PDA

View Full Version : Banking and Finance in Fantasy Settings



BreaktheStatue
2019-01-14, 08:53 PM
I'm working on building an elf who is a white-collar criminal/information broker, and it got me thinking about how finance and banking might work in your average fantasy setting.

In most fantasy settings I've come across, the various races have very different lifespans. In 5E (where I am building this character), humans get your average 75-100 years while elves get 750. Knowing that, I would think it would have a pretty strong influence on attitudes toward (and the value of) money.

How would this impact interest rates? Inter-racial lending? Savings? Taxation? Credit? Futures contracts for merchants? How would speculation work in a world with divination magic? Is there a Waterdeep SEC?

I realize that for the most part we're talking about "fantasy medieval times" and that a lot of the complicated financial instruments we have now just wouldn't exist, but most of the basics of finance are old enough that I think they'd exist in many settings - whether or not they're ever articulated. I'm not looking for a specific answer, it just got me thinking.

gkathellar
2019-01-14, 09:03 PM
Nobody actually understands how the sum of those things works in the real world, so it's probably safe to assume they'd be a barely-comprehensible mess in a Standard Fantasy world, too.

Also: modern finance depends on the existence of trusted, stable institutions (states and banks) capable of backing (a) loans and (b) currency. The knights templar were among the first and most successful bankers in Europe because they were a military organization where individuals swore vows of poverty - as poor men of the cloth they were expected to be trustworthy with money, and as soldiers with experience as caravan guards they were expected to be able to prevent their vaults from getting knocked over. In the absence of those kinds of institutions, there's a general complexity threshold on financial operations.

zlefin
2019-01-14, 09:50 PM
I'd say the biggest changes don't come as a result of simple differences in lifespans; the big differences come frmo the effects of magic, or the effect of deities.
actual differences in lifespan shouldn't have much of any effect on interest rates, savings, taxation, or credit.

ofc fantasy economies are never designed that thoroughly and there's no proper way to rigorously test them, so who knows what it'd really be like. one could make a set of assumptions and run some simulations, but I doubt the results would be that useful.

in general, finance gets bigger and more important when in a larger nation, and in more stable situations. an empire that has lasted many generations has a lot more room for institutions.

the biggest lifespan effect would be that, generally speaking, an individual won't make loans that last more than half their lifespan (unless there's a sufficiently complex market that selling the loan instrument is feasible, then there's no real limit).


as guidelines, I'd assume most people would look to Venice and other bankers as being a suitable analog for what financial instruments exist and such.

Knaight
2019-01-14, 10:48 PM
Interest rates being used for anything other than loans is a pretty new thing, and lifespans aren't necessarily the things that pushes for shorter loans - not when on the long term they could go for generations anyways, and on the short term there's questions of instability, such as "will the political entity I'm loaning to still be around for the loan duration", which tends to just get more pronounced for smaller and smaller groups, especially individuals.

In any case you can probably just steal wholesale from historical banking institutions. Medici banks, for instance.

lightningcat
2019-01-15, 12:55 AM
I believe that Forgetten Realms has a god of banking, and iirc they are the only international bank. Any other banks are local affairs and backed either by merchants or the local crown. Intrest rates are generally closer to loanshark rates then modern bank rates.

Florian
2019-01-15, 01:24 AM
Golarion offers two oddities, when it comes to the topic.
- The temples of the main god of civilization also double as banks and vaults.
- The nation of Druma makes a fortune with their merchants and mercenary business. It´s rules over by the Prophets of Kalistrade, a sect that could also be termed Prophets of Wall Street, as they worship the bling.

Banking and such are basically as old as our civilization. I once heard a joke that the first three widespread and fully recognized professions were whore, pimp and money lender.

Looking for historic examples is helpful, when translating to the faux medieval of a fantasy setting.
- Knights Templar for being a knightly order that started by protecting caravans.
- Medici and other "Merchant Dynasties"
- Speculation has always existed. It mostly did take the form of financing caravans, ships and mines, tho.

The real issue is, that we're talking about a pre-fiat-money situation, meaning it is impossible to translate our actual understanding of how banking functions over to a fantasy setting, that literally uses a hard gold standard.

The Glyphstone
2019-01-15, 01:28 AM
I could see some dragons being willing to operate as banks. Extremely low interest rates, possibly even zero - but it's an easy way to grow 'their' horde with minimal effort and the attendant psychological benefits, as well as providing reciprocal security. A dragon who's known to be protecting the savings of wealthy+powerful people might seem like a juicy target, but robbing them means A) fighting a dragon, and B) angering all the people whose money that dragon was watching over. Some of them might even be adventurers or ex-adventurers.

Mechalich
2019-01-15, 01:39 AM
The real issue is, that we're talking about a pre-fiat-money situation, meaning it is impossible to translate our actual understanding of how banking functions over to a fantasy setting, that literally uses a hard gold standard.

In addition to this, most 'quasi-medieval' settings should be cash-poor. In an agrarian economy the most valuable economic element is arable land, and in most pre-industrial agrarian economies the value of said land was vastly greater than the total value of currency in circulation. As a result there simply wasn't enough money to buy the available goods. Feudal Japan, for instance, spent decades trading with China for currency - they needed to literally buy an increased supply of coin to keep up with economic growth.

Taxation and many other common payments in a quasi-medieval setting would likely be in kind, not in currency, much of the time, especially when it comes to peasants and small artisans paying their lords. In fact one of the entire reasons feudalism as a system even happened was to produce payments of military service in kind rather than in coinage the king or other ruler simply did not possess, as the need to pay one's armies in wartime was historically crippling for many a pre-industrial empire if you had to try and actually come up with bullion to do it.

In terms of preserving the 'medieval stasis' aspect of most fantasy worlds, you probably actually want to limit banking as much as possible. Restrictions on the availability of capital restrict economic development, as do legal and or religious regimes (such as the traditional Catholic restrictions on usury) that prevent the issuing of loans for interest. The tendency of monsters like dragons to periodically take huge quantities of currency out of circulation would only exacerbate this.

Florian
2019-01-15, 04:52 AM
I realize that for the most part we're talking about "fantasy medieval times" and that a lot of the complicated financial instruments we have now just wouldn't exist, but most of the basics of finance are old enough that I think they'd exist in many settings - whether or not they're ever articulated. I'm not looking for a specific answer, it just got me thinking.

Most things that deal with accounting, banking, money lending and such are really old.

The important difference between then and now is how fiat money (aka giral money, book money...) works in comparison to gold standard money.

In the short form, fiat money is based on a system of mutual trust. A regular bank account is nothing else than an entry in a ledger tracking how much money the bank owes you. When paying for something with a debit/credit card, what we do is transfer part of this obligation (me - bank) over to the shop (shop - bank). So, now for the fiat part of it. When going to a bank and asking for a line of credit (say, 50K), the thing that really happens is that the bank simply adds two new obligations into the ledger, one that I now have 50K, the other that I owe them 50K plus interest. Right now, this is not even money, it´s just accounting, so it was possible to more or less create it out of thin air. It will only ever be real money if I either opt to get the sum in cash, or decide to pay it back in cash.

We used to have a thing called gold/silver standard. For example, a bank had to be able to exchange any obligation in their ledger for the daily rate in gold or silver. That's the reason bank notes and such could become common in the first place, because the note was equal to a receipt for gold and silver, so convenient to carry around and trade with.
Banks used to have a serious rush hour on certain days, when they exchanged accumulated bank notes and settled their score in hard currency.

In a faux medieval world, all of that will become major issues.

Coinage comes in the form of various metals, not because it is important what their face value is, but they are rated on the worth of the raw material used. Think about it: One copper kettle costs 20 copper pieces because that is exactly the amount of raw material used in creating both. The early german-speaking/Alps region actually used salt as a payment, being of incredible value as a preservative. The name for soldier, mercenary and payment have their roots in salt (Soldat, Söldner and Sold.)

Most of the population will never be mobile in any relevant way, so something like a bank note or script is totally useless to them as they lack the means to verify it, check the ledger or trade it in for cash. That would require an extensive bank network, but that doesn't really work until the raise of true national states that can introduce and back the concept of face value over material value.

As a side note, that made mercenary work and looting so damn important.

The only meaningful difference here can be in settings that have true divinities and where the divine is a fundamentally accepted and understood part of everyday life. In this context, true divinities means that they are not just powerful individuals, like for example the Greek Pantheon, but rather more akin to the intangible state as we have it in the Abrahamitic religions. he church of a, say, God of Civilization could possible be the only global institution that could generate enough trust to be the corner of something that comes a little bit closer to modern banking.

BreaktheStatue
2019-01-15, 05:13 AM
Thank you everyone for the input. At the risk glossing over everyone, my main takeaways are:

1. There is a reason that this stuff is rarely emulated, either because it's impossible or unfun.

2. If you want a historical example, look to the Medicis (or use a dragon).

In retrospect, since my charcter is more of a white collar *criminal* and not necessarily a finance professional (is there a difference, har har), I think my best route will just be research actual grafts and ask permission on those.

lightningcat
2019-01-15, 11:06 AM
In retrospect, since my charcter is more of a white collar *criminal* and not necessarily a finance professional (is there a difference, har har), I think my best route will just be research actual grafts and ask permission on those.

On a related note, The Lies of Locke Lemora is a novel about white collar criminals in a fantasy setting. The primary job is about getting a noble to invest in fake wine.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-15, 11:49 AM
Short trading in adventurer futures. That's how real villains work.

Segev
2019-01-15, 12:15 PM
The lifespan thing would make it more likely that you'd see investment bankers and brokers and investors in the longer-lived races, since giving an investment seed to your kid when he's a 15-year-old elf, and keeping him on Mommy and Daddy's expense sheet until he's an adult 100 years later, means that he'll be a trust fund kid with enormous wealth compared to other starting-out types. This will lead to a dichotomy of the wealthy and successful investors and the layabout lazy types who wind up broke from squandering their trust funds as the two typical stereotypes of elves and dwarves, financially speaking.

Being medieval, investment is riskier, and thus interest on loans is typically higher. Though it also often is FLAT interest, not compound, so a loan of 100 gp might expressly have a payback amount of 115 gp. Typically, as well, loans didn't have payment plans, but due dates. Borrow 100 gp today, and owe 115 gp in two months' time. Pay it in installments or pay it all on the last day, and it makes no difference. Usurers would usually have "late fees" but "generously" permit you to pay in part to avoid getting the greater cost (debtor's prison or confiscation of all your worldly goods or broken knees or what-have-you), just counting the remainder plus the penalty as a new loan, which, of course, has its own payback cost greater than the amount loaned. But at least it has a later due date!

Investment, too, will rarely involve brokers and the like, and will be more direct. You're actively buying into a venture by talking to the venture captain, who will be running and managing it and who will be responsible for paying back out profits in the appropriate amounts. Venture captains can be of any race; longevity isn't an aid nor detriment here. Might tend towards the shorter-lived, though, just because they have less time to make the big score, and rarely start with the leg up that the longer-lived ones do. This also would be a good job for an adventurer: leading an expedition for trade with investors' money will be risky, but high reward, and you'll doubtless face hazards on the journey.

That may also be where longer-lived races join in: to help protect their investments, they also travel. You could have a fun campaign based on mercantile ventures where the PCs are guards or even captains of the expedition, fighting off bandits, engaging in trade, and taking side quests to investigate ancient ruins to further pad the profit margins.

RazorChain
2019-01-15, 03:00 PM
On a related note, The Lies of Locke Lemora is a novel about white collar criminals in a fantasy setting. The primary job is about getting a noble to invest in fake wine.

This is exactly what I was thinking, the best way to try to be a white collar criminal is to be a con artist and get rich people to invest in ventures that won't pay off.

Just like the movie The Producers where they get a lot of people to invest in a theater piece that must fail because they have too many investors and if the theater piece is profitable then they have to pay them back

JeenLeen
2019-01-15, 03:09 PM
If you have anything like a magi-mart in your setting (as some D&D games do, at least in major cities): I like to envision it as, not the magic items held by that shop itself, but that the shop is part of a chain of shops linked to another plane. They have active portals (or daily teleportation available) for their goods or coin.

Such could also double as a bank. Drop off 20k gold coins between missions, and be able to retrieve it next time you are at a shop.

(I thought this up, or borrowed the idea, when we wanted a magic-mart idea but also wanted some realistic-enough way it could operate without being constantly robbed or every city having massive magical defenses/nigh-epic shopkeeps.)

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-15, 03:14 PM
There were some posts about this in another thread in the last couple months, I'll try to find and link that discussion.

Edit -- here we go, it was in the Planescape thread.



That's generally useful for many settings -- and there's nothing about banking that hard-locks it to some particular "tech level" or "real history timeframe equivalent".

What's really needed is an institution that's trusted enough for people to hand over their hard coin for a piece of paper and a ledger entry, that's also got enough clout of whatever sort to maintain its independence and integrity from other powerful actors, or backing from powerful actors with a long-term interest in its success.

In a setting I worked on, there was a powerful international traders/transporters "guild" that pushed for standardized coinage and rates, offered basic banking (deposit here, withdraw there, etc), and would collectively refuse services to polities that interfered with its members (all the way to embargoing them).

You can go to that post and read from that point on.

Short version, banking dates back at least to ancient Greece and Rome in some forms, and by the times and places that inspire much of "European medieval fantasy", there are many entities engaged in banking proper, as noted here.


Not just them, but they were big in it. So were a lot of the free cities in Germany and the Netherlands. The Hanseatic league and the Fuggers were active after about 1300. And the Templars issued letters of credit to pilgrims since around 1100: you could pay in your money in Europe, and then get it back in Outremer when you arrived there on your pilgrimage, so that you couldn't be robbed on the way.


(Bold added by me in both posts.)

Darth Ultron
2019-01-15, 09:02 PM
In most fantasy settings I've come across, the various races have very different lifespans. In 5E (where I am building this character), humans get your average 75-100 years while elves get 750. Knowing that, I would think it would have a pretty strong influence on attitudes toward (and the value of) money.

How would this impact interest rates? Inter-racial lending? Savings? Taxation? Credit? Futures contracts for merchants? How would speculation work in a world with divination magic? Is there a Waterdeep SEC?


Elves....and dwarves.....would offer very long term money related things. A 100 year loan, for example. And they can do the fun trick of have a contract with a human for 50/50, for the life of the human....then just a bit less then 50 years later, they get the full 100%.

Of course, most elves would not even use 'money' and have no need to such human/dwarf things....

Well...interest rates way back when were like 1,000 % if you were lucky...or worse, like your family being sold into something....or worse

Well...taxes way back then where like ''everything you own", or worse...or worse then that.

Erulasto
2019-01-16, 03:21 AM
I did up a homebrew setting where all the civilizations ended up living on floating islands, etc, because the surface became atrociously toxic. Since resources were scarce, I whipped up a banking guild that handled negotiations and trade deals (economic trade was the only way a lot of settlements could survive) and it ended up using writs of trade (IOU's) and the like instead of hard currency. The hard currencies and valuables were stored in special vaults, while transactions were done (including loans and the like) with the paper writs. Much like a real banking system.

Admittedly, the Banker's Guild ended up being one of the most potent organizations in the world....

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-16, 06:23 AM
Elves....and dwarves.....would offer very long term money related things.

What - because they live long?

I imagine a dwarf loan shark to be the meanest, nastiest piece of work imaginable - lending out at extortionate rates, short term, "and if you can't pay on time, I'm taking your house!"

I imagine elves frankly not using money at all - but they might have a system of lending magic of some sort. And since elves are fundamentally evil, I'd say they takes interest rates in your soul.

Or something. How would that work?! Say ..... you must carry the leaf of the Ever Tree next to your heart, and until it whithers, you'll have another spell for each spell level you can cast. However, using the leaf binds you to the tree, and once the leaf has withered, you pay back - with interest - losing one spell per level until you've repaid tripple the spell levels.

