Some Economic Indicators

Day 1,517, 13:40 • Published in Australia Australia • by Paul J Keating

Since joining this game a little over a month ago one of the first things I noticed is that there is precious little in the way of useful economic data. In my experience you can never have too much data, it always helps in decision-making whether that be personal investment/purchasing decisions or government macroeconomic decisions.

So, I started collecting data personally to keep a track of how things are going. The data here is over a period of less than 1 month (it took me a few days to get started) but I’ll try to keep updating it. The data is also collected at a point in time and therefore subject to volatility as I don’t have time to collect more regular samples and produce averages, it’s a snapshot each day of wage offers, food and weapons prices collected at more or less a similar time of day.

Let’s take a look at some of the results. Firstly, let’s look at product prices:

FOOD PRICE



Chart 1: Food Prices

Food prices have been relatively stable over the period. Q6 food was only recently enabled so the early stages show a little volatility as the market worked to find its new equilibrium level accounting for the new ‘product’, but fairly quickly settled on a new price level and, along with other Q levels has remained stable over the period.

WEAPONS PRICE



Chart 2: Weapons Prices

A similar story to food prices, after an adjustment period for Q6 weapons the market price was settled (though Q6 weapons have been in slight decline) with little major movement in either direction across all Q levels.

MINIMUM HEALTH PRICE

While prices per Q level are interesting, for the food market what is most interesting is the price/health point. Unless you’re seriously constrained on storage the best quality food to buy is where the unit price (Price/Health) is lowest. The following graph plots the calculated ‘best buy’ from the food offers over the perio😛



Chart 3: Minimum Cost per Health Unit

As you can see, the price per health point has varied between $0.34 and $0.38 over the period, though the peaks have reduced over time to result in lower average prices. Another story of stable prices.

Now let’s look at the jobs market.

SALARY PER DAY



Chart 4: Highest Wage Offer

It’s clear that while product prices have been stable wage offers have been gradually increasing over the period, from $142 up to mid-high $160’s over the past few days. This is unambiguously good news for Australian workers, whose daily salary can now afford more food and weapons per day.

Dollar values only go so far though, the following graph represents what this means to the average worker in terms of the health that may be recovered per day at market wages:

RECOVERABLE HEALTH PER DAY



Chart 5: Maximum Health per Day at Market Wages

A steady increase in recoverable health per day is great news. Working at the highest salary on offer and buying the cheapest unit price food available, it is now possible to do an extra 10 fights per day compared to less than a month ago.

SUMMARY

As you can see the standard of living for wage earners has been steadily increasing over the period of data collection primarily due to wage inflation while price inflation is low/negative. Why is this so? Stability is good for the economy. I suggest that a relatively prolonged period of stability, with Australia maintaining it’s territorial integrity (and therefore production bonuses) and not being involved in a direct battle for existence has allowed Australian businesses to improve productivity. Price inflation that one would normally see as a result of wage inflation is minimised due to higher productivity (i.e. supply-side improvements).

Eventually one would expect the full benefit of the prolonged stability will level out. Whether we remain intact, or indeed secure new production bonuses in future, will determine how sustainable this improved standard of living will be.

Hope you found this informative.