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[counting]

@counting:

Interesting thread, and good job on explaining how banks legally conuterfeit money. For anyone interested I recommend film "Money as Debt" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc3sKwwAaCU and this short story: http://www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html

Oh, and that economic simulation is a nice idea for a LARP, but what exactly are "hugs" and "kisses"? Are they pieces of chocolate? (That is, did the professor, or king or whatever bring a lot of bars of chocolate and partition them among the winners at the end?) How many turns does this last? (There need to be turns and not real time, as production functions are per unit of time)

Again, answer the questions first, the purpose of economic roles simulation game is to better prepare for students who first attend economics course, and most of them do not have any working experience or knowledge about the history of economy. so it's better for them to learn it through something "FUN". But in order to provide incentives for the students who sometimes are not really interested in economics but just for the credit of the course. So those hugs and kisses are black and white chocolate bars, just prepared for those students who may not want to pay attention and feel boring. At least they can be fed and keep quite in class XD.

And second, I don't know how many terns and the time of the terns, although it's common for new economy course using this as teaching tools. But they normally running at the span of a semester, with 3 credit, so totally about 50 hours or so. Each term should be as long as 1 hours or half, depending on the teachers and the scenario they prepared.

Friendly WARNING and ADVICE, if you know nothing about economy, DO NOT watch the video.

About the video and story, well. In my opinion, they are adding too much conspiracy theory into them. And generally speaking, containing quite much errors and emphasize things not necessary or misleading. Honestly, I can't bare to watch the video after 12 minutes (However I am very boring 'professorial' to fast forward watch it through). The first 10 mins are alright, although you can read most of them on Wikipedia, and most economics textbooks.

But, well, how to I put it. A RR=10%, create 90 times of money surplus? That's stupid and definitely wrong. As I mentioned above, it will only create close to 10 times (9 times more) in perfect conditions (no cash flow on the market).  And it's not the commercial banks who control the money supply, it's the central bank, or precisely the policy of it. They are control by the banking laws, the laws are made by the elected official, and you - the general population elect these damn politicians. The chairman of central banks or CEO of the other banks, are just high-level managers. They are hired by the board of directors, who are again elected by the investors, who buy stocks from these banks. The real truth is we all indirectly control the behavior of the monetary system. You choose to live like this, no one forced you. (Well, a little bit. we are far from the true declaration of freedom and peace). And if the author of the video read this, (highly doubt it), STOP spreading this out dated communist craps mixed with new-age hippie stuffs. (Calm down. Calm down )

Although I do like the way the story is told, using cute comic figures. I am not sure it was intentionally meant to be sarcastic or not. But a little over simplified the history of banking. (Again it's not currency history, banking is just an important component, and I believed that my explanations are also over simplified) The creation and evolving of money system (commodity or fiat or else) are highly debating among the field of monetary theory. Unless we have a time machine, the real truth may never be known.

[harborpirate]

As for contributing ideas, the first step would probably be to categorize objects with increasingly detail tags that could go into the raws.

For instance, a sword might have: sword, edged weapon, melee weapon.
A cup might have: container, drinking vessel.

If these things were made of gold or crystal, they should get modifiers indicating that they're also luxury items. Presumably those would be in the materials raws or calculated by rarity.

One thing I forgot to mention when posting this was the purpose of object categorization in the raws:
To establish valid replacement objects when utilitarian needs are added to the game. (And to make it possible for modders to load additional objects into the game without waiting for Toady)

For instance, an early fortress might only have needs for as many "drinking vessels" as there are dwarves, and anything categorized as such would fulfill that need, from a simple wooden cup to a fancy engraved metal flask. The early fort may not require any eating utensils, but rather just clay bowls to use.

Later, religious rites might require you to add a small number of cups made from a certain kind of rock, and metal eating utensils might become required when meat enters the diet.

Still later, nobles might require a luxury dinnerware, either made of a valuable or rare metal or encrusted with gems and such.

I think the easiest way to do this within DF mode would be to just leverage the existing mandate system for the player, and to put some sort of procedurally generated needs in place for trading civs.

The easiest way to introduce trade value-by-demand would probably be to procedurally establish some kind of threshold for major categories each trading season, where up to that number of that type of item they pay full price, and beyond that they pay very much less (perhaps next to nothing).