That sounds elfin to me.

snowblizz
2019-01-16, 06:59 AM
Well...interest rates way back when were like 1,000 % if you were lucky...or worse, like your family being sold into something....or worse

That's completely untrue. It would be almost impossible to run a loan system on rates like that. The funny thing is, rates were not too unsimilar to today. They were generally a bit higher because there was more risk in the system. As today you had tiers to it too. Established people could get fair rates from a merchant/banker/moneylender, probably 15-20%. Those with less good creditscores were then as now subject to the payday loaners at similar rates of interest (in the hundreds of %).


Well...taxes way back then where like ''everything you own", or worse...or worse then that.
No, they were not. High oppressive taxes is an invention of modern times. Back in the day 1) you couldn't easily turn infungible assets produced by farmers into fungible assests. Most taxes were produced in kind and anyone expected to get taxes more than once knew there were limits to outtake. 2) The ability of taxers to excise tax was hugely limited. Push it too far and the taxcollector got killed and you got overthrown.


By and large communities were much more dependent on each other. The city moneylender couldn't suck the people dry because the relied on them to not just take it back. And defend the town when someone else attacked.

Taxation grew slowly out of communal obligations, usually mutual defence, that were turned into taxes instead of inkind or services.

gkathellar
2019-01-16, 07:40 PM
That's completely untrue. It would be almost impossible to run a loan system on rates like that. The funny thing is, rates were not too unsimilar to today. They were generally a bit higher because there was more risk in the system. As today you had tiers to it too. Established people could get fair rates from a merchant/banker/moneylender, probably 15-20%. Those with less good creditscores were then as now subject to the payday loaners at similar rates of interest (in the hundreds of %).


No, they were not. High oppressive taxes is an invention of modern times. Back in the day 1) you couldn't easily turn infungible assets produced by farmers into fungible assests. Most taxes were produced in kind and anyone expected to get taxes more than once knew there were limits to outtake. 2) The ability of taxers to excise tax was hugely limited. Push it too far and the taxcollector got killed and you got overthrown.


By and large communities were much more dependent on each other. The city moneylender couldn't suck the people dry because the relied on them to not just take it back. And defend the town when someone else attacked.

Taxation grew slowly out of communal obligations, usually mutual defence, that were turned into taxes instead of inkind or services.

Not to mention that periodic loan forgiveness was a critical part of many premodern societies and frequently one the prerogatives of the monarchy or other ruling body to prevent things from getting completely out-of-hand.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-16, 08:08 PM
What - because they live long?

Yes? A human gets a 40 year mortgage, to pay off right before they retire. A long lived race would have a longer time.


That's completely untrue.

No. Even in modern times you can be ''taxed" everything you own. Debtors Prison, for a example.

Yes, you can say in one play at one time taxes were 'perfect' or 'good'...but very often they were very, very, very bad....or worse then bad.

JoeJ
2019-01-16, 08:30 PM
Not to mention that periodic loan forgiveness was a critical part of many premodern societies and frequently one the prerogatives of the monarchy or other ruling body to prevent things from getting completely out-of-hand.

And when taxes get to the point that people can't pay them they'll leave their farms and become bandits, living as a merry band in the greenwood where they'll survive by poaching the king's deer.

Knaight
2019-01-16, 08:43 PM
No, they were not. High oppressive taxes is an invention of modern times. Back in the day 1) you couldn't easily turn infungible assets produced by farmers into fungible assests. Most taxes were produced in kind and anyone expected to get taxes more than once knew there were limits to outtake. 2) The ability of taxers to excise tax was hugely limited. Push it too far and the taxcollector got killed and you got overthrown.

Calling them "everything you own" is ridiculous, but taxation in kind has absolutely been done to extremes historically. For instance there's a case in Song China where a lot of provincial administrators were essentially trying to cover up a famine, and so taxed grain at levels slightly above non-famine times, to make it look good to the central government. That famine suddenly got a whole lot worse, and while this was a short term situation that inevitably backfired there have been a lot like it.

A similar thing applies to the ability of tax collectors to collect taxes. While people can and did kill tax collectors it was also a pretty common historical practice for their pay to be the difference in what they're able to squeeze out of the populace and what they owe, a practice that absolutely led to excess at times.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-17, 02:28 AM
Yes? A human gets a 40 year mortgage, to pay off right before they retire. A long lived race would have a longer time.

Well, I don't disagree they live longer. I'm just not convinced that has any bearing on their financial systems. Financial systems are governed in equal part by greed, practicality and psychology.

Greed governs that you basically want all the money in the world - but that's not possible in practice, so you settle for as much as your customers can pay.

Practicality governs how much you can take over how long. A mortgage has precious little to do with the lifespan of the loantaker, and everything to do with the lifespan of the asset in question: You don't get a 40 year duration for a car loan, right?

And psychology governs everything else. Markets swing based on mood - it's not the news as such, but how the news is received, and that reception is a result of a context of millions of other data points, other news.

So ... applying this to elves and dwarves, to my mind you don't simply get 'longer loans'.

Dwarves: Very greedy, so you get higher interest rates. Very practical, so they'll get the math right - they'll squeeze you just the right amount. They're rich, so they can afford to just not do business with you if you can't afford them. In terms of psychology, they're hard and unyielding, they'll make ironclad contracts. If you can't pay, they're unlikely to cut of your fingers; the only way for you fingers to be translated into income, is by putting them to work. They'll enslave rather than physically harm or kill you.

Elves: I doubt elves have much use for money. They live in the trees, off fruit and sunshine, song and dance. They trade in kind or barter, or services, or magic. They are naturally evil, their self-centeret egotism so natural it's like a rare and beautiful flower in a secluded garden, guarded by unicorns. So: Elves are greedy enough, though ironically maybe less than other races. They may want a nice poem more than a bag of gold. Conversely, a poem that pleases an elf may be harder to come by than a bag of gold. They're not particularly practical, but they do know what they want. And unlike dwarves, they're impulsive and emotional: If you fail to deliver, they may well decide that it's only fair to turn you into a badger. In terms of practicality, they'll insist on receiving what was agreed upon (a poem to span the ages), and figuring out how to pay is entirely your problem. When it comes to psychology, elves are, by and large, insane by human standards. That's not necessarily to say they're irrational - but where a human nation might go to war over natural ressources or for the 'glory of god', elves might do it over a wager, or because they deem human cities ugly, or simply to create a legend for themselves. To have something to write that poem about.

But ... I know. I'm weird =)

LibraryOgre
2019-01-17, 11:43 AM
So, I did some work on this (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C2J_IINukBdwQYTp9wjA_OMzZf5ZaBZ9jCgsvO9wS60/edit?usp=sharing). I have another version with altered mechanics for Castles and Crusades, as well.

I have the temple of local deity of trade (The Profitmaker in Tellene, Waukeen in the Realms, Zilchus or sometimes Fharlanghn in Greyhawk, Shinare in Draglonance) serve as a matchmaker, for a fee. Do you need an investor? They may invest themselves, or may be able to find other people with money who need a place to put it. And they'll collect from either end ("Give me 5 gold and I'll suggest some investors for you/Give me 5 gold and I'll suggest some investments for you.") They also have banking services, offering notes of credit that are easier to transport than bags of gold, redeemable at other temples for cash.

Algeh
2019-01-17, 11:50 AM
The main problem is that the actual economy in generic-D&D-type settings is not modeled in a way that stands up to any detailed poking around at. There are many, many ways that a typical party can break most of the economy, and the settings generally don't try to explain why, say, gold-backed money doesn't have an inflation problem in a situation where adventurers are constantly dragging more of it in from sources such as ruins (or the elemental plane of earth, for that matter) that weren't previously part of the circulating money.

I would imagine that the magic parts of the setting allow for some things to be more like modern banking, but a lot of it will depend on the overall stability and trust levels in the setting. One of the things that magic could allow is more real-time communication, allowing bank branches in different locations to immediately check on balances rather than have to do some kind of reconciling each time the next messenger came. As long as those messages could be trusted, that makes it more likely that you could use a paper currency further away from the issuing bank since your local bank could confirm the value. Of course, that still relies on the banks themselves being trusted to be telling accurate information using those messages, which generally would involve some kind of oversight from a larger organization with some kind of enforcement ability.

It's also possible that there's some magical creature or spell that would allow for the same kind of calculations as a financial calculator with a lot less hassle than would actually be the case in a non-magical pre-calculator society, which could lead to more complex monetary instruments being practical. (Calculating compound interest by hand is possible, but tedious, which is one reason simple interest and lump sum payments would be more common in a society without calculation tools, although a sufficient amount of centralization and sophistication could certainly produce pre-calculated payment tables for various loan amounts, interest rates, and repayment periods for compound interest loans. You also need a certain baseline mathematical and financial literacy among the people offering and, ideally, taking out the loans to offer complex financial products, so this also ties in to how much education bankers get.)

Segev
2019-01-17, 02:31 PM
While I will not dispute that, in your fantasy setting, you can set up your elves to have no need for money, or not to use it, or whatever you like, I do have to question why you'd assume elves wouldn't, by nature of being generic elves, use money.

Money is highly convenient, far more so than barter and favor-trading, especially for long-term storage of value and counting out investments. Elves would need to have particular and somewhat alien cultures and mindsets that go well beyond being "tree-dwelling ancients" to justify having no use for money.

{{Scrubbed}}

Keep that in mind when designing a medieval fantasy economy: it's not really about the percentages, when it comes to discontent, but objective amounts left and whether it's enough to thrive. Much smaller percentages than you're used to can be far more costly when they cut into subsistance necessities.

jayem
2019-01-17, 05:09 PM
{{Scrubbed}}


Although other aspects come into play. We do live in a bigger society.
Roads were charged at point of use (there are lots today), but this was avoidable by not traveling, but this then raised the marginal costs. We get formalised education, (but we also need it).
We have to pay food health and safety, but then we save on not being poisoned, but we're partly in this position of having to trust others because the commons got stolen, but...
Then tithes were basically an extra tax, but covered a fair bit of what the welfare budget did.

Segev
2019-01-17, 05:20 PM
Although other aspects come into play. We do live in a bigger society.
Roads were charged at point of use (there are lots today), but this was avoidable by not traveling, but this then raised the marginal costs. We get formalised education, (but we also need it).
We have to pay food health and safety, but then we save on not being poisoned, but we're partly in this position of having to trust others because the commons got stolen, but...
Then tithes were basically an extra tax, but covered a fair bit of what the welfare budget did.

There's a lot there that's kind-of off topic. I wasn't (in that post) challenging tax rates as they are now. I was pointing out that the reason we can be taxed so heavily is that we have that much more, and thus need less of our income to eke out a living.

I'm not going to get into a discussion of whether the higher tax rates are paying for useful things or not; that's politics that are off-topic and likely to derail heavily if we get into it.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-17, 05:27 PM
While I will not dispute that, in your fantasy setting, you can set up your elves to have no need for money, or not to use it, or whatever you like, I do have to question why you'd assume elves wouldn't, by nature of being generic elves, use money.

Is that ... meant for me?

Money is a very human invention. It's enormously practical - if your world revolves around trade, and your life revolves around producing items for trade, and you depend upon somehow turning your labor into not only items for others, but different items for yourself - clothes, food, a roof over your head.

If neither of those things are the least bit relevant, what precisely is the use of money? If natures bounty is literally all you need, if any item you'd ever dream of using is not so much a product as a work of art, if you wouldn't dream of anything so low, demeaning and nasty as a 'job', if repetition and tedium and routine is anathema to you ....

See, I think the problem is you think of elves as humans with pointy ears.

My elves do not produce ... anything. They may occasionally trade - one unique work of art for another - but they have nothing even remotely resembling a human society. And no .. no money either.

Please note that I'm not saying one way is better than the other. One consequence of my way of thinking is that players cannot play elves, or dwarves - another is that they rarely if ever enter play. It's all very nice to seek out ... weird ideas for fantasy races, but it also tends to make them harder to use.

Segev
2019-01-17, 05:33 PM
Is that ... meant for me?

Money is a very human invention. It's enormously practical - if your world revolves around trade, and your life revolves around producing items for trade, and you depend upon somehow turning your labor into not only items for others, but different items for yourself - clothes, food, a roof over your head.

If neither of those things are the least bit relevant, what precisely is the use of money? If natures bounty is literally all you need, if any item you'd ever dream of using is not so much a product as a work of art, if you wouldn't dream of anything so low, demeaning and nasty as a 'job', if repetition and tedium and routine is anathema to you ....

See, I think the problem is you think of elves as humans with pointy ears.

My elves do not produce ... anything. They may occasionally trade - one unique work of art for another - but they have nothing even remotely resembling a human society. And no .. no money either.

Please note that I'm not saying one way is better than the other. One consequence of my way of thinking is that players cannot play elves, or dwarves - another is that they rarely if ever enter play. It's all very nice to seek out ... weird ideas for fantasy races, but it also tends to make them harder to use.

And you can have those elves, but they're hardly the default.

Failing to produce...anything...means your "art" is going to be pretty lackluster compared to those societies which have infrastructure and time and abundance to support more intensive artistic study. Living in a literal manifestation of the Garden of Eden doesn't make you innately more creative. If anything, it invites stagnation.

The default elves, while not "humans with pointy ears," are humans with pointy ears who live a long time and are known for their magical gifts. If you go by Tolkien's elves, then there's no reason the civilization we see in the Hobbit and LotR wouldn't have money.

As long as you have a concept of ownership, you will develop a concept of trade, and with trade will come money as you move beyond barter (which is highly inefficient in a lot of ways).

Without a concept of ownership, you don't have homes so much as you have "wherever you happen to collapse tonight." Even animals have concepts of ownership; some have trade, while others simply have a notion of protecting it from all comers or being evicted/stolen from. To rise above animalistic living requires concepts that eventually lead to money. Barring EXTREMELY alien creatures with survival instincts orthogonal to those of nature's children as we know them.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-17, 05:39 PM
I'll try to find the article, but IIRC there are even animals that can understand the basic concepts of currency vs direct sharing or trade -- that a token object can have value as a unit of trade. Maybe it was a bird (corvids? parrots?) that would take tokens instead of food as a reward for tasks or as the goal of a task, and then later use the tokens to get food and toys from the researchers?

It's hard to overstate just how practical and useful some form of abstracted-unit or token system is for dealing with exchange of goods and services, once a species and culture has some notion of possession and value.

For elves or another species to have nothing that looks like money and yet a sophisticated culture of some kind, they'd need to have no sense of possession and an utterly communal system of labor and consumption, at a deeper level than simply culture/society.

Segev
2019-01-17, 05:52 PM
I'll try to find the article, but IIRC there are even animals that can understand the basic concepts of currency vs direct sharing or trade -- that a token object can have value as a unit of trade. Maybe it was a bird (corvids? parrots?) that would take tokens instead of food as a reward for tasks or as the goal of a task, and then later use the tokens to get food and toys from the researchers?

It's hard to overstate just how piratical and useful some form of abstracted-unit or token system is for dealing with exchange of goods and services, once a species and culture has some notion of possession and value.

For elves or another species to have nothing that looks like money and yet a sophisticated culture of some kind, they'd need to have no sense of possession and an utterly communal system of labor and consumption, at a deeper level than simply culture/society.

I snickered at the bolded word, but I assume you mean "practical." (Correct me if I'm wrong, please.)

I've heard possibly-apocryphal tales of crows doing such things as approaching somebody outside a Taco Bell, dropping a quarter in front of them, and saying (in their voice-mimickry way) "Taco!" The tale-teller went in and bought the bird a taco, which the bird proceeded to eat when it was dropped on the ground in place of the quarter.

Edit to add: Supposedly there are some parks that are turning crows and other birds into clean-up crews by having "vending machines" that will dispense bird food in return for trash objects, e.g. cigarette butts.

