Currently productivity falls when wages rise. Could someone please explain this link? I am not aware of any factual basis for this link to exist. Rather I have observed lowly paid employees being nearly impossible to motivate, and well paid employees taking on work that they would prefer to deflect specifically because the pay is good enough to put up with it, even if grumbling is involved. Specifically I have even been the individual saying “You’re going to pay me what? To do what?..shrug…ok”.
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This idea that higher wages increase productivity interested me, so I decided to read up on it. I’m finding most sources agree with your claim that higher wages increase productivity. Here is one of many sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbooksauthors/2019/09/12/the-impact-of-wages-on-employee-productivity/?sh=40a8d7e660cf
This source uses the example of amazon increasing wages, and how it made them more money in the end.
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I believe the idea stems from a psychology study centered on behaviorism where people worked more effectively, but slower the less the were paid and vise versa. (Working faster and less precise when paid more). The idea is that correlation decreases the workers productivity if wages are raised. I would say though there should be a correlation between health and productivity though. (Less health = less productivity).
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Thanks for the link, that helps to see the dev replies.
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Perhaps the question isn’t one of debating how hard wages decimate the Productivity simulation, and more one of why does Automation barely affects it when you’ve ceiling’d its value?
Presumably anyone trying to push wages higher than the devs want is a socialist player, and modern socialists seem to see the fourth industrial revolution as a means to leave behind the working class (as this game sort of allows you to do by making the Poor voter group 2% with a handful of progressive policies.) Automation is something of a missing link for socialism. It’s the reason you can pay people more to do less without drawbacks.
With low unemployment and poverty, and a soaring GDP, as is so inevitable by the mid-game, and Automation starting to take off, who cares how much it costs to pay an employee, let them take maternity leave, retire at 60, or get a seat on the board when you’ve effectively established a machine-class? It’s like worrying about what to do with the wheat cutters after the combine harvester, you’ve created a society that’s eclipsed the need to make people do that shit.
None of the industrial revolutions progressed painlessly, but they all had fairly conclusive resolutions: redefined conceptions of labour raises the standard of living in tandem with productivity, and lost jobs are recouped by a need for higher-skilled, more dignified work.
But there again maybe this is too complicated a re-balance to stick on the trello and this’ll all be addressed in an expansion.
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There’s a lot of things in the economic model of the democracy games that seem to think a country has massive economic problems if it doesn’t have sweatshops. Which is pretty true if you’re a developing economy, but not if you’re a first world industrial power, which all the countries in the game right now are.
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@Plexus, I would like to see your set up which results in low unemployment. I can never get that below the yellow range once immigration sticks to the ceiling. I’ll have the GDP pinned, automation tax to full, import tariffs to full, and a slew of public sector job creation and still have alarming unemployment. Given how easy it is to pin GDP, health, education crime and poverty to either the top or bottom of the chart, as well as many other simulations in the game, I get frustrated when I can’t fix unemployment.
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@Rabid As I understand it, it’s impossible to bottom out Unemployment now, which I actually enjoy because it’s quite realistic and offers new challenge. You can get it low with every initiative that employs people maxed out besides repealing unemployment benefits and introducing compulsory work.
I almost suspect there’s some kind of rubber-banding in the simulation though, as the value always seems to dance around the 20% no matter how hard I’m working on it in the late game. (I almost wish Education, Health and GDP worked this way, since they all have the same problem of being easily addressed mid-game. Crime and Poverty on the other hand strike me as realistically resolvable with all the provision the game gives you to address them, though they’re also somewhat trivial.)
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