[counting]

Think about it in terms of a port, if there is only one ship sailing in a port, it only has to avoid fixed obstacles.  Each ship added to the harbor adds one more obstacle, and because each ship must avoid and be avoided by every other ship, every extra ship increases the difficulty of sailing in the harbor at an increasing rate. 

Also, in the time periods before the locamotive, boats were the only really efficient way to move goods, the next most efficient way was to dig a canal, which is just a really difficult way of gaining boat or barge access.

So you do mean the traffic are the cause of decreasing efficiency. And I think it's a cost most simulations doesn't consider it a factor. At least with modern settings with the helping of modern navigation. And ocean is huge and slow. With a delay of transportation which span over weeks, a couple of hours aren't that much. CLT problems like in DF doesn't happen in transportation. And there are companies specialized on business logistics who are competing to make sure the transportation are as quick as possible. Most companies don't need to care about how the goods getting to their destinations. Just need to know they will get there on time (Or the insurance can cover the loses when they are late)

But it's a interesting thought. And it contradicting with one of the assumption that in scale economy the operating cost of each entity (per unit time) is independent of quantities of commodities traded by it. Although strictly speaking it's in a perfect situation. An I wonder how much of random variations can this produces, and can it be measured and quantified. It will be a field study, an probably can give you a phd.

And about canals, in ancient china or anywhere else, they are mega-projects, funded or just drafted serfs, built by governments most of the time. And they will create a lot of barriers along the river or canals, much like modern high way, but in a form more like taxes as tariffs. The longer you travel the more you have to pay. And by doing this, limited the amount of ships, and prevent traffic. It's a totally different thing on sea port. Waiting for the permits to duck often required bribery. And the CLT and waiting are often create by that, not the sheer amount of ships. In fact if the proper channel didn't work, there are always unofficial way via black market using small boat to land directly anywhere along the coast line. But I guess there are probably some time in the history that transportation DO play a vital road in affecting the costs greater than others. (Probably during the dark ages, or very ancient times, or during wars)

[counting]

As for contributing ideas, the first step would probably be to categorize objects with increasingly detail tags that could go into the raws.

For instance, a sword might have: sword, edged weapon, melee weapon.
A cup might have: container, drinking vessel.

If these things were made of gold or crystal, they should get modifiers indicating that they're also luxury items. Presumably those would be in the materials raws or calculated by rarity.

One thing I forgot to mention when posting this was the purpose of object categorization in the raws:
To establish valid replacement objects when utilitarian needs are added to the game. (And to make it possible for modders to load additional objects into the game without waiting for Toady)

For instance, an early fortress might only have needs for as many "drinking vessels" as there are dwarves, and anything categorized as such would fulfill that need, from a simple wooden cup to a fancy engraved metal flask. The early fort may not require any eating utensils, but rather just clay bowls to use.

Later, religious rites might require you to add a small number of cups made from a certain kind of rock, and metal eating utensils might become required when meat enters the diet.

Still later, nobles might require a luxury dinnerware, either made of a valuable or rare metal or encrusted with gems and such.

I think the easiest way to do this within DF mode would be to just leverage the existing mandate system for the player, and to put some sort of procedurally generated needs in place for trading civs.

The easiest way to introduce trade value-by-demand would probably be to procedurally establish some kind of threshold for major categories each trading season, where up to that number of that type of item they pay full price, and beyond that they pay very much less (perhaps next to nothing).

Urist McBigDaddy : "Those delicate human, we dwarfs drink in barrels and eating raw!"

Back to seriousness. I think I've read in some threads that these simple thresholds have the problem of lacking specialization intent. Like human can slowly hauling high-level finished products, and raise their prizes high enough, and then sell back, and clear out the related half-products and materials in a wholesale once at cheap prize, made them into high-end products and gaining absurd amount of capitals. In a way it's no better than randomly generated caravan prize system. And another problem would be the exchange between NPCs. How do they choose who to sell, which way to send caravans. Will they send caravans to player controlled fortress? And by using what kind of mechanism do they choose the cargo to carry in limited weight? Most abundant or most pricy, or the least weight. Should it carried all kind of products or just a specific kind. And finally, the price problems. Which is linked to the way DF calculate wealth in a very mechanical way than organic and natural.