Another internet tale involves a guy who started by sharing his sandwich with crows in a park. The next day, he brought some spare bread to share. They started bringing him shiny things, like bottle caps and coins. And then one actually brought him a $10 bill. He used that to buy fancier bread for them, and apparently shared it more with those who brought actual money, because they've learned that the green paper is worth bread.

I'll try to remember to look for the story later. I won't claim it's authentic; it could be some guy lying on the internet. But it's an amusing story, nonetheless.

jayem
2019-01-17, 06:38 PM
There's a lot there that's kind-of off topic. I wasn't (in that post) challenging tax rates as they are now. I was pointing out that the reason we can be taxed so heavily is that we have that much more, and thus need less of our income to eke out a living.

I'm not going to get into a discussion of whether the higher tax rates are paying for useful things or not; that's politics that are off-topic and likely to derail heavily if we get into it.
It's why I tried to cover both sides.



For elves or another species to have nothing that looks like money and yet a sophisticated culture of some kind, they'd need to have no sense of possession and an utterly communal system of labor and consumption, at a deeper level than simply culture/society.

Another option with the long-lived elves, would be that with the lack of urgency they can 'trade' with their future selves, and be much more indiviualistic. They don't need to 'buy art' they can just take their time and produce it, put off having kids for a human generation, etc... There isn't the turnover of land to make it worth buying/selling, but they can move a long way away to make their own claim.
If there are 30 bad years where a human/elf can just about support themselves, the human is basically working for nothing whereas for the elf there's a future.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-17, 08:16 PM
I snickered at the bolded word, but I assume you mean "practical." (Correct me if I'm wrong, please.)

I've heard possibly-apocryphal tales of crows doing such things as approaching somebody outside a Taco Bell, dropping a quarter in front of them, and saying (in their voice-mimickry way) "Taco!" The tale-teller went in and bought the bird a taco, which the bird proceeded to eat when it was dropped on the ground in place of the quarter.

Edit to add: Supposedly there are some parks that are turning crows and other birds into clean-up crews by having "vending machines" that will dispense bird food in return for trash objects, e.g. cigarette butts.

Another internet tale involves a guy who started by sharing his sandwich with crows in a park. The next day, he brought some spare bread to share. They started bringing him shiny things, like bottle caps and coins. And then one actually brought him a $10 bill. He used that to buy fancier bread for them, and apparently shared it more with those who brought actual money, because they've learned that the green paper is worth bread.

I'll try to remember to look for the story later. I won't claim it's authentic; it could be some guy lying on the internet. But it's an amusing story, nonetheless.

Practical. That's what I get for typing posts at work between inventory reports finishing.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-17, 08:32 PM
Another option with the long-lived elves, would be that with the lack of urgency they can 'trade' with their future selves, and be much more indiviualistic. They don't need to 'buy art' they can just take their time and produce it, put off having kids for a human generation, etc... There isn't the turnover of land to make it worth buying/selling, but they can move a long way away to make their own claim.

If there are 30 bad years where a human/elf can just about support themselves, the human is basically working for nothing whereas for the elf there's a future.


However...

First, don't get stuck on the optional things like art. If that elf needs a set of tools right now, he doesn't have time to learn how to make them from scratch.

Second, there's a recursive problem here, in that even if the elf knows how to make the tools, he needs the raw materials... is he also going to learn to make make all the raw materials too, back to smelting iron ore into steel and everything else? Even if he knows how to make his painting supplies, where does he get the right bristles for his brushes? Does he also go grow or find the right plants, or learn how to raise horses just to get the horse hair?

Mutant Donkey
2019-01-17, 11:39 PM
First of all, no matter how long you live, never lend money to a Halfling.
If you are a king tax the longer living races a bit less, they live longer so in the end you get more money anyway. Of course make sure you are and elf so you can collect it all.
Everything else is supply and demand. If you just got raided then prices for just about everything just went up.
In reality my characters never live long enough to have enough money to worry about this. :)

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-18, 12:33 AM
And you can have those elves, but they're hardly the default.

Failing to produce...anything...means your "art" is going to be pretty lackluster compared to those societies which have infrastructure and time and abundance to support more intensive artistic study. Living in a literal manifestation of the Garden of Eden doesn't make you innately more creative. If anything, it invites stagnation.

The default elves, while not "humans with pointy ears," are humans with pointy ears who live a long time and are known for their magical gifts. If you go by Tolkien's elves, then there's no reason the civilization we see in the Hobbit and LotR wouldn't have money.

As long as you have a concept of ownership, you will develop a concept of trade, and with trade will come money as you move beyond barter (which is highly inefficient in a lot of ways).

Without a concept of ownership, you don't have homes so much as you have "wherever you happen to collapse tonight." Even animals have concepts of ownership; some have trade, while others simply have a notion of protecting it from all comers or being evicted/stolen from. To rise above animalistic living requires concepts that eventually lead to money. Barring EXTREMELY alien creatures with survival instincts orthogonal to those of nature's children as we know them.

Clearly you don't understand what I'm saying.

What you're lacking is just sufficient magic. Nature molds itself around the elves. If an elf decides to rest in the shade of a tree - the tree will move it's branches to keep the elf in shade as the sun moves. An elf can easily live a day of more on a single apple - but if said elf decides meat would be nice, he can sing fish from the stream, or deer from the forest.

I wasn't entirely specific on the 'production'. Yes, elves 'produce' things. But there isn't a single bowyer, or smith, or minstrel. Rather, any elf can craft a bow, or a sword, or a song - it's not even something they need to learn, it's as natural as drawing breath.

No item in elven culture exists more than once - every single item is unique, a work of art. And no elf needs anything anyone else makes.

But it's possible there's one elf who has a particularly love of making especially beautiful songs, and is particularly adept - that elf may barter for, say, a particularly beautiful bow.

How is that not just production, you ask? Simple: There is no simple trade, and there is no on-going production, and the song elf doesn't need anything from the bow elf. And nothing gets exchanged for anything so base and crude as gold.

Segev
2019-01-18, 09:04 AM
Clearly you don't understand what I'm saying.

What you're lacking is just sufficient magic. Nature molds itself around the elves. If an elf decides to rest in the shade of a tree - the tree will move it's branches to keep the elf in shade as the sun moves. An elf can easily live a day of more on a single apple - but if said elf decides meat would be nice, he can sing fish from the stream, or deer from the forest.

I wasn't entirely specific on the 'production'. Yes, elves 'produce' things. But there isn't a single bowyer, or smith, or minstrel. Rather, any elf can craft a bow, or a sword, or a song - it's not even something they need to learn, it's as natural as drawing breath.

No item in elven culture exists more than once - every single item is unique, a work of art. And no elf needs anything anyone else makes.

But it's possible there's one elf who has a particularly love of making especially beautiful songs, and is particularly adept - that elf may barter for, say, a particularly beautiful bow.

How is that not just production, you ask? Simple: There is no simple trade, and there is no on-going production, and the song elf doesn't need anything from the bow elf. And nothing gets exchanged for anything so base and crude as gold.

Your elves are more powerful than typical ones, then, and are effectively Fair Folk. Also, there would still be value to money, because having a fungible measure of value means you don't have to find one thing of equivalent value for that really cool bow that the elf who makes the best bows made that you really want. Money is just the next tech tree item up above barter.

kieza
2019-01-18, 02:29 PM
If you're interested in this, I recommend a book series, "the Dagger and the Coin," by Daniel Abraham.

It's a series of fantasy doorstoppers, about a cult which threatens to overthrow civilization, in which one of the protagonists is a banker.

Without getting too spoilery, saving the world at one point requires the invention of fractional-reserve banking.

OverLordOcelot
2019-01-18, 03:27 PM
One thing to bear in mind is how much effort you want to put into this. Financial systems are extremely complicated, and how they work is going to depend a lot on how the world works. For example, with spells like Create Food and Plant Growth, the way farming works is going to change radically, and that's a huge factor in how pre-modern societies work (Rome would probably love Plant Growth more than any combat spell). If there are reliable methods of transport and communication like Teleportation Circle and Sending, the ability to manage far-flung trade and banking networks is really different - even if there's not enough teleportation to shuffle goods around, being able to send an accountant with a file cabinet full of ledgers and contracts halfway around the world in an instant once a month would be incredible. The general stability of the world affects things a lot too, those elven long term investments aren't as easy to make if there's a BEBG kicking over everyone's sand castle once a generation or so.

I'm generally inclined to just have 'there's somewhere you can leave your extra gold where it earns no interest but is basically safe, sometimes you can get loans for things like construction, some areas charge more for goods or give you a worse trade for stuff' and leave it at that. Coming up with realistic answers would be a huge project and I'd almost certainly miss several major things.

Tvtyrant
2019-01-18, 04:50 PM
I'm working on building an elf who is a white-collar criminal/information broker, and it got me thinking about how finance and banking might work in your average fantasy setting.

In most fantasy settings I've come across, the various races have very different lifespans. In 5E (where I am building this character), humans get your average 75-100 years while elves get 750. Knowing that, I would think it would have a pretty strong influence on attitudes toward (and the value of) money.

How would this impact interest rates? Inter-racial lending? Savings? Taxation? Credit? Futures contracts for merchants? How would speculation work in a world with divination magic? Is there a Waterdeep SEC?

I realize that for the most part we're talking about "fantasy medieval times" and that a lot of the complicated financial instruments we have now just wouldn't exist, but most of the basics of finance are old enough that I think they'd exist in many settings - whether or not they're ever articulated. I'm not looking for a specific answer, it just got me thinking.

You want to be a white collar criminal in agrarian times? You become a land surveyor. The security for most medieval and early modern loans was land holdings, and taxes were rated by how good your land was.

The land appraiser/surveyor was the heart of large graft networks, getting bribed to over or under value land, getting attacked by locals, given tremendous powers to go into people's property at whim.

How is that changed by fantasy stuff? Fantasy nearly always has far lower populations then real life equivalents, so safe arable land is both more and less valuable. Anything next to a settlement is gold, while wilderness lands are cheap investments that may never pay off.

Getting bribed to declare a claim "safe from monsters" to get a low interest loan from a bank would be a great character quest. Or claiming there is a Kobold infestation on prime, safe land to get taxes lowered on it by a distant lord.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-18, 04:59 PM
Monkey Business -- Capuchins and Coin (https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/monkey-business.html)

The Girl Who Gets Gifts From Crows (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026)

Still looking for the birds who understand the basic of money in lab studies.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-18, 05:08 PM
Your elves are more powerful than typical ones, then, and are effectively Fair Folk. Also, there would still be value to money, because having a fungible measure of value means you don't have to find one thing of equivalent value for that really cool bow that the elf who makes the best bows made that you really want. Money is just the next tech tree item up above barter.

Way, way more powerful than the standard elves, yes. I said so before: This is NOT a player race. Neither elves nor dwarves are, in my games.

And no - they still do not have any real use for money. There is no such thing as 'equivalent value'. The phrase itself is meaningless. It works like this: "This bow that I made is worth more to you than it is to me - but that poem you wrote is worth more to me than it is to you. Wanna swap?"

So it's not equivalent value. It is, at best, equal desire to trade.

If you don't need to trade - for anything - money is a weird and meaningless abstraction. If I can make a perfectly servicable bow myself, but you can make one that's a finer work of art, then I'm not trading out of any sort of need, merely out of a desire.

Anyways ... it doesn't feel like we're going to end up in agreement. I feel your argument is absolutely true for humans, and any other semi-fantasy race that's basically suffering the 'human condition' - I do however also feel that any actual fantasy race that has no part in the human condition clearly also has zero use for currency.

Segev
2019-01-18, 06:00 PM
And no - they still do not have any real use for money. There is no such thing as 'equivalent value'. The phrase itself is meaningless. It works like this: "This bow that I made is worth more to you than it is to me - but that poem you wrote is worth more to me than it is to you. Wanna swap?"

"This bow I made is worth more to me than it would be to get you to write me a poem. But if I could get you to write me a series of poems, that would be worth more to me than the bow I made."

There absolutely is "equivalent value." You're right in that it's subjective, to a degree. This is true of all trade. It always amounts to two parties valuing what the other is willing to give up more than what they're willing to give up.

It is possible to obfuscate this, or even miss it, but it doesn't change that it's an underlying truth behind all trade.

Tanarii
2019-01-18, 09:11 PM
If you're insterested in economics in a fantasy world, with a classic (at least for the original 70s RPGs) taking-the-piss spin, Dungeonomics over at Critical Hits is required reading.
https://critical-hits.com/blog/category/critical-hits/columns/dungeonomics/

Edit: recommend you try with the oldest articles and work your way forwards. Plenty of entertaining reading there.
https://critical-hits.com/blog/category/critical-hits/columns/dungeonomics/page/7/

AceOfFools
2019-01-18, 09:48 PM
...
Think about it: One copper kettle costs 20 copper pieces because that is exactly the amount of raw material used in creating both.
...

I'm not going to let this slide.

Converting raw copper into a kettle requires specialized tools, experienced, and some amount of fuel to run the furnace. Especially when individual pieces are the work of handcrafted artisans because the technology that drives modern economies of scale haven't been invented yet, manufacturing has a markup.

No one produces manufactured goods for the price of the raw materials used, unless they're delivering at cost as form of charitable donation.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-19, 04:32 AM
"This bow I made is worth more to me than it would be to get you to write me a poem. But if I could get you to write me a series of poems, that would be worth more to me than the bow I made."

There absolutely is "equivalent value." You're right in that it's subjective, to a degree. This is true of all trade. It always amounts to two parties valuing what the other is willing to give up more than what they're willing to give up.

It is possible to obfuscate this, or even miss it, but it doesn't change that it's an underlying truth behind all trade.

No, you're still not getting it. Ok, I'll grant you this: If a flower from my girlfriend is worth a dinner at a fine dining restaurant - sure, whatever, let's call that 'equivalent value'. But while the flower isn't worth anything on the open market, the dinner is. To be entirely precise, it's 1.250 of our local currency (she owes me the flower, though, the little minx*).

In my example of the elves, there is no such thing. There is no market. The bow, and the poem, neither has any value outside of this particular trade. Or, maybe, but that's incidental. You cannot expect for the same trade to ever happen again. There is no bow to poem exchange rate.

* Before anyone accuses me of toxic masculinity, let me say that A) I guarantee she's entirely ok with the word minx, and B) I also ask you to make no assumptions about the gender, race or minx'ness of my girlfriend.

Segev
2019-01-20, 02:14 PM
No, you're still not getting it. Ok, I'll grant you this: If a flower from my girlfriend is worth a dinner at a fine dining restaurant - sure, whatever, let's call that 'equivalent value'. But while the flower isn't worth anything on the open market, the dinner is. To be entirely precise, it's 1.250 of our local currency (she owes me the flower, though, the little minx*).

In my example of the elves, there is no such thing. There is no market. The bow, and the poem, neither has any value outside of this particular trade. Or, maybe, but that's incidental. You cannot expect for the same trade to ever happen again. There is no bow to poem exchange rate.

* Before anyone accuses me of toxic masculinity, let me say that A) I guarantee she's entirely ok with the word minx, and B) I also ask you to make no assumptions about the gender, race or minx'ness of my girlfriend.

No, I get it. What you're not getting is that "the open market" is a label applied to a vague conglomeration of people having stuff they want less than stuff others are willing to trade for it. It literally can't fail to exist when there is trade of any sort.

What you might be trying to get at is that elves, in your setting, don't have sufficient volume of trade for there to be normalizing effects that let observers take a step back and agree that a given good has a prevailing rate that is the minimum value at which it will probably be purchased by somebody and somebody else probably will give it up for that rate.

"The flower from [your] girlfriend" isn't really the item you're getting "in trade." (Not that relationships are best modeled transactionally, but we'll run with it here.) What you're getting is her company and the knowledge that she's pleased, which translates to your own pleasure because, in theory, you like your girlfriend being happy. It probably fills you with warm fuzzies.

