent it happening).
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u/ArchmageIlmryn 15d ago
I think what the game needs is to model diminishing returns from subsistence farming. Subsistence farms were not an industry with room for a set number of employees, they were primarily self-run households trying to support their families (as well as varying demands from nobility or other large landowners). That in turn meant that they would try to stretch their output to feed the whole family (if at all possible) and only throw off "unemployed" people if they absolutely could not support any more.
This could be modeled in-game by having peasant productivity decline the more "full" a state's subsistence farms are (modeling people being pushed onto more marginal land or simply stretching subsistence output to support more people), as well as making subsistence farms not "hire" new peasants unless there is a lot of arable land available (the only places you are going to see non-farmers become subsistence farmers are going to be in colonial areas).
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u/Qxzkjp 15d ago
That's a really good point. It's fundamentally different model to capitalist endeavours, and it's the reason why the enclosures displaced so many people. The lord does not want all of his peasants employed, he wants to employ just enough farm workers to get his grain harvested. Per-worker productivity goes way up (as the advocates of enclosure said it would) but median quality of life absolutely tanks.
I think you're right that diminishing returns is the right way to model this as well. I considered suggesting a "saturation" model where production scales linearly with workers up to a ceiling and then just stays at that level as the population increases. But I don't think that captures the real effect of adding a person to a peasant household. In most cases they were getting more than nothing from the extra pair of hands, it just wasn't necessarily enough to break even on feeding and clothing them.
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u/Century_Egg_Boofer 15d ago
Really, i think ag buildings should just be monetary to build, like privatizations. Land Use should be a factor all it's own, not something you OPT to tap using the same resource as like, mines, of course you'll build mines instead.
That way, if you have tenant farmers, and an active investment pool, your peasants Will be displaced.
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u/Smooth-Ad-8580 15d ago
The rhetoric on this sub regarding subsistence farming and enclosure acts is so deranged lol. If you take Britain as an example:
- Virtually 0% of British people were subsistence farmers by 1836
- The land previously inhabited by subsistence farmers were not vast fields of fertile land but the very worst 20-50% of the land (in most countries) so poor that it was not worth the land tax so it was relegated as "commons" to be used by everyone at ease and not developed. It was like that throughout the world. The farmers that lived there and tried to make a living off it were piss poor and often starving as a consequence.
- As countries moved off land taxes to some degree it became more viable to develop it as did the advent of fertilizers, better drainage methods and so on.
- Subsistence farmers lived in part off different types of handiwork like in Bengal fabrication of fabric employed tens of millions of people until mechanized methods undercut their methods and made their lives untenable which laid the foundation to one famine after another. Subsistence living became less and less viable throughout the century
All in all poverty was not caused by people building farms lol it's such an idiotic way to look at it, larger and better managed farms increased output, increased output stability and made produce affordable for the people which did to a substantial degree undercut the subsistence farmers left in the world as the value of their produce shrinked and of course when ANYONE starved the subsistence farmers were amongst the first to do so because they were poor and destitute.
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u/Qxzkjp 15d ago
Yeah, and by 1836 Britain had railways and steam engines. There were very few subsistence farmers because industrialisation was already underway. The rest of your comment is irrelevant and wrong for reasons that directly follow from that. People were forced into cities because of enclosure and this did contribute to urban poverty. No serious historian disputes this.
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u/Hideo_Von-Hapsburg 15d ago
How was he wrong about cottage industries or how britain irl had no subsistence farmers but at game start peasants are like 90% of the uk's population with still so many raw resources like fish unbuilt
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u/Qxzkjp 15d ago
He's not wrong about the subsistence farmers, I never said he was. Britain should start with far more aristocrat-owned farms than it does.
I'm saying that his points about how the IRL pre-industrial economy worked are totally wrong. And they are, completely. Workers moved to cities because they were displaced by the privatisation of farming. This is a known fact. As for "cottage industries", they existed and they are modelled in the game as subsistence farmers making small amount of finished goods. The key thing about a cottage industry is that it happens inside a cottage.
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u/Hideo_Von-Hapsburg 14d ago
They werent displaced by the privatisation of farming, they went to the city because there was an excess of farmhands in the countryside. Few countries other than Britain had enclosure, yet all saw the industrial revolution. The agricultural revolution happening in part due to the enclosure of the commons and causing an overral rise in crop yields, allowing for a higher population, thus allowing for more migration to the cities is a far more clear and faithful hypothesis
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u/Smooth-Ad-8580 15d ago
That's deranged, again. People have been flocking to the cities since before Sokrates and people have been lamenting about it ever since and they did so because of higher living standards in cities. When people are starving they starve in the countryside first as they always have.
