Join the new world

Before launching into this article, I’d like to thank the good people of NSW for their support in the recent congress elections. I’m proud to represent you and will continue to do my best in that role.

A little while ago I published a few graphs outlining some economic indicators. It seems quite a few people were interested, so now that I have collected a full month of data here’s an update on how things are progressing.

FOOD MARKET


Food prices by quality level

Food prices have remained fairly stable over the month in the Q1-3 markets, with prices dropping in the Q5/6 markets (over the period these have been the least cost-effective markets for health recovery)


Minimum price per health

This relative price stability is reflected in the minimum price per health unit which has hovered between $0.33 and $0.36, occasionally peaking to $0.38. The sudden drop in the tail is most likely temporary and the result of an unusually low offer rather than a trend.

WEAPONS MARKET

Weapons prices by quality level

Similar to the food market, weapons prices have been steady at lower quality levels, though the Q6 market has been quite erratic. The recent implementation of the Q6 market, and the fact that companies may only be upgraded to Q6 during a specific time period has probably resulted in quite a ‘thin’ market subject to greater volatility during the business cycle. This is not the case in the Q6 food market, where lower Q's provide a perfect substitute thereby reducing the volatility. I predict a continuing high volatility in Q6 weapons prices that will only begin to find stability after a few more rounds of allowing Q6 upgrades (if that is in admin’s plans). That said, Q6 weapon prices have trended down over the period, good news for weapon buyers.

SALARY

Highest wage offer per day

As you can see, unlike product prices (which have remained relatively stable or trended lower), wages have grown significantly over the period. This is of course great news for Australian workers/consumers. In the last article I suggested this was due to improved productivity resulting from a longer than normal period of regional stability and relatively high (in historical terms) resource bonuses.

This remains my opinion, however I’d also add that equilibrium in the wage market takes longer to reach than in the product market. Employers are naturally reluctant to ‘bid up’ wage offers and therefore exercise greater restraint in salary offers than in product prices (where ‘work as manager’ sellers with insignificant marginal cost/unit are happy to bid down prices to get revenue). This restraint however results in lower employment (and therefore lost profit) for higher quality levels, while it is still potentially profitable to pay wages in Q4 weapons companies. The gradual increase in wages we are seeing will over time make it unprofitable to employ people in the lower-quality companies and will see a migration of workers to higher quality companies. Eventually we will find a plateau (at a higher wage and higher of productivity per worker), though the rate of growth does not appear to be slowing yet.

HEALTH PER DAY

The number of health points that may be purchased per day at the highest wage offer is my indicative measure of the strength of the economy in supporting new citizens (who generally get a job from the market, and buy mostly food).

Maximum health per day

I’ve added a trendline to this chart to level out the ‘bumps’ resulting from volatility in wage offers and product prices. A continuing good news story for workers, with the typical new citizen being able to afford an additional 100 health (10 fights) per day.

Hope you found this interesting. These numbers come with the usual disclaimer that they are collected from individual offers at a particular point in time and are therefore subject to significant volatility. Results should only be considered useful in the long term as indicating trends. Hopefully automated data collection will be a reality sometime soon with the work Mudkip McMudkip and Xavier Griffith are doing to establish the Australian Bureau of Statistics.