The fancy bow for the commissioned poem, however, are not (or at least, not by assumption) gifts exchanged between friends or loved ones with the desire to see the other person enjoy the gift being the primary motivation. By assumption and context, they would be between people who are acquaintences, maybe friends, but the exchange is because they each want the item being exchanged more than what they're giving up, not because they value the interaction and the communion as friends or loved ones.

If Eldbowyar, the greatest bowsmith still living amongst the elves, makes a magnificent work of art of a bow, it is likely that more than one elf out there will desire it, and be willing to offer their own magnificent works in exchange. Eldpoetica offers to write an epic poem in return for it. Florindalf offers the most beautiful flowers from her garden in a masterfully-arranged boquet. Maizwautr offers some booze, amount negotiable.

If Eldbowyar has made such trades in the past, there will even be expectations as to what the minimum quality and what categorical kinds of things he's likely to accept in making his choice as to whose offer to take.

And thus, while it's not got a normalizing effect due to the rarity and uniqueness, there IS a "market" for it. And as such, a "market value" that can't really be estimated, only negotiated.

This is true IRL of truly unique things, as well. Our system these days is to usually put such things up for auction. This would work in the above elf-example, too. It's not really a silent auction, but it would function similarly: people post their offerings, and the auctioneer indicates which are deemed acceptable and which is currently "winning" (giving others a chance to update their acceptable offers to be better, or to make new offers they might hope are more acceptable), until he finally closes the auction by taking what he thinks is the best trade.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-20, 07:39 PM
As soon as you have the concept of ownership and possessions, and differentiation in skill or passion producing works or goods of differing quality, there's some incentive to engage in exchange -- that is, barter.

Unless these "fair folk" elves have a congenital blindspot, they're going to figure out that they can exchange things, especially if they're also interacting with other "peoples".

And once they understand that they can exchange things, then the idea of being able to exchange this thing for that, and then that thing for another, is obvious.

xkcd44
2019-01-20, 09:42 PM
I'm a bit off the current discussion here, but my setting has an knightly order (who are totally-not Knights TemplarTM) heavily involved in the banking/finance of the human Empire and its realms.

The backstory is that the order was constituted in the last age to fight off the Orcish Horde, and when the Reconquest was completed (with the construction of the Vaticine Wall), the order was tasked with the rebuilding of the human kingdoms.

To this effect, the Pentarch gave the order special permission to use the Church's vast wealth to issue loans to individuals and businesses, in order to re-stimulate the economy and support the re-emergence of trades and guilds (the leverage the Church gained in these various venture being an added benefit).

This "indulgence" ignored the Church's general prohibitions on usury, and so, when a percentage of those initial loans inevitably defaulted, the "Templars" were permitted to use force to reclaim their investments. Understandably, this garnered them quite the bad reputation among the peasants and commonfolk, and they fill the "black knight" fantasy staple in my setting.

Despite their martial origins, the Chapterhouses of the order now function mostly as private banks and financiers in the various human cities, with the Church looking to dig its tendrils into whatever venture it can. The special privileges given to the order are still on the books, although not many know this, as the Church has been rather prudent about asserting its privileges in recent years.

Saintheart
2019-01-20, 11:28 PM
I do like the idea of dragons as bankers to be pretty cool. Most secure banks in the world, the problem is that making a withdrawal is a lot harder than making the deposit.

tomandtish
2019-01-20, 11:29 PM
Law and the Multiverse did a pretty good bit entitled Immortals and Compound Interest (http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2011/01/10/immortals-and-compound-interest/), which talks about some of the long-term banking issues that have been discussed here. Might provide some food for thought.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-21, 12:32 AM
No, I get it. What you're not getting is that "the open market" is a label applied to a

No.

There is no market, without ongoing production. That's what the term literally means - you grow your crop, you go to market to sell it. If there is no production, then there is no market either.

So since there are no professions, and no one working a job, and no ongoing production - there is no market.

BreaktheStatue
2019-01-21, 07:09 AM
Law and the Multiverse did a pretty good bit entitled Immortals and Compound Interest (http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2011/01/10/immortals-and-compound-interest/), which talks about some of the long-term banking issues that have been discussed here. Might provide some food for thought.


If you're insterested in economics in a fantasy world, with a classic (at least for the original 70s RPGs) taking-the-piss spin, Dungeonomics over at Critical Hits is required reading.
https://critical-hits.com/blog/category/critical-hits/columns/dungeonomics/

Edit: recommend you try with the oldest articles and work your way forwards. Plenty of entertaining reading there.
https://critical-hits.com/blog/category/critical-hits/columns/dungeonomics/page/7/

Thank you for these suggestions, very interesting reading.

Segev
2019-01-21, 12:02 PM
No.

There is no market, without ongoing production. That's what the term literally means - you grow your crop, you go to market to sell it. If there is no production, then there is no market either.

So since there are no professions, and no one working a job, and no ongoing production - there is no market.

The definition of "market" has nothing to do with "ongoing production," and trying to conflate the two doesn't really even begin to address the points I made in the post you're quoting. Even if you were RIGHT, it's clear from my post the definition I was using, and how my points apply to what I was discussing. This is a dense and complicated enough subject that injecting pedantic definitional "refutations" that ignore the actual points being made is unhelpful at best. It's even worse when you attempt to link something incorrect to the definition.

For reference, you're right that "the market" originated as a location to sell things. You're wrong when you suggest that it requires "ongoing production." It just requires that people want to trade and need a place to do it. And even THAT is out the window in discussing the term "market value," which doesn't even require the original definition of a "market" in the sense of a physical place.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-21, 02:32 PM
The definition of "market" has nothing to do with "ongoing production," and trying to conflate the two doesn't really even begin to address the points I made in the post you're quoting. Even if you were RIGHT, it's clear from my post the definition I was using, and how my points apply to what I was discussing. This is a dense and complicated enough subject that injecting pedantic definitional "refutations" that ignore the actual points being made is unhelpful at best. It's even worse when you attempt to link something incorrect to the definition.

For reference, you're right that "the market" originated as a location to sell things. You're wrong when you suggest that it requires "ongoing production." It just requires that people want to trade and need a place to do it. And even THAT is out the window in discussing the term "market value," which doesn't even require the original definition of a "market" in the sense of a physical place.

.... I can't be arsed to keep this up. I simply am not interested enough. You think a 'market' can exist without each and every one of the components of a market - by all means. I am going to agree to not agree with you, and leave it at that.

Segev
2019-01-21, 03:40 PM
.... I can't be arsed to keep this up. I simply am not interested enough. You think a 'market' can exist without each and every one of the components of a market - by all means. I am going to agree to not agree with you, and leave it at that.

As you wish.

My point remains unconnected to the notion of a "market," and deals with the definition of value. It certainly doesn't depend on ongoing production of fungible goods.

By focusing on the definition of "market," you're missing the actual argument being made. So yes, we'll have to agree to disagree.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-21, 04:09 PM
you're missing the actual argument being made.

Goes both ways.

DavidSh
2019-01-21, 04:13 PM
If you are contemplating economic systems for groups like elves, you might want to look at the system in the micronesian island of Yap. The famous stone money is used for some purposes. Shell money (vaguely similar to wampum) is used for other purposes. There was trade with outlying atolls in the form of an exchange of tribute for largesse, with no exact accounting that the value match up. And, in recent centuries, cash trade with foreigners.

It's not that to imagine that elves have five kinds of money, none of which is exchangeable for any other, and each of which is used for specific purposes. If you don't have elves as player characters, some of these purposes can be completely opaque to outsiders.

It's also interesting to look at the economics of East Africa in the 19th century. Stanley writes of having to carry quantities of bales of cloth to pay tolls on the way inland to look for Livingstone.

kieza
2019-01-22, 03:31 AM
.... I can't be arsed to keep this up. I simply am not interested enough. You think a 'market' can exist without each and every one of the components of a market - by all means. I am going to agree to not agree with you, and leave it at that.

I have disagreed with Segev on economics in the past, but here, he (?) is right. Ongoing production is not a required part of a market. Otherwise, there would be no market for Renaissance art, since by definition, no new Renaissance art can be created--and yet it gets bought and sold all the time. If you need a physical location, consider Sotheby's.

A market, in the sense which is obviously meant here, is a collection of:
--Agents who wish to engage in trade,
--Goods which can be traded, and
--Rules (formal or informal) by which trade can be accomplished.

The system of trade that you've described has all of these components.

Also, the flower definitely has a market price. Since it is unique--in the eyes of its current owner--the market price can be defined as "the smallest quantity of [something else] that the owner would accept to part with it." This could be one bow, four poems, or whatever.

Now, I think that I might understand the point you're trying to make: based on your description, there isn't a physical marketplace where trades take place, there's significant heterogeneity in the quality of goods, and there's also significant heterogeneity in consumer preferences (i.e. not only is every poem different, every elf has a different opinion about every poem). Also, your elves have no need of anything to sustain their lives.

Money has three primary traits:
--Store of value: Money can be stored, and will be predictably useful when retrieved at a later date. (Money is like this, grain is not, because grain can go bad if you leave it in the silo.)
--Unit of account: Money can be used to measure the agreed-upon value of other goods. (Money is like this; in an agrarian economy, grain is also like this. Art is not, because the value of art is completely subjective.)
--Medium of exchange: Other people will accept money as payment. (Money is like this; grain is like this in an agrarian economy, but not in a modern economy.)

Your elves seem whimsical, one might even say capricious, and so they can't have anything that acts as a store of value: it fails the "predictably useful at a later date" part, because it's not certain that they will still value whatever they're using as money in a year.

Your elves also don't have any commodity goods (goods that have an agreed-upon value), and so, in a sort of "dividing-by-zero" logic, they can't have anything that acts as a store of value. If no goods have an agreed-upon value, there is nothing which can measure that value.

Your elves could maybe use money as a medium of exchange (and I could see that there might be issues getting enough elves to adopt money for that to work), but that's the only purpose I see for it.

So if what you're saying is that they have the concept of value, and trade, but they don't use money (as formally defined above) as a representation of value, then yeah, that's reasonable.

Historical details about money below:

Historically, money arose as abstract tokens of exchange: rather than walking around with a bushel of grain, people would carry tokens which merely represented the grain, leaving the grain in the granary. Eventually, people started making all of their trades by exchanging grain tokens (or wool tokens, wine tokens, etc.) at which point the tokens became money. But it started with grain (we think) for a couple of reasons:
--Grain represents something which is comparable across people: a bushel of grain will feed a person for a certain amount of time. People therefore tend to have similar valuations of grain, because it represents a period of staying alive. This gives grain a near-objective value.
--Grain is grain. Barring issues of quality (which can be dealt with by arguing that poor-quality grain is equivalent to a smaller amount of "representative" grain), one bushel of grain is pretty much the same as the next. So, if one grain-token can be exchanged for (around) the same number of wool-tokens anywhere in the market, you can use grain to measure the value of wool.
--Grain is sold frequently. Everyone buys grain, so tokens which can be redeemed for grain at the granary are useful to everyone.

Obviously this isn't how money works anymore, but it is how it got started.

Now: your elves don't have any goods equivalent to grain, it seems: there's no good that represents some constant, universal thing to your elves, the way grain represents "eating enough for a period of time." Likewise, there's a lot of variation in quality of goods, and in the preferences individual elves have, making it hard to establish values across goods and individuals. Because of this, you don't have an easy foundation to invent money.

This isn't to say that these elves wouldn't use money--unless they're really alien in psychology, I don't doubt that they would get the idea if it were introduced to them--but they don't seem to have the kind of culture which would come up with it in the first place. Also, because they have no commodity goods with agreed-upon prices, money only offers one advantage, in that they can carry it around easier than piles of bows or stacks of poems.

Sincerely,

Someone working on their second graduate degree in economics.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-22, 04:03 AM
Ongoing production is not a required part of a market.

A market consists of a multitude of parts - in a physical sense, those include production, gathering, refinement, distribution, storage, and so on, and in an economic sense it includes exchange rates, valuation, currency, and all manner of other components.

Remove any one of those, and you no longer have a market. Without production, no market.

But this is entirely and absolutely moot, because that's not the discussion. If you're not going to read my posts and try to understand what I'm saying - then please stop trying to respoond.

I say again: I cannot be arsed to keep this up. Please find someone else to argue with.

zlefin
2019-01-22, 10:36 AM
A market consists of a multitude of parts - in a physical sense, those include production, gathering, refinement, distribution, storage, and so on, and in an economic sense it includes exchange rates, valuation, currency, and all manner of other components.

Remove any one of those, and you no longer have a market. Without production, no market.

But this is entirely and absolutely moot, because that's not the discussion. If you're not going to read my posts and try to understand what I'm saying - then please stop trying to respoond.

I say again: I cannot be arsed to keep this up. Please find someone else to argue with.

kaptin, you need to accept that your understanding of economics and its terminology is not as good as you think it is, and you're just plain wrong. I know it's hard to accept that, but sometimes it's true; and to learn, you need to accept that your current understanding has problems with it.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-22, 10:42 AM
kaptin, you need to accept that your understanding of economics and its terminology is not as good as you think it is, and you're just plain wrong. I know it's hard to accept that, but sometimes it's true; and to learn, you need to accept that your current understanding has problems with it.

I think we could even soften that to "what you mean by 'market' is not what economists mean by 'market', so there's some disconnect in the conversation". Terms being well-defined helps, but if someone's using a term a bit differently, they can't really blame others when the disconnect happens.

Segev
2019-01-22, 12:06 PM
I have disagreed with Segev on economics in the past, but here, he (?) is right.I'm a guy, yeah. :)



Sincerely,

Someone working on their second graduate degree in economics.My degrees are in physics and computer engineering, so I don't have the pedigree you do, but I definitely have an understanding of economics and theories about it that would be enjoyable for me to discuss with somebody who studies the subject. (In particular, I tend to take a view on things that economics don't change so much as average out when you move from micro- to macro-, and that a lot of the problems I see with disconnects between theoretical models of macro-economics and what happens when they're implemented can be traced to assuming macro-economics has actually different rules than micro-. But that's probably a topic for PMs or another thread somewhere.)




A market, in the sense which is obviously meant here, is a collection of:
--Agents who wish to engage in trade,
--Goods which can be traded, and
--Rules (formal or informal) by which trade can be accomplished.

The system of trade that you've described has all of these components.

Also, the flower definitely has a market price. Since it is unique--in the eyes of its current owner--the market price can be defined as "the smallest quantity of [something else] that the owner would accept to part with it." This could be one bow, four poems, or whatever.A much more organized way of expressing what I was trying to get across. Thanks!


Now, I think that I might understand the point you're trying to make: based on your description, there isn't a physical marketplace where trades take place, there's significant heterogeneity in the quality of goods, and there's also significant heterogeneity in consumer preferences (i.e. not only is every poem different, every elf has a different opinion about every poem). Also, your elves have no need of anything to sustain their lives.

Money has three primary traits:
--Store of value: Money can be stored, and will be predictably useful when retrieved at a later date. (Money is like this, grain is not, because grain can go bad if you leave it in the silo.)
--Unit of account: Money can be used to measure the agreed-upon value of other goods. (Money is like this; in an agrarian economy, grain is also like this. Art is not, because the value of art is completely subjective.)
--Medium of exchange: Other people will accept money as payment. (Money is like this; grain is like this in an agrarian economy, but not in a modern economy.)

Your elves seem whimsical, one might even say capricious, and so they can't have anything that acts as a store of value: it fails the "predictably useful at a later date" part, because it's not certain that they will still value whatever they're using as money in a year.

Your elves also don't have any commodity goods (goods that have an agreed-upon value), and so, in a sort of "dividing-by-zero" logic, they can't have anything that acts as a store of value. If no goods have an agreed-upon value, there is nothing which can measure that value.

