So your example causing infinite wage increases only works if the size of the industry is limited when the whole period is exemplified by increasing demands for goods produced by multiple industrial sectors.
How do they expand with the state managing all capital investment? The largest they can expand is the total size of the industry, with everything it already has. By the nature of the game, all industries are limited until the player decides to expand them.
Or, hear me out here, buildings could actually function close to how industrial sectors actually operated in the era, rather than an idealized reinterpretation of market mechanics that isn't even true for the modern era. I don't get how it can be so hard to understand that labor markets are fundamentally markets where prices rise when demand exceeds supply, or fall in the reversed scenario.
The issue is, it's not nearly as simple as you're making it out to be.
Supply and demand exist, and the labor market is indeed a market, but for whatever reason, it may not even be the reasons I've explained here, historically wages have been highly correlated with productivity, and profit margins relatively limited. Disagree all you want with the theory, but industrial sectors operated in the era with wage raises being common
Except this doesn't actually happen because larger firms in the Victorian era never pay the same wages as smaller firms, they actually pay less than smaller firms because the workers are less skilled, even in the same industry. The low wages of large firms is such a common occurrence there's
plenty of people trying to figure out the exact reason behind it. Also, any growth in employment of facility would not necessarily detriment the growth of another facility in the same industry, the industry would simply grow to eat into the unlimited population, which is your job as the aforementioned "Spirit of the Nation". We know wages in the industry didn't affect each other too much because the disparity in wages was huge.
This is a misinterpretation. Small and large firms experience fundamentally different levels of specialization and economies of scale. They weren't competing over the same workers. Among firms with the same levels of specialization and production methods, which is what the game represents, wages were far closer.
Except this literally is what did happen and worse, as labor revolts arose all over Europe in the time period. Wages getting raised by strikes and labor revolts, not by businesses trying to cannibalize each other. Because of course they didn't cannibalize each other, they grew themselves, eating into the boundless peasents, and lowering wages the bigger the firm got and the less skilled the laborers got.
This narrative you're creating here is not at all depicted in the economic data. Wages raised with or without strikes and labor action. Sometimes they enabled
more wage rises, but that's not what you're describing here. You're attributing all wage rises to labor movements, which is a ridiculous historical claim to make.
Can you just stop? Wages aren't even close to tracking productivity for the 19th century. If that means everything has to be a monopoly, so be it. Albeit you still haven't made a consistent argument for why non-monopolistic businesses would constantly raise wages. Also, as a reminder, it is your preference for economics that leads to grossly ahistorical outcomes., which is the reason anyone is having this discussion in the first place.
The very first of your links says literally the exact opposite of what you're claiming. Using the tables that source provides; wages were growing
faster than productivity in the relevant time period to the game. Please don't link thinks that totally disprove your own argument, while acting otherwise. It's bad form.
Before any more discussion is had on this, please just let me conclusively disprove this worryingly common misconception that wages didn't raise without labor movements in the Victorian era with some empirical data.
Here's dataon wages and total profits in manufacturing industries in the US from 1850 to 1890, from the US census:
Source:
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1895/dec/volume-6.html (General Tables 1-4, page 2)
Here we very clearly see a raise in wages for American workers, even in cases where labor movements were uncommon, such as in 1850-1860. Over the entire time period 1850-1890, we see over a 100% increase in wages per capita (net Inflation in the period was negligible, at around 8%, so this is basically real wage growth)
and assuming misc. costs (they're only listed for 1890 and I'm too lazy to go through older census data) grew at a similar rate to capital, wages, and cost of materials used, the average profit margin throughout the period was around 13-14% as well, which is about what the game has now. Under a monopolistic model we would expect them to have exploded instead, but that's not what we see here.
The fact is, in the Victorian era, profit margins remained relatively low, while wages continually grew. The world was not the dystopic capitalist hellscape people here seem to think it was. There was of course lots of poverty and lots of exploitation, especially once we start talking about colonies, but at least in the case of free markets, people's lives still generally improved as the economy as a whole improved.
www.statista.com
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