Economic Productivity in Vekllei

Part of the bulletin series of articles

Summary

• Despite functional moneylessness for most people, the Vekllei economy is very large and trades with other countries.
• In this aspect, the Vekllei economy is easily evaluated and compared to moneyed markets overseas, and against which Vekllei ranks highly in economic productivity.
• This seems to run contrary to popular intuition, in which Vekllei’s social, participatory labour should not outcompete powerful industrial American and European markets that have much higher GDPs.
• Nonetheless, because of a variety of unique factors in the Vekllei market, productivity metrics remain among the highest in the world outside of the oil-rich and resource-extraction economies.

Note

This bulletin highlights the advantages of the Vekllei system, i.e. its best-case scenario. There are in fact many inefficiencies and exceptions within Vekllei’s intricate economic constellation of industry, barter, social labour and planned economics, but here we look only at explaining high productivity metrics in Vekllei.

Productivity is an equation that measures the ratio between input cost and output value of a product, which can be used to indicate efficiency, growth and competitiveness. In most countries, this is measured by the hours of labour required to produce it, since labour hours are both expensive and easy to track.

In the Vekllei system, however, labour-value measurement of productivity is incomplete. While labour is inversely much more valuable in a moneyless economy for its voluntary, participatory nature, labour-hours do not reflect a material expense (and therefore input ratio) in the Vekllei economy.

The reason for this is straightforward – Vekllei in its domestic market does not use money, and therefore employees are not paid and do not impose a salary burden on a company. Their remuneration is more complicated and harder to quantify materially, and includes public-provided goods and services (education, housing, food) and social relationships and gifts.¹

In material terms, the largest average expense of most Vekllei industries are raw commodities, electricity, land use and imported technology that service the industrial economy. Consequently, productivity in Vekllei includes indexes of these factors, as a measurement of total or multifactor productivity.

Core drivers of productivity in Vekllei are:

1. High public investment from autonomous but coordinated productivity drivers like governments and bureaux
   The Vekllei economy is highly centralised in policy but devolved in structure, and there are clear lines of communication between municipal, republican, commonwealth and federal governments regarding opportunities for investment and improvement. Investment is spurred by the major firms of the Vekllei economy, some of which are government-owned. The country has historically high levels of public investment and the government plays a significant role in the economy.
2. Rapid advancement of labour-saving technologies like robotics and automatic factory schematics
   The basic Vekllei standard of living is mostly the product of automatic factories. Food, housing, clothing, electricity and heat are produced by robots and universalised schematics. As a result, factory labour that is undesirable and difficult to compel without a wage incentive is mostly abolished in basic consumer products manufacturing.
3. Computerisation and centralisation of actionable data
   The automation of industrial labour, alongside improvements in computing and data processing, provided new opportunities to not just index production but improve it. Regular production within the industrial economy (an important and distinct market seperate from the moneyless domestic economy) is not just recorded but in fact initiated by computers, eliminating some human oversight and also making much more efficient the planned elements of the Vekllei economic system common at the industrial scale.
4. High standards of education, job performance and innovation among its workforce
   Vekllei has among the highest rates of teachers per capita in the world, and education is universal and free from kindergarten through university. For what they lack in consumer comforts – per the social economy – they are very well-educated, very healthy, and well fed. These securities pay huge dividends in the high-skill Vekllei economy. Furthermore, its huge immigrant population are mostly English-speaking and, thanks to Century Society laws, often tertiary-educated, further adding economic value to the high-skill labour pool.
5. An advanced and high-skill economy that makes good use of labour
   Much of the Vekllei economy is geared towards maintenance of their quality of life, which is mostly automatic. Beyond this concern, services, finance and high-value exports make up most of the economy, and are where the majority of Vekllei people work. Assisted by good education, short working weeks and material security, Vekllei workers are typically employed in work they enjoy and contribute to, trimming wage-incentivised dead weight from company employee rolls. This factor should be taken seriously in analysing productivity – most, though not all, Vekllei people self-select work for reasons that are not financial, which often positively influence the productivity of their labour.

This is a workforce that, without a compelling wage, rejects low-skill work.² This further advantages Vekllei productivity by forcing the automation of factory labour (or simply disregarding it, as Vekllei does not have a consumer society) and pressuring labour into high-value industries in services, research, civil service and finance.

This, in truth, is the core factor of high total productivity in Vekllei. It is not just that they work harder, faster, or with better technology, because these things are not really true. Instead, the Vekllei economy sheds inefficient work regularly in a means out of reach for other countries, because a low wage in a free market will always resurrect unproductive business practices.³ Rather than simply improving productivity, Vekllei’s unique economy reduces unproductivity, which is not quite the same thing.

An example of this is the pyramid of bad jobs, and the ways in which low-productivity labour is reduced through cascading solutions:

1. It is improved
2. It is rewarded
3. It is shared
4. It is automated
5. It is conscripted
6. It is done without

Many such jobs are simply “done without,” which leaves Vekllei with an automated low-skill industrial market⁴ and a top-heavy high-skill market that contributes most economic value, or GDP. In this context, in which their public investment and infrastructure drives people upward, it is no wonder that most other markets not based on raw commodity extraction are unable to compete with Vekllei in this metric.