Your elves could maybe use money as a medium of exchange (and I could see that there might be issues getting enough elves to adopt money for that to work), but that's the only purpose I see for it.

So if what you're saying is that they have the concept of value, and trade, but they don't use money (as formally defined above) as a representation of value, then yeah, that's reasonable.Some really good points that I knew, but hadn't codified in words for myself, about the nature of money. I appreciate those.

I will note that, even as presented, there remain something that elves of this sort would still view as a store of value: land/property. They have to live somewhere. And unless they're communal to a fault, they probably do have a notion of "my place." If nothing else, the bow-maker and the armor-smith and the jeweler will need specialized tools and workspaces that are nontrivial to uproot. To say nothing of the gardener with his super-unique flowers.

Now, again, there's subjectivity to the value of a particular parcel of territory, but at the very least, there is value to it for the use to which it can be put and the living space it allows, and this serves as a store of value.

kieza
2019-01-22, 01:23 PM
A market consists of a multitude of parts - in a physical sense, those include production, gathering, refinement, distribution, storage, and so on, and in an economic sense it includes exchange rates, valuation, currency, and all manner of other components.

Remove any one of those, and you no longer have a market. Without production, no market.

But this is entirely and absolutely moot, because that's not the discussion. If you're not going to read my posts and try to understand what I'm saying - then please stop trying to respoond.

I say again: I cannot be arsed to keep this up. Please find someone else to argue with.

I teach economics for a living right now. I am literally paid to explain things like this to college students. What I've just told you is, literally, a textbook definition of a market. If you want a shorter definition, here's one: a market is a system of exchange.

The things you say are necessary in a market are commonly associated with markets, it's true, but they're far from universal or required. You can easily have markets without production, or storage, or exchange rates. In fact, I've worked with economic models that lacked everything on your list except for "valuation."

The framework you previously described fits the purest definition of "market" in economics--it's just a market which doesn't use money. Is it what a layman would call a market? Maybe not, but since this is a discussion about economics, you're under some obligation to use economic definitions, not just whatever description fits your internal perception.

If you're not going to read my posts and understand that this is how actual economists define markets, then please stop trying to respond.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-22, 01:35 PM
kaptin, you need to accept that your understanding of economics and its terminology is not as good as you think it is, and you're just plain wrong. I know it's hard to accept that, but sometimes it's true; and to learn, you need to accept that your current understanding has problems with it.

Clearly better than yours. It's supply and demand: If there is neither, there is no market.

Schismatic
2019-01-22, 02:54 PM
I'm working on building an elf who is a white-collar criminal/information broker, and it got me thinking about how finance and banking might work in your average fantasy setting.

In most fantasy settings I've come across, the various races have very different lifespans. In 5E (where I am building this character), humans get your average 75-100 years while elves get 750. Knowing that, I would think it would have a pretty strong influence on attitudes toward (and the value of) money.

How would this impact interest rates? Inter-racial lending? Savings? Taxation? Credit? Futures contracts for merchants? How would speculation work in a world with divination magic? Is there a Waterdeep SEC?

I realize that for the most part we're talking about "fantasy medieval times" and that a lot of the complicated financial instruments we have now just wouldn't exist, but most of the basics of finance are old enough that I think they'd exist in many settings - whether or not they're ever articulated. I'm not looking for a specific answer, it just got me thinking.

Technically elves are at disavantage.

Human - apprenticed at 11, becomes guild certified by 16 ish. Becomes journeyman 18 ish. Starts approved trading. Has a family. Tutors and schools kid until 11. Apprentices them. Possibly becomes local guildmaster, or chartered attestor by 45 ish with possibly even grandkids and a few productive children allowing you to expand operations, or develop more extensive economic/political spheres of influence over a much larger coverage.

Elf - Apprenticed at 100, becomes guild certified by 110 ish. Becomes journeyman at 115ish. Starts approved trading. Has a family. Tutors and schools kids until 90-100 years old.... etc etc.

By the time the Elf has started a successful family business, empires might have crumbled. While that initial human has 100 direct, living descendants...

Even if a human has no kids of their own, they my belong to families that have numerous branches and offshoots, and are born into a world being taught the latest innovations and dangers. The death of an elf and the impact on a family bonus is far more catastrophic than a human death as part of an extended family business.

Incidentally this is how I justify humans having bonus skillpoints in 3.x

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-22, 03:04 PM
Technically elves are at disavantage.

Human - apprenticed at 11, becomes guild certified by 16 ish. Becomes journeyman 18 ish. Starts approved trading. Has a family. Tutors and schools kid until 11. Apprentices them. Possibly becomes local guildmaster, or chartered attestor by 45 ish with possibly even grandkids and a few productive children allowing you to expand operations, or develop more extensive trading and increase political and economic influence.

Elf - Apprenticed at 100, becomes guild certified by 110 ish. Becomes journeyman at 115ish. Starts approved trading. Has a family. Tutors and schools kids until 90-100 years old.... etc etc.

By the time the Elf has started a successful family business, empires might have crumbled. While that initial human has 100 direct, living descendants...

If we assume elves spend a long time as physical adults but social "adolescents" (ie, 80 years in a late-teenage social standing) this is quite likely true, with about the same percentage of elves establishing early exceptional success as the percentage of humans who achieve major success in their late teens / early twenties.

Segev
2019-01-22, 03:12 PM
Clearly better than yours. It's supply and demand: If there is neither, there is no market.You...have supply and demand. You described it in your discussion of that fabulous work-of-art bow being traded for that magnificent poem.

The bowyar has a supply of 1 bow, and a demand for 1 poem. The poet has a supply of time for writing a commissioned poem, and a demand for 1 bow.


If we assume elves spend a long time as physical adults but social "adolescents" (ie, 80 years in a late-teenage social standing) this is quite likely true, with about the same percentage of elves establishing early exceptional success as the percentage of humans who achieve major success in their late teens / early twenties.

This formulation has always bugged me, and your description of it just helped me clarify another reason why: late teen humans in D&D are already adventurers. If elves are "late teens" from 15 years old to 115 years old, why are they waiting until they're 115 to start adventuring? You certainly CAN wait until adulthood to start adventuring, but it's blatant that many adventurers start while still nominally "kids." Old, late-teen "kids," but still not "adults" socially.

And adventuring is EXACTLY the kind of "run off to have a good time" romantic notion that a 100-year-long late-teenagerhood would spur people to do. Consider the classic "backpacking across Europe" thing; adventuring is roughly equivalent in the kinds of settings where adventuring is a "thing." Little reason why they'd wait until nominal adulthood when humans and halflings and the like don't.

Schismatic
2019-01-22, 03:18 PM
If we assume elves spend a long time as physical adults but social "adolescents" (ie, 80 years in a late-teenage social standing) this is quite likely true, with about the same percentage of elves establishing early exceptional success as the percentage of humans who achieve major success in their late teens / early twenties.

And even if a particular human family member doesn't have 'success' (as in skilled in their enterprise) a child, sibling or cousin, by blood or marriage, may be.

So the relatively constant injection of related familial members and their associated families by things like marriage also become resources for concentrating wealth within a select extended family group.

If it takes an elf 110ish years to even achieve the same diversity of familial cost saving and intra-family wealth circulation and generation, then the elf family is going to be bleeding more money to outside partnerships in terms of contracts, materials and services.

Rhedyn
2019-01-22, 03:21 PM
You have one very big problem with fantasy banking, a severe lack of cheap paper. Wood-based paper wasn't invented until the 19th century, meaning you couldn't afford to keep track of every minor transaction.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-22, 03:26 PM
You have one very big problem with fantasy banking, a severe lack of cheap paper. Wood-based paper wasn't invented until the 19th century, meaning you couldn't afford to keep track of every minor transaction.

This is one of those things I can easily see being different in a fantasy world of widespread (even low to mid) magic, alchemy, magitech, artificers, and inventors.

Schismatic
2019-01-22, 03:28 PM
You have one very big problem with fantasy banking, a severe lack of cheap paper. Wood-based paper wasn't invented until the 19th century, meaning you couldn't afford to keep track of every minor transaction.

They had paper money in China in 'generic middle ages' times.

That and they've been using promissory notes, and attestors and chartered trading company credits, to increased security and disincetivize highway robbery by reducing carried coinage by travelling traders for millenia.

Double-entry bookkeeping is 10th Century in Europe, even older elsewhere.

Tax evasion and complex debt handling is as old as concepts of finance itself. Kind of sad, but a natural expression of human greed.

Rhedyn
2019-01-22, 03:34 PM
They had paper money in China in 'generic middle ages' times.

That and they've been using promisory notes, and attestors and chartered trading company credits, to increased security and disincetivize highway robbery by reducing carried coinage by travelling traders for millenia.

Double-entry bookkeeping is 10th Century in Europe, even older elsewhere.
Yeah but you wouldn't use any of that to keep track of buying 1 meal at a tavern. Serious financial transactions only.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-22, 03:34 PM
You...have supply and demand. You described it in your discussion of that fabulous work-of-art bow being traded for that magnificent poem.

The bowyar has a supply of 1 bow, and a demand for 1 poem. The poet has a supply of time for writing a commissioned poem, and a demand for 1 bow.



This formulation has always bugged me, and your description of it just helped me clarify another reason why: late teen humans in D&D are already adventurers. If elves are "late teens" from 15 years old to 115 years old, why are they waiting until they're 115 to start adventuring? You certainly CAN wait until adulthood to start adventuring, but it's blatant that many adventurers start while still nominally "kids." Old, late-teen "kids," but still not "adults" socially.

And adventuring is EXACTLY the kind of "run off to have a good time" romantic notion that a 100-year-long late-teenagerhood would spur people to do. Consider the classic "backpacking across Europe" thing; adventuring is roughly equivalent in the kinds of settings where adventuring is a "thing." Little reason why they'd wait until nominal adulthood when humans and halflings and the like don't.

That's a really interesting idea... the elven extended adolescence as the ultimate "gap year", including all the cheap travel to foreign lands with just the a couple of backpacks, staying in hostels and inns, trying strange food and listening to strange music, whirlwind romances, etc. Gives a whole new origin to some half-elves, too (and it makes more sense to me for this to be the time when an elf doesn't yet quite grok when it means to get involved with someone from a "short lived" "race" -- an entire human lifetime can go by during the "long adolescence", leaving the elf with that standoffish attitude towards humans in the aftermath.)

Schismatic
2019-01-22, 03:38 PM
Yeah but you wouldn't use any of that to keep track of buying 1 meal at a tavern. Serious financial transactions only.

Well, white collar crime is hardly going to be about cheting someone out of baked turnips and sausage. Paupers don't need lenders, anyways.

Whole benefit of the feudal system. Poor people needn't complicate high finance and trade.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-22, 03:52 PM
You have supply and demand.

No you do not - and this discussion is long over.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-22, 03:57 PM
You...have supply and demand. You described it in your discussion of that fabulous work-of-art bow being traded for that magnificent poem.

The bowyar has a supply of 1 bow, and a demand for 1 poem. The poet has a supply of time for writing a commissioned poem, and a demand for 1 bow.


And unless there's simply no way for the elves to reach similar conclusions regarding which bows are better, one bow will be in more demand than another.

There's not a bulk commodity "supply and demand" of tons of grain or gallons of olive oil or standardized slabs of building stone, but the overall concept still applies.

Schismatic
2019-01-22, 03:59 PM
That's a really interesting idea... the elven extended adolescence as the ultimate "gap year", including all the cheap travel to foreign lands with just the a couple of backpacks, staying in hostels and inns, trying strange food and listening to strange music, whirlwind romances, etc. Gives a whole new origin to some half-elves, too (and it makes more sense to me for this to be the time when an elf doesn't yet quite grok when it means to get involved with someone from a "short lived" "race" -- an entire human lifetime can go by during the "long adolescence", leaving the elf with that standoffish attitude towards humans in the aftermath.)

Yeah, but legitimately who could afford it? Adventurers are special. Most people just stay where they're born and die there. Given how NPC HD works in 3.5, many NPCs would die if they catch plague within a day. If every elf travelled a century that's a lot of dead elves.

Plus if you can travel you can also pick up a mattock and till some fields, slacker. Your mother and I didn't give you the food off our plate simply so you can gallivant off.

Work hard and the local lord will let us lease the neighbour's plot and then we can work on arranging your marriage to the local seamstress if you're lucky.

Feudalism... best economic model for job security in history.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-22, 04:07 PM
Yeah, but legitimately who could afford it? Adventurers are special. Most people just stay where they're born and die there. Given how NPC HD works in 3.5, many NPCs would die if they catch plague within a day. If every elf travelled a century that's a lot of dead elves.

Plus if you can travel you can also pick up a mattock and till some fields, slacker. Your mother and I didn't give you the food off our plate simply so you can gallivant off.

Work hard and the local lord will let us lease the neighbour's plot and then we can worko arranging your marriage to the local seamstress.

Feudalism... best economic model for job security in history.

The lethality and griminess of life in that time period, and the downtroddenness and poverty of the average peasant or farmer, get quite a bit of exaggeration. Based in part on the worst days of the worst places, and in part on a lot of modern myth-making and pop-history. The sort of grinding feudal serfdom you're describing wasn't the norm overall. (Really wish Galloglaich was still posting, he could break it down with pages of detail.) The "dark ages" of Europe really only lasted a few centuries after the collapse of the Roman state, and were rarely quite THAT bad.

Plus, we're talking about elves.

Plus, we're talking about fantasy settings that can often justifiably be a different sort of place than historical Europe, even if the trappings are quite similar.

Schismatic
2019-01-22, 04:36 PM
The lethality and griminess of life in that time period, and the downtroddenness and poverty of the average peasant or farmer, get quite a bit of exaggeration. Based in part on the worst days of the worst places, and in part on a lot of modern myth-making and pop-history. The sort of grinding feudal serfdom you're describing wasn't the norm overall. (Really wish Galloglaich was still posting, he could break it down with pages of detail.) The "dark ages" of Europe really only lasted a few centuries after the collapse of the Roman state, and were rarely quite THAT bad.

Plus, we're talking about elves.

Plus, we're talking about fantasy settings that can often justifiably be a different sort of place than historical Europe, even if the trappings are quite similar.

Feudalism wasn't nearly as bad as popularly presented, that's true. But people rarely travelled regardless. Moreover the validity of tenant farming was based on the productivity of farmers. Also elves still need to eat. But even in generic fantasy Europe, part of the entertainment is surely being able to swagger into a village weaing enough visible wealth that you're effectively roleplaying a fantasy King Louis XIV amidst the unwashed masses?

I feel like the limitations on wealth in Forgotten Realms was to evoke that feeling that there were definite haves and have nots. Though they also have copious inns everywhere so obviously people travel extensively. Like inns in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

kieza
2019-01-22, 04:47 PM
You...have supply and demand. You described it in your discussion of that fabulous work-of-art bow being traded for that magnificent poem.

The bowyar has a supply of 1 bow, and a demand for 1 poem. The poet has a supply of time for writing a commissioned poem, and a demand for 1 bow.

Ehh... you're right for the wrong reasons:

The bowyer is willing to give another elf a bow in exchange for a poem, or two bunches of flowers, or any of several other combination of goods. He is also willing to give up two bows for some (larger) combinations of goods, or three bows, etc. This willingness to trade away bows means that supply of bows exists, but you can't say "his supply is one bow." Likewise, the other elf's desire for a bow constitutes demand, but you couldn't say that "his demand is one bow."

Supply and demand both consist of a relationship between quantity and price, e.g. "I will sell 1 bow for 20 gold, 2 bows for 25 gold each, 3 bows for 30 gold each, etc." In a nonmonetary market like the one we're discussing, supply and demand would be measured in terms of other goods, e.g. "I will trade 1 bow for 2 poems, 4 bunches of flowers, or a stimulating conversation. I will trade 2 bows for...etc."

