RE: "In constructing the Labor's Effect on Land function"

If I understand correctly from last week's call, Will's suggestion is similar to my earlier suggestion to attach the competency factor to labour, and then to produce an average competence among a firm's labour participants to obtain the firm's competence (fictionally representing ISO 14000 https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/iso-14000.asp). Jacob had preferred to attach the competence factor directly to the firm, on the working design assumption that each laborer should be presumed to adapt to the policies and practices of the firm where they work.

I am comfortable with either approach. I adjusted my spreadsheet to Jacob's firm-level competency, but didn't have time to update my comments in the draft document.

Either way, it important to keep in mind that this a modeling requirement to endogenously generate ER Indices from the model; it is not something that the ERA Framework would need to do in practice. In the real system, the competencies are revealed in measurable outcomes, and that's all the ER framework needs to know. So my only suggestion for the model is to use the labor compentence method OR the firm competency method based on which of these that you expect to most likely come across as coherent to our target audiences; and to prefer the simpler over the more complicated approach.

RE: open to suggestions on the naming

Is there a reason to call it anything other than competence?

When the outcome is expressed in monetary units, over the years I have characterized this as an "ecological deficit" or "ecological surplus".

RE: "The land might endogenously change"

In the spreadsheet I created, the factor for "Productive Capacity of a Patch" provides a reasonable basis for a simple formula expressing the rate at which a patch self-organizes its own background improvement. This background rate would occur when the land is being used, and which it is not being used.

RE: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/mc1s9wy58u

I don't follow the rationale for the structure of this formula. Hope we can step though it on the next call.

RE: "Worst case scenario is the exact opposite of best case scenario"

It seems to me that this has no workable meaning. Why not use the relative multiples of the base statistic that I put into the spreadsheet?

RE: "I can think of some examples where the capability of improving the land (M) is vastly different from the capability of making the land worse (-M)."

Sure but this consideration is easily incorporated into the choice of worst and optimal scenarios, and the slope of the Bezier spline.

Equation from meeting today:
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/8nt3ww0cve

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RnUcTVmbyBVh4uf2Pgl2wZB5xbpRooK3OQwJEpVXCpw/edit?usp=sharing
Spreadsheet format

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/18KMH-BZyFBR9bJ5n-04bhraGy1rjaa6Puz14R60Oq8c/edit

Flowchart