Board Thread:Fiction Universe Discussion/@comment-9141454-20150625191138/@comment-25309944-20150627185048

Just graduated! I suddenly have a bunch of free time on my hands again. :D

How should it look like?
 * As Drodo mentioned, we've designed something similar with Andasium, a fictional fuel which is modeled after a number of real-world equivalents. The Andasium economy is optional, which means that users can opt in or out of mentioning Andasium in their fiction, which I think is an important point because not everyone has an interest in modeling their fiction's economy in detail.


 * With that said, writing the economy into fiction can be a little tricky. Economics is all about trends and the invisible flow of capital, value, and goods, which is hard to make relevant in stories and even fiction pages. Does that mean that economic concepts have little place in fiction? Perhaps not. One of my ideas for Andasium is that it would act as a leg-up of sorts for the nations possessing large reserves of it, allowing them to use the profits to develop their economies further and buy the technology that they lack in order to catch up. Intergalactic trade is typically a great creator of wealth. This is what happened with France in the early-2790's, as they sold large amounts of military equipment to the intergalactic market. With those profits, France was able to start importing large amounts of foreign goods and technology, especially from the Tybusen Intergalactic Allied Federation, creating new sectors in its economy and closing the technological gap. Five years later, such powers as the Farengeto Republic were going through the same process, except modernizing off of France.


 * This is an example of how economics was used to advance a nation's overall plot and power in a realistic way. Modernization can be a painful process given the new technologies and (possibly) social change involved, but it has resulted in the rise of new superpowers.


 * Additionally, Drodo and I are working on government-level stories between France and the Drodo Empire which are heavily driven and definied by the economies of both nations. If any of you are interested in how that works, let me know on IRC! :D

How would these affect trade?
 * My hope is that introducing new raw materials would help us flesh out the economies of different fictions even more, though we should be careful not to make it too complicated. Having too many goods might turn a lot of people away.


 * With that said, it's important to understand how trade between nations works. In economics, nations have what is called a comparative advantage in producing certain goods. This means that they can produce it more efficiently and cheaply than anything else. Barring government intervention, corporations and individuals will generally fall over themselves to produce that good because that is what is most profitable. For example, real-life Ivory Coast has a comparative advantage in the production of Cocoa beans due to the climate, the skills of their workforce, and their coastal location, so their entire economy is built around it. Because of Cocoa, the Ivory Coast is one of the richest countries in Africa. This also has created problems for the Ivory Coast which are specific to it, so if you'd like to design your own nation's comparative advantage(s), please speak to me! There are a lot of factors involved.


 * However, there's an argument that due to exponential increases in technology and the ability to produce wealth, scarcity––the driving force behind value (gold is rare, therefore it is valuable)––will disappear, and with it the necessity for an economy, a currency, and trade. Ghelae illustrated the production power of advanced civilisations nicely when he demonstrated just how much energy and stuff can be siphoned from a star. Because of such an enormous ability to produce, nations will never want for anything, right? All of our needs will be met, and capitalist endeavors will mean nothing in the future.


 * There are a number of problems with this idea, however. By any definition, the developed world should be living in a post-scarcity society in the real-world. Our methods of production, along with the people willing and able to produce for us, have increased at a mind-boggling rate over the past hundred years. In 1900, 40% of the American workforce was engaged in Agriculture, the production of food. Today, that number is 3%, and yet we produce enough food to feed the entire world. Shouldn't the whole idea that food has value have evaporated by now because there's so much of it? By all definitions, there is no scarcity of food. As much as I'd love free food, I'm sad to report that it still has a price.


 * The problem is that post-scarcity doesn't take into account demand, the second component of a particular object or good's value. The important thing to remember is that, as technology advances and a good becomes cheaper to produce, its price goes down. When its price goes down, the demand for it increases. Because its cheaper, more people are willing to buy it. Average Americans today consume a truly staggering amount of stuff compared to a hundred years ago, from cars to one-use items to food to clothes to electronics. It is simply insane how much we buy to use once and then never again. Department stores now sell decent dresses at $20, and those are selling so fast that they're designing, producing, shipping, and selling new designs in a three-week cycle. So the more stuff there is to buy and the cheaper it is, the more people will buy. There doesn't appear to be a ceiling at which point everyone declares that their needs have been met and that they will buy no more.


 * It is tempting to look at falling prices and postulate that, at some point, they will fall to zero due to so much production, and that is how post-scarcity will come about. That brings us back to the supply-side of the equation. In the economy, individuals work to their best self-interest. If a good is expensive on the market, more individuals and businesses are going to want to supply it in order to reap the profits. Conversely, the cheaper a good is, there will come a point where it simply isn't profitable at all to produce it, and thus fewer corporations will be willing to supply it. This means that if the price of anything approaches anywhere near zero, that sector will see a mass exodus of producers looking to place their money elsewhere. This will also have the effect of pushing the price back up because when the supply goes down, something becomes more scarce.


 * This is why trade, currency, and economics is not likely to become obsolete anytime soon, even with miraculous leaps in technology as we've seen in the past few decades. In fact, those advances have tended to increase the reaches of the market, since more countries now use capitalism than at any time in history. It has also caused a whole host of problems which I can go into on PM if anyone's interested, such as fast-moving capital, wage and labor problems, etc.

 Could these become cause of a conflict?
 * Generally, economic interdependence tends to prevent wars rather than cause them. It is usually much cheaper to buy a resource from someone than to deploy hugely expensive military assets to take them by force. At the same time, unfair trade practices––such as countries trying to slant the market in their favor using tariffs, subsidies, currency manipulation, etc.

 How would these be mined and processed?
 * You guys have already addressed this in great detail. ;)