There are many papers in Agent based computational economics, or experimental economics dealing with the simulation of finding a way to "evolve" a  barter trading system, and from that the hub-and-spoke market structure with the use of a common commodity as the role of money will emerge, without a centralized or macro level of rules requires. But since DF already has a micro level of autonomous behaviors setting in place, the next thing should be interesting is to see if the macro behaviors can be generated not by hard-coded rules. (I want that invisible hand really invisible!)

[Reelyanoob]

The starvation problem is a sign of losing self sustain.

No it is not. It's a sign that hunting/herding has not been implemented at all, and only affects races who a carnivorous. That's why they always starve at 4 years. Presumably, the game is starting them with 5x population as a food supply number, which lasts 4 years due to pop growth in the meantime.

It has nothing to do with the trading model.

Other than that, interesting thread and ideas.

Currently there's a problem in DF because the dwarves all starve (at least in my worlds).

Really? I've never noticed this happening and I've genned 100's of worlds in the last few weeks to test a mod I was making.

[counting]

The starvation problem is a sign of losing self sustain.

No it is not. It's a sign that hunting/herding has not been implemented at all, and only affects races who a carnivorous. That's why they always starve at 4 years. Presumably, the game is starting them with 5x population as a food supply number, which lasts 4 years due to pop growth in the meantime.

It has nothing to do with the trading model.

Other than that, interesting thread and ideas.

Currently there's a problem in DF because the dwarves all starve (at least in my worlds).

Really? I've never noticed this happening and I've genned 100's of worlds in the last few weeks to test a mod I was making.

Interesting to know about that. So due to the easy surplus of farming, so everyone becomes a vegetarian? However, historically farming society should have higher population per land area then hunting/gathering. But I don't know if DF needs to follow this rule. Or perhaps DF more favorable for animal husbandry (professional pet meat industries?). As my own experience that to simulation a population as a whole isn't that easy, and often required divided into subgroups and can DF simulate NPCs idling? Or are they magic workers who stands there doing nothing but finished all the jobs?

[tolkafox]

I will bookmark this for further read, but counting: You are overthinking this. Toady hasn't made it this far for half of your ideas to even come into effect, but they will of no doubt be useful in the near future.

Also, money is imaginary. It costs too much money to make it real, much easier to show it on a computer screen and transfer it in exchange for goods. Capitalism, Ho! Also, large scale economy fails. We are already proving that as we speak, local economy is where it's at.

[Reelyanoob]

So you do mean the traffic are the cause of decreasing efficiency. And I think it's a cost most simulations doesn't consider it a factor. At least with modern settings with the helping of modern navigation. And ocean is huge and slow. With a delay of transportation which span over weeks, a couple of hours aren't that much. CLT problems like in DF doesn't happen in transportation. And there are companies specialized on business logistics who are competing to make sure the transportation are as quick as possible. Most companies don't need to care about how the goods getting to their destinations. Just need to know they will get there on time (Or the insurance can cover the loses when they are late)

It certainly is a major factor. e.g here in Australia we have a serious problem with shipyard capacity. Doesn't matter how big the ocean is if you've got several weeks worth of container ships backed up (this really happened a couple of years ago). The backlog was due to massive increases in China's demand for raw materials (especially coal around here), while it's just not economic for any one company to expand a port, let alone worry about planning permissions.

A few hours doesn't cover it - we had ships there for a month waiting to unload. Competition theory may state this should be a fixed problem, but of course it really hasn't been (and there would always be a lag in port capacity, as there has to be a demand before anyone worries about supply) . The port is a shared resource which you just cannot make another one wherever you like.

"luckily" the global financial crisis slowed down the exports a little, and we don't have a backlog right now.

In fact if the proper channel didn't work, there are always unofficial way via black market using small boat to land directly anywhere along the coast line.

How many shipping containers fit on a "small boat": Zero! Seriously who's going to load and unload containers on some random beach somewhere by hand, while there's high-tech robotic loaders at the designated port? Especially as you'll be mistaken for drug smugglers if you try this.