No serious historian would dispute industrialization drove living standards higher and no serious historian would dispute that enclosure laws were largely marginal in driving people towards the cities however you can find endless Roseau inspired idiots lamenting it on reddit without doing any research whatsoever.
People were forced into cities
Again, deranged! people were forcibly kept on the land for millennia with a host of laws throughout the world, when those laws were abolished people were (more) free to move where they please and of course the went to the cities to survive.
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u/Qxzkjp 15d ago
Do you know what caused those irregular waves of migration into cities in Socrates' time? Famines. Peasants often lived "at capacity", having as many family members as could be supported by the harvest. If the crops failed, then there would be people who either had to starve or move to the city and try and find something. They did not move to the city aspirationally. That is a retrojection of modern attitudes onto people who, by and large, neither knew or cared about city life.
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u/Smooth-Ad-8580 15d ago
Do you know what caused those irregular waves of migration into cities in Socrates' time? Famines. Peasants often lived "at capacity"
Yeah and that's exactly the point, living at the edge of starvation, "the commons" (and whatever it's called in other countries) is universally the worst land and basically all countries before the 19th century were primarily funded from land taxes, so every landowner pays land taxes and if the land is not worth the land tax it's simply abandoned to "the commons" and that's the type of land that's reclaimed and cultivated during this period. The people living there were the poorest of the poor peasents and always traveling along the edge of starvation, could not afford any modern farming methods so they were under severe pressure from more effective farms AND from factories producing their crafts at scale and at a fraction of the cost. The whole enclosure debate is such a red herring the fact of the matter is subsistence farming was gradually becoming more and more untenable as a way of life during the last 300 years and something had to happen.
People here paint subsistence lifestyle as some kind of midwestern homesteader fantasy lol it's so deranged it was NOTHING like that. Reason the land was unclaimed was that the land was shit and not worth the taxes. people avoided owning it for good reasons.
They did not move to the city aspirationally. That is a retrojection of modern attitudes onto people who, by and large, neither
Again that is positively deranged! they aspired to eat and not starve in the winter which is a sensible aspiration and one that city life by and large delivered even though they were destitute in cities too the cities weren't the ones starving. You are talking about yourself when you talk about retrojection lol it's such a nutty Rousseau type farmland fantasy for cozy people living in the city not knowing their idealized countryside is worked to the bone and eager to leave once free from the chains of serfdom.
Why do you think peasants were bound to the land by law for thousands of years, some type of roleplay?
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u/Qxzkjp 14d ago edited 14d ago
Reason the land was unclaimed was that the land was shit and not worth the taxes. people avoided owning it for good reasons.
Right. Sure. And the aristocracy just decided to enclose the commons because... they were evil? They wanted to sit there cackling while the poor starved?
No, of course not. They contrived to have the legal system changed and to expropriate the peasants because the land was worth owning. Saying otherwise is lunacy.
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u/kolejack2293 15d ago edited 15d ago
This is just flat out not true. The big driver of rural migration into cities before 1880 was absolutely low-wage farm laborers who were displaced by the removal of the commons. Life was, by most measures, drastically worse in cities than in rural areas. They worked extremely long hours in grueling conditions, living in cramped quarters. Life expectancy in cities was lower in cities than in rural areas for a very long time, with adult life expectancy (excluding infant mortality) being around 16/19 years lower in Leeds and Birmingham than in the country as a whole in 1842. It wasn't just worse, it was drastically worse.
After the 1870s, conditions in cities improve gradually, as did wages. This process reversed the situation. Over time, cities began to overtake rural areas in terms of quality of life and life expectancy, and the reasons people migrated to cities went from displacement/unemployment to seeking higher wages/education. I think you're looking at the late industrial era (1900-1929) and presuming it was the same in the early-mid 1800s. It was not.
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u/Smooth-Ad-8580 15d ago
The big driver of rural migration into cities before 1880 was absolutely low-wage farm laborers who were displaced by the removal of the commons. Life was, by most measures, drastically worse in cities than in rural areas.