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 12:22 AM
Ehh... you're right for the wrong reasons:

The bowyer is willing to give another elf a bow in exchange for a poem, or two bunches of flowers, or any of several other combination of goods. He is also willing to give up two bows for some (larger) combinations of goods, or three bows, etc. This willingness to trade away bows means that supply of bows exists, but you can't say "his supply is one bow." Likewise, the other elf's desire for a bow constitutes demand, but you couldn't say that "his demand is one bow."

Supply and demand both consist of a relationship between quantity and price, e.g. "I will sell 1 bow for 20 gold, 2 bows for 25 gold each, 3 bows for 30 gold each, etc." In a nonmonetary market like the one we're discussing, supply and demand would be measured in terms of other goods, e.g. "I will trade 1 bow for 2 poems, 4 bunches of flowers, or a stimulating conversation. I will trade 2 bows for...etc."

Doesn't really cover fungible commodities, however.

The problem of simply looking at supply-side economics is committig the grave error that whether in our blustering, boisterous late stage capitalist hellhole that will destroy the planet, or in a generic fantasy Europen feudalism where everything is ust green and dandy and how only certain countries would practice indentured labour even though all of them would, that sufficiency point economic ideas is objectively wrong.

There is always a difference between 'consumer goods' (common items) and 'luxury goods', and prices must be allowed to flux in one, and the other can't afford to.

Consumer goods do rise and fall, but scarcity alone could never mitigate that. Not unless that society is quite literally burning to the ground and about to be destroyed.

In the Reaganomics example you've got above, the common items market is 'healthiest' when it achieves sufficiency point. Total supply, for total demand... This never happens, but it's the 'dream' of free market economists while often overlooking the fct tht if the moral good of capitalism is the sufficiency point then why not simply regulate the market towards it?

Luxury items cannot function this way. By definition, luxury. And there is no sufficiency point, becuse it they wouldn't be luxury items.

Luxury items almost always cost more than they're obectively worth, as the basis of their existence is or spirited on niche interest consumption... and the whole point of them is that some people can't have them.

kieza
2019-01-23, 12:31 AM
Doesn't really cover fungible commodities, however.

The problem of simply looking at supply-side economics is committig the grave error that whether in our blustering, boisterous late stage capitalist hellhole that will destroy the planet, or in a generic fantasy Europe feudalism where everything is ust green and dandy and how only certain countries would practice indentured labour even though all of them would, that sufficiency point economic ideas is objectively wrong.

There is always a difference between 'consumer goods' and 'luxury goods', and prices must be allowed to flux in one, and the other can't afford to.

Consumer goods do rise and fall, but scarcity alone could never mitigate that. Not unless that society is quite literally burning to the ground and about to be destroyed.

I'm just talking about definitions here. No reason why the prices have to behave exactly that way (i.e. supplier's price increases with quantity), it was just the first example which came to mind.

EDIT: I missed your edit by like 30 seconds. Just to clarify, I despise Reaganomics and supply-side economics with a burning, fiery passion, and nothing I've said should be taken as an endorsement of the concept.

I'm still not entirely sure what you're trying to say here, though.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-23, 12:59 AM
I'm actually beginning to find this interesting. Not the discussion, which is inane. But the fact that you all seem genuinely unable to grasp the idea.

Let's try this: Demand side.

What you need to realise is that there is no such thing. Anything anyone ever want, they can easily make themselves. Or nature simply provides. Or it's magic. There is zero demand, for anything. You want a bow - you make one. You want a poem - you make one. Total absense of demand.

With me thus far? Everyone - no exceptions - is totally selfsufficient.

Supply side.

There is no production, of anything (except for personal use). This is, literally, a society of total layabouts. No one does anything meaningful wiht their time - at least not in the way that humans do. No one has a job, no one goes to the workshop every day and spends the day making bows, or writing poems. It's quite simply not a thing that ever happens, at all.

Now, if you cannot grasp or accept this, there's no reason for discussion. And if you're intent on calling what's left a market, then there's also no reason for discussion. You want to call the rare and incidental exchange of one thing for another thing a market - by all means. You're demonstrating a surprising lack of comprehension of both this iteration of elves, and market mechanics, but ... swell, do that =)

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-23, 01:18 AM
"If you don't agree with me, then clearly you don't understand. And if you won't agree with me, there's no point in discussion."

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 01:30 AM
I'm just talking about definitions here. No reason why the prices have to behave exactly that way (i.e. supplier's price increases with quantity), it was just the first example which came to mind.

EDIT: I missed your edit by like 30 seconds. Just to clarify, I despise Reaganomics and supply-side economics with a burning, fiery passion, and nothing I've said should be taken as an endorsement of the concept.

I'm still not entirely sure what you're trying to say here, though.

Well the argument is more so in order to delineate how an economy functions you need to look at how its people live. Being a Roman citizen post-Gracchus meant getting free flour. It was an amazing economic benefit to its people relative to the rest of the world, and also something they would lose their collective minds over if they didn't get it.

Also no 'fiery passion', more trying to nail down this concept of need, what people are accustomed to, and to what their expectations are. If we accept there is no transcendental sufficiency point of absolute value, thus absolute demand or absolute supply ... then you need to determine what people consider common items and luxury items.

If we assume a custom crossbow is a luxury item, then it would be literally whatever the boyer can expct to get away with as a niche, specialty item. If a society is proactively at war and mass numbers of people are being conscripted, and you've been ordered by your lord to churn them out as that region's war effort to supply forward forces and replacing broken equipment, well for years afterwards whatever crappy, mass produced crossbows you did help produce will still not inflict too much on your masterful, custom crossbows prices you made before and after and the prices they routinely generate.

It matters not how many crappy crossbows are out there, because the soldiers getting those crappy crossbows could never afford your masterfully made crossbows to begin with.

That being said, you will however create a very strong demand for crappy crossbows that must be sated, otherwise someone is going to lose their mind (and their head).

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-23, 01:31 AM
"If you don't agree with me, then clearly you don't understand. And if you won't agree with me, there's no point in discussion."

If you show me any sign you understand what I'm saying, I'll gladly engage with you. Your turn.

ViridianIIV
2019-01-23, 01:49 AM
Any species that lives longer on average is going to have a leg up on shorter lived competition... this is why Tolkien esque elves who tend not to use their abilities to cheat are preferable to more human thinking elves.

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 02:08 AM
I'm actually beginning to find this interesting. Not the discussion, which is inane. But the fact that you all seem genuinely unable to grasp the idea.

Let's try this: Demand side.

What you need to realise is that there is no such thing. Anything anyone ever want, they can easily make themselves. Or nature simply provides. Or it's magic. There is zero demand, for anything. You want a bow - you make one. You want a poem - you make one. Total absense of demand.

With me thus far? Everyone - no exceptions - is totally selfsufficient.

Supply side.

There is no production, of anything (except for personal use). This is, literally, a society of total layabouts. No one does anything meaningful wiht their time - at least not in the way that humans do. No one has a job, no one goes to the workshop every day and spends the day making bows, or writing poems. It's quite simply not a thing that ever happens, at all.

Now, if you cannot grasp or accept this, there's no reason for discussion. And if you're intent on calling what's left a market, then there's also no reason for discussion. You want to call the rare and incidental exchange of one thing for another thing a market - by all means. You're demonstrating a surprising lack of comprehension of both this iteration of elves, and market mechanics, but ... swell, do that =)

This is broken metric. For starters it mkes no concession for time, scarcity, materials, creativity, technicality, or prestige. This discourse would work if in a hypothetical society that doesn't need to work was happy to wear 'Grey Slacks, long' for the day when they fill out their 'Monthly Clothing Ration' forms (in triplicate).

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-23, 02:21 AM
This is broken metric. For starters it mkes no concession for time, scarcity, materials, creativity, technicality, or prestige. This discourse would work if in a hypothetical society that doesn't need to work was happy to wear 'Grey Slacks, long' for the day when they fill out their 'Monthly Clothing Ration' forms (in triplicate).

It's not a broken metric. You barely miss the head of the nail.

This is, indeed, a hypothetical society - only one where any elf, from age 3 (or so) is essentially able to take care of his own every need. It's important to keep in mind that the entire point is to make a race entirely unlike humans. Well, they could be even more unlike if they were Cthulhic masses of tentacles and reproductive organs, but that's not the exercise in this case.

But each and every individual elf can - easily - create any items it needs. And they're not 'grey slacks'. Any item an elf makes is essentially a work of art.

Exchanges will take place when - and only when - there is some other reason. But this is not a market economy, nor is it a planned or mixed economy. It is neither a market, nor is it an economy. No one needs anything, no one buys anything, no one sells anything.

So exchanges might be ... to show respect or appreciation, or out of love, or ritual - or they may have some less noble basis; maybe an elf will only deign to have a mere human touch one of his prized creations if the human will first perform some action, most likely a quest that will hopefully fail and kill the low brow miscreant.

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 02:34 AM
It's not a broken metric. You barely miss the head of the nail.

This is, indeed, a hypothetical society - only one where any elf, from age 3 (or so) is essentially able to take care of his own every need. It's important to keep in mind that the entire point is to make a race entirely unlike humans. Well, they could be even more unlike if they were Cthulhic masses of tentacles and reproductive organs, but that's not the exercise in this case.

But each and every individual elf can - easily - create any items it needs. And they're not 'grey slacks'. Any item an elf makes is essentially a work of art.

Exchanges will take place when - and only when - there is some other reason. But this is not a market economy, nor is it a planned or mixed economy. It is neither a market, nor is it an economy. No one needs anything, no one buys anything, no one sells anything.

So exchanges might be ... to show respect or appreciation, or out of love, or ritual - or they may have some less noble basis; maybe an elf will only deign to have a mere human touch one of his prized creations if the human will first perform some action, most likely a quest that will hopefully fail and kill the low brow miscreant.

So people making goods and services, but isn't work? I mean you're describing any pre-industrial society right there. There's people who fish, who weave nets (for the fisherpeople), they make boats, you have salters, smokers and driers for the catch and to maintain foodstuffs longterm, so on and so forth.

If you're a talented seamstress who makes your own clothes, why wouldn't someone then say; "Could you make me something?" Moreover why exactly wouldn't that be 'work' in a general sense? Also, why exactly is grey slacks not an art? If the argument is on the basis and relationship to consumption, Andy Warhol wants a word.

I will say I don't like elves in concept. They're kind of annoying in a general sense. Best to treat them as fey, and just not pretend anything they do makes sense. At all. They just exist as a crazy representational aspect of pointless madness.

The death of work is the death of social complexity. A person who hunts their own food, tans their own hides for clothing, who mintains their own garden, builds a home on land owned by no one, and can and will expect nothing but perpetual isolation can be said to be someone who does work. Yet will know nothing else by necessity.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-23, 02:57 AM
So people making goods and services, but isn't work? I mean you're describing any pre-industrial society right there. There's people who fish, who weave nets (for the fisherpeople), they make boats, you have salters, smokers and driers for the catch and to maintain foodstuffs longterm, so on and so forth.

If you're a talented seamstress who makes your own clothes, why wouldn't someone then say; "Could you make me something?" Moreover why exactly wouldn't that be 'work' in a general sense? Also, why exactly is grey slacks not an art? If the argument is on the basis and relationship to consumption, Andy Warhol wants a word.

I will say I don't like elves in concept. They're kind of annoying in a general sense. Best to treat them as fey, and just not pretend anything they do makes sense. At all. They just exist as a crazy representational aspect of pointless madness.

The death of work is the death of social complexity. A person who hunts their own food, tans their own hides for clothing, who mintains their own garden, builds a home on land owned by no one, and can and will expect nothing but perpetual isolation can be said to be someone who does work. Yet will know nothing else by necessity.

See ... this is what I mean. You clearly do not grasp the premise.

Everyone makes their own. No one makes anything for anyone else. Everyone is entirely self-sufficient. There is an absolute absense of need or reason to ask anyone else for anything else.

It would make sense for you to ask: How, and why, is there any society at all?

It doesn't make any sense to keep on and on and on trying to force this into a market mindset, when I keep repeating that ....... there .... is .... no ... market.

Florian
2019-01-23, 03:07 AM
@Kaptin Keen:

You understand that we understand the "market" to be mainly a social function, right?

I get what you are trying to create with your version of the elves, a people where each person is a more or less self-contained and fully independent unit of their own, not really in need of a functional society, because they don't depend on distributing/sharing the work load and specialization, what would lead to industrialization.

The point being that if one elf should find the bows or poems of another elf to be desirable and they are willing to barter for it, not just take it or get it as a gift, you have the social function of the "market".

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 03:16 AM
See ... this is what I mean. You clearly do not grasp the premise.

Everyone makes their own. No one makes anything for anyone else. Everyone is entirely self-sufficient. There is an absolute absense of need or reason to ask anyone else for anything else.

It would make sense for you to ask: How, and why, is there any society at all?

It doesn't make any sense to keep on and on and on trying to force this into a market mindset, when I keep repeating that ....... there .... is .... no ... market.

Am I missing a post somewhere?

For starters there is no separation of a 'market' and a collective productive effort. If there is no market for gross productive forces, there is no social fabric. Both of them are contingent on the other. A society made up of entirely 100% self-sufficient people with a 100% success rate of self-fulfillment and no individual or social dependents, they need no government, police, taxes, laws, businesses, infrastructure development, or currency.

They are effectively a collection of very individual people that neither need nor desire the interruption of another.

maruahm
2019-01-23, 03:16 AM
Exchanges take place until a Pareto optimum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency) is reached, so long as it's geographically and politically possible to trade and modulo some inefficiency. This is due to the fundamental theorems of welfare economics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics), which are mathematical results and so apply to fictional economies as well as real ones.

If you really want to argue that a magical economy starts at its Pareto optimum, and thus no exchanges occur, then you'll have to argue that there is nothing (as in, it's literally impossible) any two elves in our fictional economy can do to help each other, even if they wanted to. Already, that's probably not true—any elf wizard's time is best spent earning XP through encounters, and any elf craftsman's time is best spent trying to sell their new wondrous item to the wizard in exchange for sweet dungeon coins. There's already scarcity in character build options like feats and skill points, and that gives certain elves comparative advantages, which means that there's no Pareto optimum without some exchanging going on.

An economist would call those collective exchanges "markets". If you disagree with the definition, then the economist would just call them "neo-markets" instead and use the new definition for all of his research.

The only chance that the elves will not engage in market behavior is if: 1) it's politically impossible, e.g. they're communists; 2) it's geographically impossible for elves to be in significant contact, e.g. every elf has a repulsion around them; 3) elves are perfectly irrational and will never, ever act to their own advantage, e.g. uhh, literally no one is like this, so I'm blanking on examples; or 4) every elf is completely unable to learn information, e.g. they're all in comas. Only scenario 1 is reasonable for any fantasy setting, so if you reject 1, then markets will happen. Or neo-markets, if you'd prefer.

Source: published econ papers and worked as a quant for 2 years. My primary field is math-physics, so you know I'm not a """brainwashed""" economist. :smalltongue:

Edit: I literally cannot believe I wrote a manifesto long post on applying micro theory to elves.

Mechalich
2019-01-23, 03:17 AM
@Kaptin Keen:

You understand that we understand the "market" to be mainly a social function, right?

I get what you are trying to create with your version of the elves, a people where each person is a more or less self-contained and fully independent unit of their own, not really in need of a functional society, because they don't depend on distributing/sharing the work load and specialization, what would lead to industrialization.

The point being that if one elf should find the bows or poems of another elf to be desirable and they are willing to barter for it, not just take it or get it as a gift, you have the social function of the "market".