You need the cranes to get the containers on and off the ship btw, and there just no way it's economic to load coal by hand.

But I guess there are probably some time in the history that transportation DO play a vital road in affecting the costs greater than others. (Probably during the dark ages, or very ancient times, or during wars)

Or Australia in 2007-2009, but this would be "capacity constraints", which affect supply, therefore prices at the importer's end.

Also, food and other items are much more expensive in remote areas here, again due to transport costs. Probably 2-3 times the cost of Sydney for a lot of things in remote (and poor) areas. I also imagine there's only single trucking companies making a lot of those runs, due to the small populations being served, so the overheads involved don't allow new competitors into the market.

[counting]

I will bookmark this for further read, but counting: You are overthinking this. Toady hasn't made it this far for half of your ideas to even come into effect, but they will of no doubt be useful in the near future.

Also, money is imaginary. It costs too much money to make it real, much easier to show it on a computer screen and transfer it in exchange for goods. Capitalism, Ho! Also, large scale economy fails. We are already proving that as we speak, local economy is where it's at.

I know, but I want DF to be that AWESOME! It can be, it has potentials (I'll explain below and you might agree as well after that)! And since suggestions are for the future, we do need to think ahead (Probably in my case a little too far, since I already been traveling this path far enough), and we need visions ahead for the future, like every good dwarf should XD

For monetary systems, first, a economy system doesn't always involved and required money. There are economic system like gift economy, which they do existed in hunter/gather societies (with people less than hundreds). But the strange thing is one way or another, it seems every economy system till so far, all evolve into monetary system, and most commonly using 1 and 1 only medium of exchange. Isn't that sound strange enough for anyone who are curious? So we do need to find out why that happen in economics. (There are already many theories/models, and even put to test)

The second part about the scale of economic society. I'll list a real example and a simulation/model that gives you the idea of the scale. If you read some economic articles, the famous stone money may ring a bell to you. (Rai stones was used on a small island Yap in pacific ocean, and local people used these giant sized stone, weight tones and stood meters with a big hole in the center, to exchange goods.) What you probably don't know is the size of the community (who value giant stones as money), there are only thousands of them on Yap, and probably only hundreds when it is used. Even combining the surrounding islands who participated the exchange, no more than tens of thousands. (Till today there are still few people lived there, because they are indeed tiny islands).

Next I'll use a paper - which I have in my hands - Peter Howitt, Robert Clower, "The emergence of economic organization", Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol 4, p55-84, 2000 (Yes, I do reference it in my essay). The system is simulated using a parameters of 2,160 transactors, it is "barters" and a unit of production (or you may just called it an entity as in DF). 10 kinds of commodities, 200 tiles of space (the locations people can trade like a local area in DF), etc. (Don't you think it feels very familiar since it almost the same and within the range of the DF parameters) And monetary-system/market-system emerge from this simple setup and community from micro level without any pre-existed planning. Not always as the results the authors indicated, only within a certain range of variables, mainly it is the overhead cost differences of commodities during trade = f(i). And almost always it evolves into a system using the commodity(s) with a less overhead cost using as a medium, but not always the least one. And most often the ONLY one, even in system stabilized without the only one, (some barters remain bargaining), there is a dominate one.

NOTICE : One of the very basic differences between bartering economy and the one using commodity money, is that the price asymmetry (called the exchange ratio between commodities in bartering, and if one side is a commodity money, then its number of units to the target commodity, still the definition of ratio, will be called a price as we are familiar with). Let's assume you can buy 2 commodity-A's with 1 dollar, and $1 for 3 B's. So the exchange ratio of A:B should be 2:3 in commodity money system. But in bartering their isn't a medium, assuming a gem is in the role of money in previous setup, and A as a weapon, and B as an armor, 1 gem for 2 weapons, 1 gem for 3 armors, but then it's anyone's guess how many weapons for a armor, maybe 2:3, maybe not, it can be any ratio. that's why it's called a bargain. So don't think if you invented a round and shinny object called a coin, it will automatically become a commodity money. It's still bargaining every where, until something happens making the coin (or a gem) a medium as the function of money. Although not fully functioned as we used to in modern tern, from commodity money to metallic, to representation, to paper(credit), to inconvertible, to fiat, to electronic. They all have differences steps by steps. We've come a long way for thousands of years in developing money system. (You can see why monetary and banking are such large branch of economics, and I am not even major in it, so much to learn )

