Join the new world

Ever wanted to know how Australians economy and standard of living compares with other countries? I do, but couldn’t find any decent way to compare. GDP per capita is the most common real-life aggregate measure but the in-game tool appears to be broken, and in any case it doesn’t say much about standard of living so I set about working on a measure of economic well-being that makes sense in this world.

One measure is the number of health points a citizen may recover per day at the current salary level. This is a particularly good measure for new citizens, who generally work from the “official” market job offers and spend most earnings on food. This is calculated by dividing the price of food in each Quality level by the health provided and identifying the minimum value, then dividing this result into the highest wage offer on the market.

It also makes sense to incorporate the cost of weapons into the measure, and given that Q6 weapons tend to represent most influence per hit the number of Q6 weapons that may be purchased at the current salary level is also relevant.

Combining these two measures gives a composite index that can be used to compare the economic performance of sets of countries, or of a single country over different time periods.

In the time-honoured tradition of self-obsessed egomaniacs I have named this measure “The Keating Index”, though if someone could offer a more appropriate suggestion in the comments that would be much appreciated.

I prepared this measure across a number of countries, large and small, across all continents/regions, and both friend/foe to establish what might be a useful cross-section. Again, if anyone has suggestions to add other countries I’d be happy to add them next time.

The results are below:



The Keating Index day 1519

The results are fairly self-explanatory, each of the surveyed countries is plotted on the scatter-graph according the the maximum health per day (X axis) and Q6 weapons per day (Y axis) that may be purchased at the highest prevailing wage offer.

While the rankings are fairly predictable, with large countries enjoying high production bonuses ranking higher on the scale than smaller countries with fewer bonuses, it is interesting to note the size of the disparity. For example a Turkish citizen can afford health to fight 100 times per day, while a new citizen in Malaysia can only afford 37 fights. An American, Chinese or Turkish citizen can afford 7 Q6 weapons per day with change, while an Australian can’t quite afford 4.

It may be worth revisiting this index from time to time to assess our economic progress. Use of an index like this may be a useful way to assess government policy changes.

Disclaimer: The data for this survey were all collected at a specific point in time and therefore the result may be skewed due to individual ‘outlier’ offers that don’t match ‘normal’ wages/prices for the market. Furthermore the results do not directly take into account the black market economy, work as manager and commune work that represents a large majority of production.