Indeed. To some degree Kaptin Keen is describing a post-scarcity market, in that the elves are completely capable of providing for their basic needs with a negligible amount of effort, but there would still be exchange based on different personal priorities, differences in aesthetic sense, and perhaps even something like fads. And once you have exchange, you have a market. It wouldn't be a market that operates on anything like our market economy model, it would be more like the 'reputation economy' markets that operate in certain portions of the Eclipse Phase setting where people can make anything they need using advanced 3d printers but exchange happens for blueprints and other non-physical items.

This sort of thing is relevant in D&D because while Kaptin Keen's elves are distinctly non-standard, there are entities that have highly non-traditional economies. The biggest and probably most important (to adventurers) case is Fiends, who have a market built around Souls. After all fiends don't need to eat, they don't need clothing, and gold is largely useless to them save as a means to use in other people's economies in the hope of ultimately acquiring souls. How the soul-based fiend economies work is kind of unclear (and honestly tends to change every time someone knew writes a sourcebook on Hell), but it is something that exists.

jayem
2019-01-23, 03:18 AM
This is broken metric. For starters it mkes no concession for time, scarcity, materials, creativity, technicality, or prestige. This discourse would work if in a hypothetical society that doesn't need to work was happy to wear 'Grey Slacks, long' for the day when they fill out their 'Monthly Clothing Ration' forms (in triplicate).
Time, elves have in vast supply. There's an issue with some things they might need sooner, but at that point you can probably get by with cast offs for a while.
Meanwhile where a human has say 2.6 kids between 20 and 30, elves may need 16 to keep up between their 200's and 300's. Quite how that works out I don't know a lot of costs are pretty much fixed (it's not like there is 10* as much maths to learn)

Technicality, most things get better with practice (even better with dedication). Anything that done once a human generation would be the humans first time (plus once they saw it done and once they can help) and so easily out-competed by someone specializing, while at the end our elf has done it 20 time.

Transient scarcity can often be mostly paid with by time (I.E you wait it out). Materials can be substituted or waited for enough of the time.

That probably only gives about 50% suppression and co-oporation is obviously good, but if it's mostly like for like and (elf) short term then there's no problem.
And similarly there is still the family to call favours from (which allows the 700 year old to do all the families shirts for the centuary, rather than learning it in the 70's and stopping in the 80's). At which point inter-family inter-commodity supply/demand probably is suppressed to low levels

So that just leaves creativity (helped by time and experience) and prestige

maruahm
2019-01-23, 03:22 AM
Indeed. To some degree Kaptin Keen is describing a post-scarcity market, in that the elves are completely capable of providing for their basic needs with a negligible amount of effort, but there would still be exchange based on different personal priorities, differences in aesthetic sense, and perhaps even something like fads. And once you have exchange, you have a market. It wouldn't be a market that operates on anything like our market economy model, it would be more like the 'reputation economy' markets that operate in certain portions of the Eclipse Phase setting where people can make anything they need using advanced 3d printers but exchange happens for blueprints and other non-physical items.

I'd like to note that post-scarcity doesn't mean exchanges don't happen. "Scarcity" (in the sense that an epic wizard experiences no scarcity) is not a requirement on market exchanges occurring.

Florian
2019-01-23, 03:24 AM
1) it's politically impossible, e.g. they're communists

Scratch that. Communism and socialism have/had very pronounced and functioning markets, both on the macro as well as on the micro level. Barter and trade were pretty brisk affairs.

maruahm
2019-01-23, 03:27 AM
Scratch that. Communism and socialism have/had very pronounced and functioning markets, both on the macro as well as on the micro level. Barter and trade were pretty brisk affairs.

You're 100% right. Historical communism very much had markets, and often where no explicit markets existed social capital took the place of hard capital. Also, black markets.

I'm just referring to a hypothetical elf communist state with perfect planning and no markets. With magic, who knows what's possible.

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 03:30 AM
The only chance that the elves will not engage in market behavior is if: 1) it's politically impossible, e.g. they're communists; 2) it's geographically impossible for elves to be in significant contact, e.g. every elf has a repulsion around them; 3) elves are perfectly irrational and will never, ever act to their own advantage, e.g. uhh, literally no one is like this, so I'm blanking on examples; or 4) every elf is completely unable to learn information, e.g. they're all in comas. Only scenario 1 is reasonable for any fantasy setting, so if you reject 1, then markets will happen. Or neo-markets, if you'd prefer.

How exctly does the communist not engage in market behaviour? The whole point of central planning is to make the economy work in favour of its human participants. Not people working to simply maintain the economy. The way you use market behaviour suggests that individuals are thoughtless consumers before the fact, and might not instead defer to a sociological perspective of social engagement that introspectivey gauges their personal relationship with the market that is to drive their market engagement.

People do not come to consumption trends and concepts of common and luxury consumption without enculturation and class consciousness. And these assumptions precede any individual participation on their own.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-23, 03:41 AM
You understand that we understand the "market" to be mainly a social function, right?

The market is supply and demand. You can call it a 'social function' if you like. If there is neither, there is no market. Whatever other suffix you feel like applying to it.


If there is no market for gross productive forces, there is no social fabric.

Yes.


Exchanges take place until a Pareto optimum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency) is reached, so long as it's geographically and politically possible to trade and modulo some inefficiency. This is due to the fundamental theorems of welfare economics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics), which are mathematical results and so apply to fictional economies as well as real ones.

If you really want to argue that a magical economy starts at its Pareto optimum, and thus no exchanges occur, then you'll have to argue that there is nothing (as in, it's literally impossible) any two elves in our fictional economy can do to help each other, even if they wanted to. Already, that's probably not true—any elf wizard's time is best spent earning XP through encounters, and any elf craftsman's time is best spent trying to sell their new wondrous item to the wizard in exchange for sweet dungeon coins. There's already scarcity in character build options like feats and skill points, and that gives certain elves comparative advantages, which means that there's no Pareto optimum without some exchanging going on.

An economist would call those collective exchanges "markets". If you disagree with the definition, then the economist would just call them "neo-markets" instead and use the new definition for all of his research.

The only chance that the elves will not engage in market behavior is if: 1) it's politically impossible, e.g. they're communists; 2) it's geographically impossible for elves to be in significant contact, e.g. every elf has a repulsion around them; 3) elves are perfectly irrational and will never, ever act to their own advantage, e.g. uhh, literally no one is like this, so I'm blanking on examples; or 4) every elf is completely unable to learn information, e.g. they're all in comas. Only scenario 1 is reasonable for any fantasy setting, so if you reject 1, then markets will happen. Or neo-markets, if you'd prefer.

Source: published econ papers and worked as a quant for 2 years. My primary field is math-physics, so you know I'm not a """brainwashed""" economist. :smalltongue:

Edit: I literally cannot believe I wrote a manifesto long post on applying micro theory to elves.

Any elf is a wizard, and a craftsman. And while everything you say is true of humans, none of it applies here. There are no humans. Or, there may well be, but they're somewhere else and not part of the discussion. You say it very eloquently yourself: An elven wizards time is best spent ..... and that's really it: You're assuming a means to an end, and it's just not there.

What you're describing is fundamental to human existance. But elves don't give a damn, and have no reason to.

If you want to force the term market unto a situation where neither supply, demand, production, currency, exchange rates, and so on, exist - then by all means, call it what you will.

Also, I live in Denmark. As an average citizen, I have more spending wealth than the average american, plus I have free healthfare, education, unemployment benefits, and so on. Communist utopia exists, and I can give you the address where you can come have a look for yourself.


Indeed. To some degree Kaptin Keen is describing a post-scarcity market, in that the elves are completely capable of providing for their basic needs with a negligible amount of effort, but there would still be exchange based on different personal priorities, differences in aesthetic sense, and perhaps even something like fads. And once you have exchange, you have a market. It wouldn't be a market that operates on anything like our market economy model, it would be more like the 'reputation economy' markets that operate in certain portions of the Eclipse Phase setting where people can make anything they need using advanced 3d printers but exchange happens for blueprints and other non-physical items.

This sort of thing is relevant in D&D because while Kaptin Keen's elves are distinctly non-standard, there are entities that have highly non-traditional economies. The biggest and probably most important (to adventurers) case is Fiends, who have a market built around Souls. After all fiends don't need to eat, they don't need clothing, and gold is largely useless to them save as a means to use in other people's economies in the hope of ultimately acquiring souls. How the soul-based fiend economies work is kind of unclear (and honestly tends to change every time someone knew writes a sourcebook on Hell), but it is something that exists.

Yes! This is precisely what I'm trying to do. Isn't that the whole goddamn discussion? "Re: Banking and Finance in Fantasy Settings". What happens in a fantasy world, when you move the boundaries, or work with mindsets and cultures entirely unlike our own?

Florian
2019-01-23, 03:44 AM
How exctly does the communist not engage in market behaviour?

In a sense, by creating a similar situation than a post-scarcity society. By anticipating possible future demand and producing goods and making them available before they are actually needed would cut down the needs for a micro economy to a bare minimum, if at all.

maruahm
2019-01-23, 03:46 AM
How exctly does the communist not engge in market behaviour? The whole point of central planning is to make the economy work in favour of its human participants. Not people working to simply maintain the economy. The way you use market behaviour suggests that individuals are thoughtless consumers before the fact, and might not instead defer to a macrological perspective of social engagement with the market that is to drive their means of mrket engagement.

Here's a real-life historical example. The Soviet planning system used economic models very similar to what western academics were doing. Instead of letting a free market compute the optimal allocation of iron to factories, the Soviets simulated a nonexistent market using fairly advanced tools in linear programming, numerical analysis, and convex optimization. This way, firms did not have to engage in market exchanges to determine who needed iron—the Kremlin calculated what an efficient economy would have allocated, and gave the right factories the right amount of iron.

This worked, more or less, in some areas where it was easy to compute the optimal allocation. In other areas it was harder, and you get things like Soviet store shelves being bare and so on. This was only exacerbated by other things like corruption, misaligned political incentives, etc., but those are whole 'nother issues.

It is however true that markets still existed! As I mentioned, only a hypothetical perfect communist society would have no markets, because the government would compute all allocations perfectly. The Soviets realized they couldn't do this, so they permitted some minimal low-level market behavior. This way they didn't have to do things like make sure Anya in Apartment 12 gets the blue jeans and Sofia in Apartment 22 gets the green.

tl;dr The historical communists did. But a perfect planned economy would not need market engagement.


You say it very eloquently yourself: An elven wizards time is best spent ..... and that's really it: You're assuming a means to an end, and it's just not there.

You can replace XP and craftsmen with any two other things that an elf would value, and my point would hold true. I just gave two examples. Go ahead and create whatever foreign, exotic interests you have in mind for your elves. The theorem mathematically applies to them as well.

As long as all elves don't have the exact same build, exact same desires, there will be comparative advantage, and then exchanges will happen.


Also, I live in Denmark. As an average citizen, I have more spending wealth than the average american, plus I have free healthfare, education, unemployment benefits, and so on. Communist utopia exists, and I can give you the address where you can come have a look for yourself.

Scandinavian countries are less communist than people usually criticize/praise them for. Actually compare tax rates, corporate regulations, and so on, and you'll notice that they're not so far off from the U.S. They have their own versions of Wall Street, you know. Almost worked at a trading shop in Netherlands, but the the actual Wall Street offer was better.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-23, 04:01 AM
The theorem mathematically applies to them as well.

And if you insist on applying the term market to something that's entirely unlike the market in every way except the theorem mathematically applies, then by all means .... do that. But as I've stated again and again to exhaustion: There is neither supply nor demand. Mathematically theorem that. And .... just, please remember: This is my idea. You cannot tell me what my idea is. That's never going to go anywhere.

Then you can be like, "well, but how about exchanges of X for Y?" - and whatever answer I give, you go "HA! MARKET!"

And that's wonderful, and congratulations on how absolutely clever you are, and it still means you're completely missing the point.

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 04:06 AM
Time, elves have in vast supply. There's an issue with some things they might need sooner, but at that point you can probably get by with cast offs for a while.
Meanwhile where a human has say 2.6 kids between 20 and 30, elves may need 16 to keep up between their 200's and 300's. Quite how that works out I don't know a lot of costs are pretty much fixed (it's not like there is 10* as much maths to learn)

Technicality, most things get better with practice (even better with dedication). Anything that done once a human generation would be the humans first time (plus once they saw it done and once they can help) and so easily out-competed by someone specializing, while at the end our elf has done it 20 time.

Transient scarcity can often be mostly paid with by time (I.E you wait it out). Materials can be substituted or waited for enough of the time.

That probably only gives about 50% suppression and co-oporation is obviously good, but if it's mostly like for like and (elf) short term then there's no problem.
And similarly there is still the family to call favours from (which allows the 700 year old to do all the families shirts for the centuary, rather than learning it in the 70's and stopping in the 80's). At which point inter-family inter-commodity supply/demand probably is suppressed to low levels

So that just leaves creativity (helped by time and experience) and prestige

Do elves have time, however? By the time an elf is an adult, a human has learnt a trade, mastered it, had great grandkids, and those great grandkids having a wealth of accumulated social and intra-familial skills and wealth building, and a myriad of possible successful economic and political enterprises.

Just in terms of raw labour and productivity.

Time for an elf is not actually a commodity they have. It's a curse. They simply have less skills divergence, less total economic engagement, and by the time an elf has created a family enterprise, that human family has a legacy of action, adventure, skills-building, and collective knowledge and social base to take advantage.

That human knows their siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and various married expanded families of possibly 100s of different ways of living to directly take advantage of within 4 generations. By the time an elf has grandkids, that human family may have gone from a farming family, to merchnts, to possible nobility.

So sure, elves have a lot of time. But limited ways to work with it.

Not only that, but elves don't actually live that comparatively long in comparison to that specifically written childhood.

Plus whatever ideas an elf has about propriety, technology, sophistication of engineering... a human will have disposed of. Hyper-focussed on the new, chaotic, the comparatively bleeding edge. An elf wil spend 100 years perfecting a type of metalurgical praxis... that human blacksmith is onto something new and exciting. By the time an elf hones and perfects the crafting of bows, humans will have gone from crossbows, the harquebus, to the wheellock.

Elves in D&D, much like in Middle-earth, should be in retreat. Nevermind the fact that there is a direct correlation between population an innovation. That as humans grow in number, the sheer technical capcity to innovate also similarly grows... often solely due to population densities of cities. To put it bluntly, humans have reasons to achieve an industrial revolution, elves do not.

Plus prestige has nothing to do with experience or even quality. Often it's driven by raw consumption and class consciousness on its own. And who consumes better than humans?

maruahm
2019-01-23, 04:07 AM
There is neither supply nor demand. Mathematically theorem that. And .... just, please remember: This is my idea. You cannot tell me what my idea is. That's never going to go anywhere.

I'm not telling you your idea. I'm just saying that, logically, a market will appear, given some very reasonable assumptions, e.g. elves aren't perfectly irrational. In particular, I'm not relying on assumptions of supply and demand, I'm claiming that they appear under a wide range of conditions on their own, and pointing out the economic theory behind it.

It is, of course, your idea. And there's nothing wrong with a post-scarcity society of elves who are entirely self-sufficient and have no market transactions. Sci-fi and fantasy rarely depict things which make sense when you take them to their logical extremes. Just don't add "realistic depiction of economics" to your book blurb and I won't have a problem with it. :smalltongue:

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-23, 04:28 AM
I'm not telling you your idea. I'm just saying that, logically, a market will appear, given some very reasonable assumptions, e.g. elves aren't perfectly irrational. In particular, I'm not relying on assumptions of supply and demand, I'm claiming that they appear under a wide range of conditions on their own, and pointing out the economic theory behind it.