So I think DF is NOT too small to have currency, but almost perfect in size for monetary system. (You can see why I am so enthusiastic about the economy in DF, it's perfect for experiments, MUWAHAHA  ) If it succeeds, maybe I can even reference it! And even if it fails, we do need them to fail in order to find out what makes them tick and analyse it. A system with 100% success is NOT right at all, it may indicate it's planned not evolved. Again, it's FUN makes it good. And I want to post a thread, just to say how AWESOME it can be! (Sounds too TROLLISH for my taste anyway)

About capitalism, and it's "failure"? Again, you lived quite well today, isn't it? probably much much better than anyone on earth a hundred year ago. And the economic system evolve over time with up and down, we even name them as 'economic cycle' you can google it. And the economics right now are probably self adjusting (we called it shakeout). Until it reaches the next equilibrium.

Too much information? Welcome to the world of economics.

P.S Money isn't imaginary, look down in my signature. Money is not excessive, but a necessity. You can't live without it in current economic system.

[counting]

It certainly is a major factor. e.g here in Australia we have a serious problem with shipyard capacity. Doesn't matter how big the ocean is if you've got several weeks worth of container ships backed up (this really happened a couple of years ago). The backlog was due to massive increases in China's demand for raw materials (especially coal around here), while it's just not economic for any one company to expand a port, let alone worry about planning permissions.

A few hours doesn't cover it - we had ships there for a month waiting to unload. Competition theory may state this should be a fixed problem, but of course it really hasn't been (and there would always be a lag in port capacity, as there has to be a demand before anyone worries about supply) . The port is a shared resource which you just cannot make another one wherever you like.

"luckily" the global financial crisis slowed down the exports a little, and we don't have a backlog right now.

...

How many shipping containers fit on a "small boat": Zero! Seriously who's going to load and unload containers on some random beach somewhere by hand, while there's high-tech robotic loaders at the designated port? Especially as you'll be mistaken for drug smugglers if you try this.

You need the cranes to get the containers on and off the ship btw, and there just no way it's economic to load coal by hand.

...

Or Australia in 2007-2009, but this would be "capacity constraints", which affect supply, therefore prices at the importer's end.

Also, food and other items are much more expensive in remote areas here, again due to transport costs. Probably 2-3 times the cost of Sydney for a lot of things in remote (and poor) areas. I also imagine there's only single trucking companies making a lot of those runs, due to the small populations being served, so the overheads involved don't allow new competitors into the market.

As I said you can get a phd or even more than 1 for this. As a comparison, Giving some thoughts, we do have a similar variable, called adapting rate behaves like this. It basically determine how long for a trade come to fulfill, and to adapt the changes from one set of conditions to another. such as when the amount of goods been trades has changed (from small to large or vice versa) as you mentioned. But it's way too simplify if you think it's a major factor. (We certainly don't think it is in our simulation). And it's good, because in the future, we can build another models and focus on changing this factor (with more variables), test it and see if it is true or not.

As for small boat, I am not referring to present time (maybe I didn't explained well). It's about medieval or even ancient time. People smuggle using fast and small ships, and not always through merchants, but pirates (They don't actually had and needed big ship, it's hit and run, fast is the key). And dare I said coal isn't worth for smuggling. (In any time period, they are dirty heavy an cheap, we need finest craftsmanship like a dwarf XD)

About competition or the difficulty of entry in transportation, it is largely due to the nature of business, monopoly or competitive. But the shortage of manpower should means it's not a capital centralized business. But in transportation truck and fuels are major cost isn't it? Not men. Salaries are cheap. And 1 car needs only 1 driver, it's even less ratio with manpower/goods in ships. (A good reason why in modern mega-tone ships, transport by sea is good for large quantity of goods).

