It depends what the dynasty ends up doing with the Unemployed number, and whether we’d want to manipulate it directly through other mechanics, but the updated totality of

“Each City has a publicly tracked Unemployed Population which is an integer that defaults to the City’s Population. Whenever the Population of a City increases or decreases, the Unemployed Population also changes by the same amount. If it would ever be set to a value above the City’s Population, it is instead set to the City’s Population. If it would ever be set to a value below 0, it instead becomes zero. Whenever a non-Residential Zone is added to a City’s Zones, the City’s Unemployed Population is decreased by 1, to a minimum of 0. Whenever a non-Residential Zone is removed from a City’s Zones, the City’s Unemployed Population is increased by 1, to a maximum of the City’s Population.”

does seem closely equivalent to just saying

“A City’s Unemployed Population is considered to be its Population minus the number of non-Residential Zones it has, to a minimum of zero.”

for most purposes.

Thanks! I’ve edited the Proposal to do exactly that. We can always tweak the Unemployed Population formula later as more complexity is introduced or desired.

Tweaking the formula later would require the passage of a proposal which might not find universal agreement depending on how the game progresses. I feel like it’s better to keep the rules a bit open in the early game rather than tying down the unemployed population variable to be a totally dependent quantity.