It is, of course, your idea. And there's nothing wrong with a post-scarcity society of elves who are entirely self-sufficient and have no market transactions. Sci-fi and fantasy rarely depict things which make sense when you take them to their logical extremes. Just don't add "realistic depiction of economics" to your book blurb and I won't have a problem with it. :smalltongue:

Well then - I believe we may be in agreement on everything except the term 'market' =)

What's rational to humans may well be entirely irrational to elves, and vice versa. If we agree that there is no supply or demand, and that each transaction is unique - that the exchange of one particular bow for one particular poem establishes no wider context of the exchangeability of bows for poems - then we can call what remains a 'market', for all I care. I don't think of it that way, but the precise term isn't important. It's the rest of the assumed baggage - work, or 'a job', in particular - that I'm opposed to, because that just isn't part of the idea.

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 04:44 AM
Here's a real-life historical example. The Soviet planning system used economic models very similar to what western academics were doing. Instead of letting a free market compute the optimal allocation of iron to factories, the Soviets simulated a nonexistent market using fairly advanced tools in linear programming, numerical analysis, and convex optimization. This way, firms did not have to engage in market exchanges to determine who needed iron—the Kremlin calculated what an efficient economy would have allocated, and gave the right factories the right amount of iron.

This worked, more or less, in some areas where it was easy to compute the optimal allocation. In other areas it was harder, and you get things like Soviet store shelves being bare and so on. This was only exacerbated by other things like corruption, misaligned political incentives, etc., but those are whole 'nother issues.

It is however true that markets still existed! As I mentioned, only a hypothetical perfect communist society would have no markets, because the government would compute all allocations perfectly. The Soviets realized they couldn't do this, so they permitted some minimal low-level market behavior. This way they didn't have to do things like make sure Anya in Apartment 12 gets the blue jeans and Sofia in Apartment 22 gets the green.

But none of this is actually relevant to the idea of market behaviour. Once more it's rewriting common definition of what the mrketplace is. The four aspects of market behaviour is awareness, preference, advocacy, engagement. You can break down 'market behaviour' in any economic system. From feudal societies, subsistence fishing villages, Maoist China and Manhattan.

Market behaviour is about that grey area between psychology and economics, only no one wants to call it psychology because they won't get a Nobel Prize. Because, you know, the Nobel Prize is for people that can't do math or philosophy...

You're using market behaviour to analyze a collectivist society.

maruahm
2019-01-23, 04:55 AM
But none of this is actually relevant to the idea of market behaviour. Once more it's rewriting common definition of what the mrketplace is. The four aspects of market behaviour is awareness, preference, advocacy, engagement. You can break down 'market behaviour' in any economic system. From feudal societies, subsistence fishing villages, Maoist China and Manhattan.

Market behaviour is about that grey area between psychology and economics, only no one wants to call it psychology because they won't get a Nobel Prize. Because, you know, the Nobel Prize is for people that can't do math or philosophy...

Your definition of market behavior is very far afield of most economists, then, as I'm sure you're aware. Perhaps you're less aware that behavioral economists (who have indeed won Nobel prizes—see Richard Thaler) also subscribe to the "orthodox" view of market behavior. And so too do most 20th- and 21st-century heterodox economists, e.g. neo-Marxians like Baran, Sweezy, or Kalecki.

I'm not rewriting market behavior. I'm using the term as used by researchers and academics in the field. If you have a separate definition, I'll be happy to discuss market behavior—insofar as my expertise is able to—as you define it.

Florian
2019-01-23, 05:06 AM
@Schismatic:

The point was that you can pre-empt the existence of a market by deliberately creating a post-scarcity situation.

For example, if you had free, unlimited and unhindered access to basic consumer goods, especially the ones that cover your core needs, like housing, clothing, food and medicine, that would eliminate some markets because it has eliminated the basic need for that stuff.

Now, let's say the government would fill my kitchen/larder with basic ingredients, spices and all of that, that might have eliminated the market for basic goods, but not the market to get cooking done and let's not talk about the cleaning up afterwards, so on.

Mechalich
2019-01-23, 05:12 AM
Yes! This is precisely what I'm trying to do. Isn't that the whole goddamn discussion? "Re: Banking and Finance in Fantasy Settings". What happens in a fantasy world, when you move the boundaries, or work with mindsets and cultures entirely unlike our own?

Actually it's pretty much the opposite of the discussion. Most people, whether writing, reading, playing, or otherwise creating/consuming fantasy, have little interest in the particulars of how the world works economically. Tolkien created multiple elf languages, but couldn't have cared less how Gondor financed and provisioned its armies. George RR Martin works out noble lineages and cultural mores and even cuisine (https://www.amazon.com/Feast-Ice-Fire-Official-Companion/dp/0345534492) in mind-boggling detail, but he can't even mathematically model the distances from point A to pint B correctly, never mind an economic system. Most people, in considering the economics of fantasy are looking for a solution that enables their games or stories to function in a way that characters can initiate relatively seamless exchanges to buy stuff they need when they need it, accumulate money from doing work, and at the same time maintain sufficient verisimilitude to keep the tale from imploding.

What people are generally trying to do is to find answers to fit questions generated by the inclusion of a supernatural element, in this case extremely long lifespans for certain races, into the existing D&D gaming monetary framework. it's a much less comprehensive question.

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 05:32 AM
Your definition of market behavior is very far afield of most economists, then, as I'm sure you're aware. Perhaps you're less aware that behavioral economists (who have indeed won Nobel prizes—see Richard Thaler) also subscribe to the "orthodox" view of market behavior. And so too do most 20th- and 21st-century heterodox economists, e.g. neo-Marxians like Baran, Sweezy, or Kalecki.

I'm not rewriting market behavior. I'm using the term as used by researchers and academics in the field. If you have a separate definition, I'll be happy to discuss market behavior—insofar as my expertise is able to—as you define it.

Okay, no. 'Market behaviour' is not something like 'horizontal gene transfer'. I have Googled it twice now and every website I'm getting that attempts to explain it talks of sociological and psychological mechanics of market engagement. So clearly 'most economists' aren't speaking very loud, and I'm not really sure what the angle is here. The most closely defined search result field of academic research is behavioural analysis of market participation that jumps to a wikipedia article. It seems to focus on the role of consumption and human behaviour.

Which is all well and good, but says nothing about how communists don't engage in 'market behaviour'. They still consume things, they still worked, and regardless of economic system productivity is a major concern.

The last time I remember hearing 'market behaviour' it was in relationship to a psych experiment concerning brand recognition and behavioural modifiers to consumption and 'aspirational purchases'. Like the relationship between store attendants and consumers in prestigious fashion outlets use various manipulative strategies that differ from 'common' fashion outlets and items that most people buy. Why overtly manipulative (and critical) sales strategies in 'aspirational brand' stores work whereas would fail in any average DFO-esque shopping centre.

Essentially researching how prestige works in consumerist societies.

maruahm
2019-01-23, 05:58 AM
Okay, no. 'Market behaviour' is not something like 'horizontal gene transfer'. I have Googled it twice now and every website I'm getting that attempts to explain it talks of sociological and psychological mechanics of market engagement. So clearly 'most economists' aren't speaking very loud, and I'm not really sure what the angle is here. The most closely defined search result field of academia is behavioural analysis of market participation that jumps to a wikipedia article. It seems to focus on the role of consumption and human behaviour.

Come on, those Wikipedia articles you're citing literally use the definition of market behavior I've been using. "Most economists" are indeed speaking pretty loudly. Did you even read them?

Market behavior is about how people make decisions when capitalist exchanges are possible. Not how they consume allocated goods.


Now, let's say the government would fill my kitchen/larder with basic ingredients, spices and all of that, that might have eliminated the market for basic goods, but not the market to get cooking done and let's not talk about the cleaning up afterwards, so on.

This actually ties in really nicely to our discussion of historical communist societies, actually. Because in pre-Deng China and Soviet Russia it was illegal to operate a repair shop for standard things like furniture, bikes, stoves, and so on, it was typical for structures to arise at the lowest levels where one local with a talent for repair, ostensibly a factory worker or farmer, would often unofficially repair other folks' items in exchange for ration tickets or just for social capital.

Of course, many families didn't have access to their local unofficial repairman, so they either learned to repair themselves, obtained new copies, or sent in a request to their township head and waited the inordinate amount of time for the planning system to finally meet their needs. This is why, when the Soviets had their little perestroika, and when Deng began his China reforms, one of the first parts of the economy which opened up were the local township-level sectors.

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 06:08 AM
@Schismatic:

The point was that you can pre-empt the existence of a market by deliberately creating a post-scarcity situation.

For example, if you had free, unlimited and unhindered access to basic consumer goods, especially the ones that cover your core needs, like housing, clothing, food and medicine, that would eliminate some markets because it has eliminated the basic need for that stuff.

Now, let's say the government would fill my kitchen/larder with basic ingredients, spices and all of that, that might have eliminated the market for basic goods, but not the market to get cooking done and let's not talk about the cleaning up afterwards, so on.

You can pre-empt some needs, but irrational consumption is a thing. Like I'm a massive MLP fan, and I've spent probably $8,000+ on it as a franchise? Multiple covers of every comic books, DVDs, toys, clothes, etc. Many societies on Earth already transcend many of these things. Housing is guaranteed in some places. Medicine. Food. Moreover, a magical society is no more or less liable to have these things just given to people.

You can't just teach a cleric to channel divine powers and force them to heal the nation's sick, like Uiversal ClericCare. They're not doctors, they're priests. Clerics like other PC classes are also considered 'special'. Uniquely powerful, resourceful people. And in being priests they waste their lives praying to gods that won't get off their lazy arses. Of course if they didn't spend years cloitered, training to be a priest, and being 'faithful' they wouldn't be able to spend anytime healing people.

And this is why D&D gods are collectively awful and why Ur-Priests are perhaps the true saviours of mortal creatures... <.<

Clerics are kind of the perfect example why a magical society might not have any capacity to truly enjoy what we have here on this mundane little planet with things like science and empiricism.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-23, 06:37 AM
Actually it's pretty much the opposite of the discussion. Most people, whether writing, reading, playing, or otherwise creating/consuming fantasy, have little interest in the particulars of how the world works economically. Tolkien created multiple elf languages, but couldn't have cared less how Gondor financed and provisioned its armies. George RR Martin works out noble lineages and cultural mores and even cuisine (https://www.amazon.com/Feast-Ice-Fire-Official-Companion/dp/0345534492) in mind-boggling detail, but he can't even mathematically model the distances from point A to pint B correctly, never mind an economic system. Most people, in considering the economics of fantasy are looking for a solution that enables their games or stories to function in a way that characters can initiate relatively seamless exchanges to buy stuff they need when they need it, accumulate money from doing work, and at the same time maintain sufficient verisimilitude to keep the tale from imploding.

What people are generally trying to do is to find answers to fit questions generated by the inclusion of a supernatural element, in this case extremely long lifespans for certain races, into the existing D&D gaming monetary framework. it's a much less comprehensive question.

Hm - yes, but .. this discussion, this thread, is about banking and finance in fantasy settings.

But you're correct, of course. And while there is very little comparison otherwise, I too am interested in the fluff, but would be hard pressed to stay awake if someone tried to explain to me the actual mathematics of it. I'm interested in making elves (as the example goes) tangibly different from humans. And, as you say, integrate it into games; why is it that you cannot get an elf to bloody well sell you anything? Well it's because you have nothing they want, and they don't generally have anything to spare.

How about orcs though. Orcs are similar, right? What is orc society, anyways? Slave economy, fuelled by too much testosterone, little appreciation for anything that isn't an expression of force or strength somehow. Trouble is that orcs are stupid - but for the sake of it, let's assume the smartest still manage to rise to the top. Smartest, but not necessarily strongest or toughest, so in order to stay on top, you need to weed out the greatest threats. Which is easier than it sounds because, overall, there's a decent chance the strongest warrior is also dumb as a brick.

So orc society is all about strength and honor and conquest, and orcs all the way at the top use war as a way of culling the strong, so to speak.

So it becomes something of a cleptocracy. The smartest orcs rule factions that they send into war, for various reasons, not least of which is to appoint champions - so they can die in combat, before they get any bright ideas above their station. "Arghul, you are a formidable warrior - don't think I haven't noticed. I want you to be my standard bearer, on the front line, to inspire the others. Go! Bring us honor!" And the poor gullible fool goes away proud as a prancing pony.

So for economy, it's all about building the biggest pile. It's not about spending, or particularly about trading, but about compiling an impressive amount of loot. Sure you have to pay the men part of the loot when they go and fight for you - but when they die, it likely returns to you. There is no inheritance, an orc owns only what he has taken for himself.

Orc society is a giant, deadly pyramid game. I like that. And because the rare, cleverer orc rules, it doesn't have to be the idiotic cave dweller race it's always portrayed as. Instead, it's a horde of barely controlled barbarians, but acting on the whims of some very devious minds.

Florian
2019-01-23, 06:45 AM
If you ignore the whole soccer hooligans vibe, that's the core concept of Warhammer Orcs in a nutshell.

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-23, 07:05 AM
If you ignore the whole soccer hooligans vibe, that's the core concept of Warhammer Orcs in a nutshell.

.. yes, you're right. It hadn't occurred to me, but that's entirely correct - but I think it's because the hooligan vibe is so in your face =) do the smartest orcs rule, though? Isn't it all WAAGH this and WAAGH the other thing? Strongest, not smartest.

I think I could make something that's rather unlike Warhammer, even if it .. grows in the same soil, so to speak. Well, and Warhammer gets around certain problems in a certain way, having goblins and squid to perform specific functions - where I'd go with capturing slaves from other races (something I'm sure Warhammer orcs also do, but I'm no expert). Do orcs trade in teef in Warhammer? They do, don't they?

I think I'd .. what? I want to say they're a prestige economy. But an uneven landscape: Each warlord securing a niche for himself - having the most land, or the most slaves, or the most warriors, or the greatest pile of gold - and I think the basic unit of currency might be a slave. But every warlord needs to be best at something, because no one fights for the second best.

Schismatic
2019-01-23, 08:32 AM
Come on, those Wikipedia articles you're citing literally use the definition of market behavior I've been using. "Most economists" are indeed speaking pretty loudly. Did you even read them?

Market behavior is about how people make decisions when capitalist exchanges are possible. Not how they consume allocated goods.

But they are literally not saying what you're saying. They're discussing human behaviour and trends of consumption and human mood as relative to their market engagement. There's nothing in there that says 'communists don't engage in market behaviour' ... they clearly do.

As I wrote before, the last time I read something with 'market behaviour' it was a psychological study on consumerist activity with 'aspirational brands'. And more or less it looks like these people are using that term to describe similar things.

zlefin
2019-01-23, 09:41 AM
Clearly better than yours. It's supply and demand: If there is neither, there is no market.

actually your understanding is far worse than mine; and you've no reasonable basis to claim yours is better. I recommend looking up the dunning-kruger effect if you wish to have a better understanding of why you don't get that.
Also, supply and demand isn't pertinent to the post of yours I responded to, it's jsut bringing up an irrelevant point to try to claim victory; you made other points there, which were simply wrong.
using a point that's true but irrelevant to the highly specific point under contention doesn't make you right.

Max_Killjoy
2019-01-23, 10:17 AM
@Kaptin Keen:

You understand that we understand the "market" to be mainly a social function, right?

I get what you are trying to create with your version of the elves, a people where each person is a more or less self-contained and fully independent unit of their own, not really in need of a functional society, because they don't depend on distributing/sharing the work load and specialization, what would lead to industrialization.

The point being that if one elf should find the bows or poems of another elf to be desirable and they are willing to barter for it, not just take it or get it as a gift, you have the social function of the "market".

That's a point we've been trying to make -- that once people are willing and able to trade things, even abstract things, there's a market.

The argument we're up against seems to have decided that these "ours are different" elves don't have a market, and then proceeded to reverse-define "market" such that the elves don't have one.

LibraryOgre
2019-01-23, 10:20 AM
The Mod Wonder: I think this one can take a break for a while.