The Economy of Safe Survival

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Falcon XL, Oct 14, 2020.

  1. I have thought about the interesting economy of this server a lot, especially since this is the closest that I have seen a Minecraft server be to a free-market economy that exists in the modern world. I would love to find out more about the server's economy such as:
    • What is the GDP of Safe Survival, both in diamonds and USD? GDP per capita? Economic growth rate? How would the economy of Safe Survival compare to real-life economies?
    • What is the Safe Survival economy based off? What are its biggest industries? Agriculture? Tourism? Minerals? Ranks? Commodities? Capital goods? What are its main exports/imports?
    • What is the richest region of the server? The poorest?
    • How much debt does the server have (in diamonds and USD)?
    I find the economy of this server interesting and it's just a nice thing to study imo.
     
  2. I used to be an Economics major in college so I'll give this one a shot.

    It would be extremely difficult to track the metrics needed to calculate GDP or other economic indicators. For example, how many rockets were produced in the last year on SS? How much revenue (in diamonds) did those rockets generate? Since shops aren't required to keep records of sales - you'd have no way of knowing unless you surveyed every shop owner on SS. Granted you could go to the largest mall owners and try to get their sales numbers but wouldn't be fully representative of the server and likely still limited in accuracy (probably based on rough estimates).

    The industries one would actually be really interesting - in so much as you could rank which products are the most popular by trade or shop sale. I'm sure you could probably arbitrarily pick this one based on ranking the most talked about/demanded items. However trying to calculate any kind of measurement would again be time consuming and hampered by incomplete information.

    Richest region is a rather subjective question. Which warp is the richest? Is that measured in land value, popularity, or plot count? For a player-driven economy like SS - I'd argue the better metric is who is the wealthiest player by diamonds and assets (appraised/estimated value). From reading the server chat I actually think this one is largely settled.

    Debts don't exist by rule on the server (no banks/lending schemes).
     
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  3. I define "richest" as the area with the highest GDP per capita. Also, the land value of warps is interesting, considering there is huge demand for warp plots but a very short supply of them.
     
  4. Ah. Well GDP per capita doesn't really work in this case because it's used as a measure of comparative prosperity/standard of living. Some of these warps have mega malls that probably generate the lion's share of it's "gross product" - yet just because a mall is doing well doesn't mean that prosperity applies to the rest of the warp. Warp residents - using the term loosely - have complete freedom of travel to go to other warps so there's no guarantee they're benefitting from goods from their "home warp". Also, shops don't employ workers from the community or in any way give back to the warp - so any prosperity generated applies only to the shop owner. Finally, the powerful 45 day rule means you can still live in a rather "prosperous" warp without paying the "cost of living" associated with living there - meaning there's little to guarantee a standard of living across the warp.

    Speaking of land value - it's again a rather tricky data point to collect due to the challenges of limited information and small datasets. The best way to estimate land value would be to conduct an appraisal, but appraisals are based on past sale value data. I would venture to guess that the number of warp land sales/trades in the past month have been under 20, maybe even under a dozen. Most of these trades might have been completed in game via private chats or through PMs in Discord. You'd first have to find a list of all the claims that changed hands in the past "x" months in order to even have the data to analyze. Once you do, it's probably going to be of very little use since such a small dataset is likely highly skewed and composed of differing variables like claim sizes and distance from the warp building. A solution might be to simply assign a set "value" to a block of warp land based upon a generated model that takes into account variables like distance from warp/type of warp - but this would be highly arbitrary and would most likely not agree with player expectations.

    Realize this was long winded but hopefully makes sense