lately i’ve been looking trough the simulation files and messing with them as i usually do and i noticed the high population has only really has negative effects, and yet it is listed as UNKNOWN instead of HIGHBAD, i suggest that you should add some positive effects to having a high population, like for example bigger GDP, or lower working week because there are more workers, and overhaul how population works in general, mabye also make the cost of UBI dependent off population like unemployed benefit is dependent from unemployment.
it would also be nice to see an overhaul of productivity, wages and working week while you are at it, why do wages decrease productivity?
I think that population should have a far bigger effect on a lot of things, especially the economy. @cliffski
Wages are seen to decrease productivity because for some outputs, where the task is fixed, such as stacking products in a warehouse, if the wages go up, but the rate of work does not (presumed to already be at maximum), then the work done per dollar is going to decrease.
Obviously in theory if high wages boosted morale and resulted in higher output, that would not be the case, but I suspect that there are many more fixed-output jobs than those based on morale.
In general wages are a cost to business. If you can pay people less, then you can hire more for the same money, and the productivity of a business with the same amount of financial capital will rise.
So low wages mean high productivity. Whether thats good for the economy or not is debatable because low wages means low disposable income which lowers consumer demand which may reduce all economic activity
I see what you’re going for here. Depending on how deep down the hole you want to go, industrial automation could be another input to this detail. Any job unaffected by morale, such as stacking boxes, is a job a robot could do. Higher automation would mean a higher ratio of jobs are ones which actually require humans, are therefore affected by morale, lessening the impact of wages on productivity.
Yes true, although i’m still not currently satisfied with how obscure the games method is for illustrating that effect of X on Y is mitigated by Z. Its currently a case of finding the effect in a details screen, seeing (and understanding!) the cog icon, and clicking it to see a list (and even then the actual equation is not shown, just an indication that it has some input…)
Yeah, plus if we’re accepting wage rate per work hour influences an overall value for productivity, but morale doesn’t, isn’t that a little selective? Perhaps in favour of a capitalist interpretation of this economic concept?
We certainly qualify the satisfaction of high earners via the Brain Drain situation and Business Confidence simulation.
I’m sure it’s an unrealistic amount of work at this stage in the development of the game, but I’ve always hoped that making workers happy had any point to it at all above avoiding strike action. As the Brain Drain situation implies, how happy an employee is, has real, measurable advantages.
Yes true. Its always a balance between modeling things accurately and making the game playable. New players are already scared off by the main screen!
I definitely think there is scope to perhaps model mental health in the game, and there are so many things that should feed into that, such as job satisfaction, and reduced working hours, maybe reduced by social media and fake news…
That would be really cool. I can already see how social care and other health systems, vice, cultural strength, and of course human development would influence that, perhaps implying a hard correlation between the Earnings and Wages metrics, so they’re no longer understood separately across different concepts.
But again, a big simulation with many logical inputs that’d logistically create more design problems than it solves. It’d definitely be my preference for implementation, though.
Well, GDP per capita could rise, I guess it depends on how intensive your economy is, otherwise rising GDP would never lead to rising GDP per cap (even considering pop increase), which is not what we see in real life. In real life GDP per cap rises with + GDP even with an increase in pop.
I’m wondering, do higher wages and labour rights lead to lower productivity? It must be offset by something otherwise we wouldn’t have developed economies with high income. Is it offset by technology, education, higher consumption, something else, all of these, etc.?