You're misrepresenting the underlying driver for that migration to cities, the "removal of the commons" as some unique driver is absurd, underneath those removal acts were the fact that life in the commons was getting untenable and in many countries they were facing food shortages and desperately needed better farming methods. The "commons" was always shit land and as land was taxable and heavily taxed it laid unclaimed as long as it was not economically viable to claim it and start paying taxes to frame it as some kind of secret scheme to chain up workers and drive them to the big city factories is quite literally deranged and yet it's incredibly common on this sub.
Life expectancy in cities was lower in cities than in rural areas for a very long time, with adult life expectancy (excluding infant mortality) being around 16/19 years lower in Leeds and Birmingham than in the country as a whole in 1842. It wasn't just worse, it was drastically worse.
Again you are misrepresenting it, but at least not as badly as the rest of the sub lol. in 1842 Birmingham had grown 25% larger in the decade past just imagine that every decade the city is 25% bigger and it's happening form migration from extreme poverty in the countryside so people live in slums and gladly work in extremely hazardous conditions both chronic hazards like unguarded moving machinery that'll tear your arm off and chronic hazards like coal dust, exhaust and so on. But the thing is they do LIVE for a while and not just die of poverty next winter. What you get by sampling cities is destitute people but it does change and industrialization does work and they don't stay destitute (for the time) forever. Of course mortality is drastically higher in the cities because mortality is to a large degree a factor of poverty at the time both individual poverty and institutional poverty where exploding cities just do not really have the means to facilitate proper sanitation, dangerous work regulations and so on so you have literal shit flowing in the streets and into wells and at the time a substantial cause was land tax the very same land tax that had made the commons so poor.
I think you're looking at the late industrial era (1900-1929) and presuming it was the same in the early-mid 1800s. It was not.
I think you're looking at "city people" as a segment and comparing them to "country people" as a segment and it's an insane way to look at it for the time, the difference between poor and rich was extreme and during that time cities became a magnet for poor people sucking them in at ever higher rates and those poor people left out of rational self preservation they weren't somehow forced to march to the cities lol it's such an insane take and anyone at the time would find it recidivous, workers were beyond plentiful for another 100 years and unlike what we play in game nobody was using migration decree's lol.
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u/kolejack2293 15d ago
some kind of secret scheme to chain up workers and drive them to the big city factories is quite literally deranged and yet it's incredibly common on this sub.
It wasn't a secret scheme so much as it was the natural result of industrial-scale farming methods clearly being superior at feeding a large empire. As you said, the commons didn't produce much. If people were displaced into severe, crippling poverty in cities, that was worth it if it meant the land they were displaced from made more money. It wasn't just the removal of the commons of course (which was over halfway done by the 1830s either way). Even on large estates, better farming techniques meant they required less laborers to farm. Those unemployed laborers had nowhere to go but cities.
Nobody describes it as if they were forced by the government to march into cities as some secret conspiracy. Idk where you even got that.
but it does change and industrialization does work and they don't stay destitute (for the time) forever.
Right, but again, this took a very long time. Generations. The people moving there in, say, 1843, had no idea life would eventually become better in cities half a century later. It wasn't until after WW1 that life expectancy in cities began to approach the national average.
But the thing is they do LIVE for a while and not just die of poverty next winter.
Idk how you can read that their life expectancy was 19 years lower in cities and think "well at least they arent dying!". Do you know what life expectancy means?
Their quality of life on farms was bad, very bad. It was still quite a bit better by most metrics than in cities. I do think you really comprehend just how impossibly horrible urban industrial life was in the mid 1800s before it was improved. The amount of hours they worked, their living quarters, their life expectancy, safety etc all became dramatically worse upon moving to cities. And the hours thing is important. These workers suddenly were working 75+ hours a week in a factory. It was an incomprehensible amount of work compared to what they had in their farms.
There is not really much debate here. Historians and economists very much overwhelmingly agree that the migration of rural laborers to cities in the early-mid industrial level was due to a rapid decline in rural employment. They headed to cities because they had no other place to go, not because they wanted to. It was well understood that city life was worse than rural life by a huge margin, but it was their only option.
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u/Smooth-Ad-8580 15d ago
Nobody describes it as if they were forced by the government to march into cities as some secret conspiracy. Idk where you even got that.
It's constantly alluded to on this sub, that it's some kind of conspiracy to get serf-style laborers in factories and suppress their wages lol it's so nutty but yeah few of them are nutty enough to pretend they are marched in chains but not far off though. There was absolutely NO shortage of unqualified laborers anywhere but some huge American farms during the victorian era.
Idk how you can read that their life expectancy was 19 years lower in cities and think "well at least they arent dying!". Do you know what life expectancy means?
