Cyber-budget lets citizens run the economy

It's 2009, and the French economy has been ruined by a policy of frivolous tax-cutting and overspending on pork-barrel projects, including homeland security, prison construction and international military action. Public approval ratings are plummeting, the deficit has spiraled out of control, and the citizens are revolting.

Who's to blame? Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin? Nicolas Sarkozy, his interior minister? Henry, the mild-mannered janitor?

Uh, no, actually, it was me. I was just trying out some alternative budget scenarios at http://www.cyber-budget.fr. Sorry. I thought it was only a game.

In fact, it is a game, but one that is intended to educate French citizens about the complexities of the state budget.

The Minister for the Budget and Administrative Reform, Jean-François Copé, launched the game earlier this month, inviting French citizens to imagine what it would be like to run the country's finances for a three-year period.

The French are passionate about politics and history, but are much less familiar with the economy, so it is necessary to find new ways to get them to take an interest, Copé said. One way to do that is by means of educational games like Cyber-budget, which draws its inspiration from a similar game in Japan.

There are three phases to the Cyber-budget game.

The first phase aims to teach basic concepts. A Tetris-like sequence pushes players to stack bricks representing expenditure items to one side, and revenue items to the other. Another segment, in the style of a TV game-show, invites players to guess whether expenses such as medical care, social housing or water treatment are the responsibility of central government or of regional and local administrations. To help put all those large numbers into perspective, there's also an exercise in arithmetic: how many homes, or cars, could you buy with the annual defense budget? Or how many people salaried at the minimum wage could you employ with the receipts from the special tax on gasoline?

In the second phase, players learn to balance the government's budget, and set their spending priorities. One stage of the game takes this quite literally: a set of scales is weighed down with an element of expenditure (schools, say, or defense) on one side, and players must drop weights on the other side until it balances. The weights, varying in size according to their value, represent sources of revenue, including income tax, value added tax, or the tax on personal wealth.

There's also a mock press conference, where cartoon journalists ask players difficult questions about their policies (so that's what it's like to be on the receiving end ... ) and expect them to stand by their answers in a later stage of the game. It's quite realistic -- as a minister, you never have to answer "yes" or "no," but can hide behind answers like "That's one of my priorities," "That's not a direction my policy will take," or "We'll see about that later."

The third phase is the most interesting -- and also the most frustrating. The game simulates the evolution of the French economy over three years, with economic growth, government spending and tax receipts all depending, to some measure, on the policy priorities set in the previous phase.