The economy in this model provides an important controlling influence on the ability to produce armaments. If armament spending had been formulated as the indicated spending times an effect from capacity, we could simply override that effect and make it always one. Unfortunately, such a formulation is difficult to create because it is important that actual armament spending never exceed economic capacity. For this model, the appropriate way to remove the controlling influence of the economy is not to make something constant, but rather to impart behavior to economic activity that is not influenced by the level of spending on arms.
| Ø | Click on Economic Capacity 1 with the right mouse button (or hold down the Ctrl key and click). |
| Ø | In the dialog click on the Exponential Growth radio button. |
| Ø | For Starting From fill in 100. |
| Ø | For Growth Rate (%/unit time) fill in 10. |
Look at the behavior of the different variables. Total Armament 1 grows more, but is still S shaped. In fact, Economic Capacity 2 is falling off quite strongly relative to the strong1 run and this is hampering the ability of 2 to product armaments.
Let's make the same change to Economic Capacity 2 that we made to Economic Capacity 1.
| Ø | Click on Economic Capacity 2 with the right mouse button (or hold down the Ctrl key and click). |
| Ø | In the dialog click on the Exponential Growth radio button. |
| Ø | For Starting From fill in 100. |
| Ø | For Growth Rate (%/unit time) fill in 10. |
Now look at the behavior. We get very rapid growth in the level of armaments for both sides. We can be confident that economic capacity is not a constraining factor because in both countries the fraction of capacity devoted to armament production is small and diminishing.
| Ø | Raise desired strength ratio 2 to also be 2. |
Economic growth is constraining once again - even at 10%/year.