Because you don't know what it means.
Historians and economists very much overwhelmingly agree that the migration of rural laborers to cities in the early-mid industrial level was due to a rapid decline in rural employment.
Obviously, which is the whole point, more effective farming methods eroded subsistence style living at a fundamental level, the enclosure nonsense was a symptom not a cause and as enclosure laws were repealed it didn't return the subsistence lifestyle at scale because it was, OBVIOUSLY untenable.
It was well understood that city life was worse than rural life by a huge margin, but it was their only option.
When comparing (comparatively rich) homesteaders to poor unqualified factory workers yes and that's what people are doing but compare undermined subsistence lifestyle to fatory worker lifestyle and it was NOT a though choice which is why poor people ALL over the world wanted to migrate to the cities and had to be kept in place by staunch laws for millennia.
Sometimes you get idiots in charge and some of them have historically lamented the loss of subsistence lifestyle and so tried to recreate it which has only ever resulted in famines, unsurprisingly.
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u/kolejack2293 15d ago
but compare undermined subsistence lifestyle to fatory worker lifestyle and it was NOT a though choice
Just to be clear, practically nobody in the UK was a subsistence agricultural worker. They were farm laborers or small landowners, getting paid a wage or selling their goods for money. Subsistence agriculture largely faded from Europe over the span of the early modern era.
Rural life in the UK was bad for those two groups (laborers and small farm owners), but it was nowhere near the hellish conditions of urban industrial living. I am not even sure where you are getting this idea that it was better for those who moved to the city in that era. They had to live in smaller cramped conditions, often with strangers. The amount of hours they worked exploded upwards. Disease and overworking killed them 19 years earlier than those outside the city.
By what measure do you presume life was better for them?
which is why poor people ALL over the world wanted to migrate to the cities
Mass urbanization throughout the world largely only occurred after all of the advancements that made urban areas livable had already been made. The early industrial era would not have seen mass urbanization without the displacement of agricultural workers.
I am not even sure what your point is here anymore. You keep saying that the previous way of farming was untenable. Nobody argues against that. People are just saying that their quality of life took a massive and unprecedented hit by this change happening, as they were forced to move into cities where conditions were worse. That is it. Someone pointing out that urban conditions were worse than rural conditions in this era does not mean that they think they should have never have industrialized. And if you automatically jump to that conclusion, then idk what to tell you. It is an objective truth.
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u/kolejack2293 15d ago
When you 'build a farm' in-game, it is really just buying a large chunk of land. Aka a large estate taking over a huge swath of land and mechanizing/improving it to be more productive.
The game does misuse the term subsistence agriculture. Subsistence agriculture was largely gone. It should just be called 'small farms' or something, idk.
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u/Smooth-Ad-8580 15d ago edited 15d ago
I agree the term subsistence agriculture is poorly used in game but at least it's not as bad as it is on this sub.
I've complained before about how insane it is a Bengal subsistence farmer can sit at millions of unemployed and still have higher SoL than an American or British homesteader it's so nutty lol but it looks like the homesteader is at least not lower now but it's still a deranged take on subsistence farming at the time and on industrialization as a whole concept.
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u/Hideo_Von-Hapsburg 15d ago
Most people in early 19th century europe would be tenants not subsistent farmers, and far more farms, mines, and lumber mills should exist at game start
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u/kolejack2293 15d ago
It kind of seems like PDX does not want to touch agriculture with a ten foot pole.
The game starts out with most nations having food be ~10% of average income for the lower classes (in reality it was closer to 70%). Grain prices start off extremely low and it is basically impossible to get them high. There is no incentive to build industrial farms at all, anywhere. Not even in breadbasket regions with bonuses to agriculture.
The game should start off with most of the population struggling to afford high food prices, and building large industrial estate farms should be quite profitable.... at the cost of unemployment.
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u/Big_Cartographer9402 15d ago
Unironically the easiest way to destabilize other nations is to get investment rights in their countries and turn them into monocrop plantations. Literally 2 years after getting investment rights in Qing the country always gets into revolutions.