Are there actually so few people? Rough calculation, a truck with capacity of 10 tones, a people consume goods say 100 kg a week, it's a 1:100 ratio of drivers and the population, unless you have people less than thousands I don't think in anyway you can't afford to find a driver in manpower. If you are talking about wages been too low, it's another factor not manpower problems (namely the labor market). It has to do with capitals. (money system). For my understand, the reason for shortage in raw materials mainly due to the monetary market, not in the process of production, or distribution. Traders just can't paid enough for the shipping companies to afford the risks and costs, due to the liquidity of in money market been restricted.

Again, I agree there are restriction in transportation, but I don't agree that it's due to manpower or physical restrain, but rather within the market system. There are indeed limited locations for ports, but the reason why we developed containers and canes and larger ships, is to pack more goods at the same time at once. And it will keep developed with the demand increases. If it keeps happening, technology should catch up. I don't see why we can't build bigger ships or 1 giant ships to transport them all, it has more to do with efficiency on scale than design, and as you realized that the capacity of a port always increase over time through out history due to bigger and bigger ships, if it has physical limits, I don't think we hit them yet. It will be literally every space in 3 dimensions filled with goods. If you can imagine a world with trillions people, we may cover the entire sea, and build giant transport tubes filled with goods directly transferring them from factories to retails across the global. But simulating the possibility of future technology or even it's very next development is way too complicated in any simulations we can muster now, so the discussion about economics should draw a line somewhere. It's really really interesting thinking and talking about it, but if you can't test it, it will only be hypotheses. But feel free to explore them, it's the nature of good studies in science. And I welcome further discussions.

Back to the DF and computer simulations, the answer is again we don't simulate it. Probably because we don't want to and we can't. It will add too much variables on already numerous ones. And we generally disregard it (at least in my field of study), so I didn't think about it before. But it doesn't mean we can't simulate them in DF. And the weights and space limits in caravan are in fact implementing this factor already. And you can imagine changing these limits with varies sizes over time. I wonder what might have happened. (That's the beautify of experiments isn't it, maybe you can suggested it in a new thread.), Or better, to set the physical limitation of a fortress entrance, and adding tariff if currency is implemented. (I think DF already did it in a way, caravans arrived at once will mess up cause path finding algorithm, makes them too stupid to find the path.) DF is better in simulate lower level micro behaviors than ours. We are a little more closer on the scale from micro to macro, since we aimed at observing the effect on macro behaviors. I really hope the caravan arc working better than we have discussed. DF should be full of surprises as it always been .

[Reelyanoob]

Are there actually so few people?

I was talking about the Australian "outback" here. Yes, there really are that few people. Average of 1-2 per square kilometre or something.

Specifically I was thinking of impoverished Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory region of Australia, they pay a LOT more for food and other essentials than I do in the "big city" and there's really no jobs up there for them.

Yeah, I read your stuff about liquidity and money markets and building ports, but none of that changes the reality of shipping costs to remote inaccessible markets in the NT area, what you write sounds way too academic, and certainly is not addressing the actual situation. Some of that stuff is shipped 2000+km by sea from here, which obviously affects the cost, and the limited population up there can't possibly support large scale port expansion, it's just not feasisble.

NT - area = 1,349,129 square kilometres, population = 229,675 people

An Average of 1 person per ~6 km^2 !

I'll put a statement to you - people in low population remote areas end up paying more for goods. Certainly your model can encompass this basic "fact of life"?

Again, I agree there are restriction in transportation, but I don't agree that it's due to manpower or physical restrain, but rather within the market system. There are indeed limited locations for ports, but the reason why we developed containers and canes and larger ships, is to pack more goods at the same time at once. And it will keep developed with the demand increases. If it keeps happening, technology should catch up. I don't see why we can't build bigger ships or 1 giant ships to transport them all, it has more to do with efficiency on scale than design, and as you realized that the capacity of a port always increase over time through out history due to bigger and bigger ships, if it has physical limits, I don't think we hit them yet. It will be literally every space in 3 dimensions filled with goods. If you can imagine a world with trillions people, we may cover the entire sea, and build giant transport tubes filled with goods directly transferring them from factories to retails across the global. But simulating the possibility of future technology or even it's very next development is way too complicated in any simulations we can muster now, so the discussion about economics should draw a line somewhere. It's really really interesting thinking and talking about it, but if you can't test it, it will only be hypotheses. But feel free to explore them, it's the nature of good studies in science. And I welcome further discussions.

