The Economist ~ A very simple change to the game
Day 2,466, 14:46
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Published in Poland 
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by
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by Spite313
Dear friends,
World's shortest article today. No need to comment (hurr). If you care to look at the economy page of the eUK here you will see that the average wage in the UK is 245cc and rising. Hot damn, you might be thinking, time to move to London! Unfortunately wages there are on parity with anywhere else, but the UK is currently suffering under a bit of economic sabotage.
The average wage is a mean system taken over 30 days. So let's look at some examples: Say you have 500 citizens earning 30cc each per day. That is 15000cc in total. Now let's add another person who earns 100k cc a day. That would mean instead of an average salary of 30cc you have an average of... 230cc a day per player. Even though everyone except that lucky guy gets nothing.
This is an easy thing to do with any small country, since with the collaboration of a friend you can just keep pushing the same 100k through the system again and again, losing 1-4% a day in tax, until the market is buggered.
So what effect does it have on the economy? Well Work Tax is based on the average wage multiplied by the work tax. So if your average wage is 30cc and your work tax is 10%, you get taxed 3cc per company. If it's 240cc... you get the picture. As it happens the UK has 1% tax because it's a wonderful tax haven, so even with 240cc average wage it's still only 2.4cc per company. However if something like this hit the USA for example, they'd quickly be over the profitable limit for raw materials companies.
To combat this we need to do one of two things:
1. Stop using the mean average and start using the median average. What difference would this make? It would mean that extreme outliers would no longer count, and the average in most countries would be somewhere in the "bunch" of wages within a few cc of the current top market wage. Downside is that it would include commune wages so it would likely be artificially low.
2. Keep using the mean average but eliminate outliers or use some robust statistical tool to do so. I'm sure the admins are smart enough to do this. It would mean that both commune workers and the odd 100k wage guy would be eliminated, working an average out of the central 90% of wages which probably fall within 5-6cc of each other.
This will prevent highly artificial market manipulation.
Cheers,
Iain
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Pole.
add me as friend please... 😃
v
Economic Warfare!
I agree that it'd fix it.
I don't want to flatter the admins, but this may well have been a deliberate plan (if unlikely) to add another aspect to the game.
don't expect to see any change.
Agreed, median average makes much more sense.
Actually Josh Frost made such an experiment a year ago exactly in the eUSA (: I remember we found out that there was a bug in the game preventing us from collecting all of the tax money which was afterwards resolved.
I hope they tweak the mechanics after all.
Simpler fix - remove the work tax or allow countries to set 0% tax rates. Paying for the ability to work doesn't make sense. Taxes should be based on revenue/income and when I work in my companies, I don't have any income until I sell the products I manufacture, and when I sell them, I pay the VAT.
You don't pay VAT on RM, which is 99% of WAM
True, but it makes sense as RM are used to make other products, you can't consume them. Those product are subject to VAT so eventually I pay it either directly as a seller or indirectly as a buyer, unless I go to #itrade.
I can see another solution - remove work tax completely and unVAT food and weapons. Impose VAT on RM, instead. Why? RM cannot be donated so VAT cannot be evaded. #itrade dies, Godfather Corleone and his kind die, everyone's happy.
Seems sensible.
That's a nice article, first one I've seen since the missions were relased.
Surprised this is not being used in more countries...
comment couse you dont want it 😉
That would not be bad. But considering all the instances they took on other similar cases (take PTOs as an example), pretty sure they won't do a thing.
vote + sub + coment this porn article
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/off-vs-on-2-article-in-2nd-mission-2427195/1/20
voted
comment http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/new-mission-1-2427325/1/20
nice article
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Just read the underlined stuff; and its right. You got my vote.
Well, I'll comment anyway 😃
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are they really smart enough??
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Time to move to London!
Could the harmonic mean be used? Using your example in the article the harmonic mean would come out at about 30.06. Given the minimum wage IS under the control of the government via congress it could be set at a level to give a harmonic mean at the level deemed suitable
Senior Journalist
third article
please comment 🙂
http://www.erepublik.com/pl/article/analiza-koszt-w-dom-w-q1-2429948/1/20
Wrong time to write a real article...
Btw, are you making pics in your articles yourself?
It is relatively easy to remove the extreme cases in statistics. Not sure about a script that could actually do that automatically without constant checks, however (not a programmer myself, hence looking for an answer from someone who knows this stuff). But it would, indeed, be a really sensible solution to abnormalities in the market. But I do not really think that people would actually start an economic warfare on small countries this way. A few reasons of that being:
a) Rather expensive, considering a 1-4% income tax would actually amount to 1-4k of currency in the situation described in the article;
b) Not exactly effective, as it would cause people to simply pay more money to their govs, which means the country under such attack would not lose anything - it would actually win, due to reasons explained in point a);
c) Why would anyone want to attack a small country like this anyway? Is having over 100k to do such a trick not enough to actually start a war and thus do more damage?
By the way, this may also be used as an artificial way to increase prices of goods - by reducing supply (especially RMs) - and labor - by increasing demand in order to keep producing more while working less as a manager. But I doubt it could in any way be worth spending a bunch of cash on income tax only to increase profits for a short period of time.
P.S. It's not the shortest article in the world, believe me. I've seen a ton of articles consisting of 1-3 words not only today, but every sing day for almost a week, due to obvious reasons. It's nice to actually find something interesting to read in here.