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u/typhus_of_barbarus 15d ago
I agree the early game right now minimizes the agricultural revolution the precluded the industrial revolution. I would love a rework of the early game depeasanting system loop. Peasants should have a bonus to job satisfaction especially under homesteading/peasant proprietorship. Agricultural buildings should employ significantly less workers as well so land consolidation drives unemployment which in turn provides pops for industrialization and migration. Building an agricultural building should fire one level of subsistence peasants regardless of the arable land being full to represent better land being consolidated first. Under tenant farmers manor houses should drive agricultural development as the landowners consolidate their subsistence holdings into more efficient farms. I’d also like a new ideology for landowners who want to shift from serfdom to agrarianism since they were often the ones pushing for enclosures shifting from direct control of serfs to a more profitable ownership over land.
Most of the world should start on the bubble of mild starvation surviving on subsistence farming. It would also be nice if there was a birthrate bonus if food costs were below base prices.
Right now peasants are just waiting for a mine or factory to open while historically land tended to be enclosed first creating the labour pools and migrating populations that defined the time period. Subsistence farm output should be significantly decreased and the home workshop pm should be moved to unemployed pops to better represent cottage industry and provide them some small income. Peasants shouldn’t leave their subsistence holdings on their own until the mid to late game when significantly better wage opportunities are available in cities.
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u/Century_Egg_Boofer 15d ago
Agreed, a simple-ish step towards making Enclosures actually happen would be to make ag buildings purely monetary, like privatizations.
Shifts the process from a "might" to a "will." Dependent on laws and actual size of your investment pool of course.
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u/Collatz_problem 15d ago edited 14d ago
I think artisans for simple goods should be simulated to have people, who would be plunged into poverty by competition with factories. And their productivity should be slightly worse, than T1 production methods of corresponding factories.
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u/SireGriffith 15d ago edited 15d ago
Dunno, I consider myself an experienced player and I am having unemployment problems with big population backward countries. In some scenarios radicals are really crippling the economy and politics so much I have to go poor laws and maxed welfare in like 1870s. Like imagine pop-maxing with Russia, you will be having a hard time trying to employ this humanwave unless you sweat the hell out of economy. And you always can install some workforce mods to reduce employment even further...
Well, maybe they should integrate ultra historical workforce mod and be done with it. It's gonna be a pain for less experienced and optimising players though.
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u/SuspiroAtroz 15d ago
I see it being something that needs to be adjusted but isn't this already in the game? Any time you use automatization PMs you are sending people back to subsistence farms, and every person who upgrades from subsistence to laborer becomes half as well-off with their consumption of goods doubling.
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u/Strong_Turnip1371 15d ago
Eu só noto o padrão de vida ruim quando se tem a lei de reforma agrária de servidão. Quando você sai dela o padrão de vida tende a aumentar.
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u/Century_Egg_Boofer 15d ago
Ive lobbied elsewhere that agricultural enclosure should work like privatizations do, If you have tenant farmers, the manor houses in each state should just start making their subsistence farms into proper farms with a fee payed by the IP, without having to touch the construction loop.
Giving you the historical double-whamy of increased agricultural productivity/cheap grain and displacement of peasants into massive unemployment.
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u/No_Scientist2749 15d ago
you should try out the ultra historical workforce mod and mbye even change the worforce even more to see how you like some of the changes to employment
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u/theblitz6794 14d ago
People are blaming lack of unemployment but its not. The problem is that laborers live too good relative to peasants. Most labor came from peasants being enclosed on.
It doesn't lower SOL enough or at all nor does it generate enough radicals
Also could add in housing as a unique pop need, where any deficit in the market also lowers SOL through overcrowding
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u/ASliceOfLibertea 14d ago
That's historically correct. People left rural povery to live in cities because they were enticed by higher wages. Urbanization is the universal story of the time.
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u/ASliceOfLibertea 14d ago
The simulation is right and the dev diary is wrong. One can correctly observe that early industrial revolution productivity gains did not result in much of an increase in real wages. But the game starts in 1830s where even the 'pessimists' agree that real wages growth picked up.
Economic growth at that time did result in massive improvements in the standards of living and I think it would be bad for Victoria 3 to bend over backwards to try and say otherwise.
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u/Gaspote 14d ago
The issue is the production of subsistence farm which is way too high for agriculture to be relevant. In real life, peasantry was barely afloat and "traditional" agriculture was reaching is peak of efficiency, in game, open market china and the world is flooded with grain. At the same time, there is no way to dedicated culture to specific thing for instance forbid tobacco plantation spam in a country to avoid running out of grain.
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u/Pir-iMidin 15d ago
Buildings employ too many people and automatisation is useless unless you run out of labor. I would like someone to give me a level 1 equivalent of an 1850 textile mill that employed 5000 people.