Yeah, sorry i'm not buying the global transport tubes idea. If we had high enough tech, we can synthesize what we need close to where we need it, thus reducing energy waste in transport. And with trillions of people (if such were to happen - it will not due to pop growth already tapering off, with a projected total of 10 billion), we'd need all the energy efficiency possible.

[counting]

Are there actually so few people?

I was talking about the Australian "outback" here. Yes, there really are that few people. Average of 1-2 per square kilometre or something.

Specifically I was thinking of impoverished Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory region of Australia, they pay a LOT more for food and other essentials than I do in the "big city" and there's really no jobs up there for them.

Yeah, I read your stuff about liquidity and money markets and building ports, but none of that changes the reality of shipping costs to remote inaccessible markets in the NT area, what you write sounds way too academic, and certainly is not addressing the actual situation. Some of that stuff is shipped 2000+km by sea from here, which obviously affects the cost, and the limited population up there can't possibly support large scale port expansion, it's just not feasisble.

NT - area = 1,349,129 square kilometres, population = 229,675 people

An Average of 1 person per ~6 km^2 !

I'll put a statement to you - people in low population remote areas end up paying more for goods. Certainly your model can encompass this basic "fact of life"?

Good to know about that, I never been to Australia before. And in economics we don't deal or even think economic analysis can apply with that few of population, since economics is a subject dealing numbers, and sufficient big numbers for the mathematical statistics to be possible, and have meanings. In such small groups the basic principle fails, since the specialization of jobs is impossible, hence you can't analysis something that has multiple roles in one person. That's for psychology analysis not economics.

An small groups offshoot that depend on large economic system will suffer for higher price, like NT areas you said. The reason is the simple supply/demand with shortage (constant strong demand = less elastic) and because of the hardship causing the inventories low, so the elastic of supply also inelastic so the price goes way up, and indeed will be observed if simulated, and they are very well explained and done by others many times over, also not a major goals for our simulations either. (Again too much details is impossible, we need to focus on certain aspect) And these offshoots are indeed generally become offshoots BECAUSE of the physical constrain in the first place, like in DF you drop them in the middle of no where, no water, no tree, and probably don't even have stone, just a desert of sands. It's nearly impossible for it to become a major part of a economic system in the first place. And the impact they cause in greater economic system are generally to small and can be discarded as random effects (that's how we view this if the question is brought up, and not reasonable to wast a lot of memory and calculation powers to simulate a big empty place, although it can be done as a future goal).

And hold on I am not saying it's not important or can't be analysis, it's just hard to be done using existed economic analysis, and probably why we are developing experiential economics right now. They involve other fields of studies like public welfare, environmental science, small groups psychology, probably sociology and political science too. And since DF can drop any biome, so maybe in a small scale and make it a multiplayers game, we can simulate that. (We will need real human in here)

By the way, about me being way to academic, I can't help it . I AM in the academics. Everyday I am writing and reading articles like this @@. It's a force of habit. Or people can't understand what you are saying, or will causing confusions when discussing a certain issue. We need to distinguish the difference as much as possible, or it will lead to nowhere. (A reason why we feels a lot harder and require a lot more words to communicate with other field of experts. You are an expert of local population and geography too, we all are in a sense of familiarity of our surroundings)

[counting]

Yeah, sorry i'm not buying the global transport tubes idea. If we had high enough tech, we can synthesize what we need close to where we need it, thus reducing energy waste in transport. And with trillions of people (if such were to happen - it will not due to pop growth already tapering off, with a projected total of 10 billion), we'd need all the energy efficiency possible.

You got the idea exactly right, it's very difficult to imaging some future technologies without left behind some factors. Left along simulated them, you may as well build another planet. And by synthesize you mean replicator technology? (Good ST reference I like it ^^) But, manipulate atoms requires way more energy than transport. (think about a reverse of nuclear bombs, you need to set one off first to gain such energy power), or you can't change the nature of atoms, like make iron out of sand, at least the technology it requires are way ahead of us now. But building giant structures are within current technology level, you can even draw the schematic, we just lack the need from large enough population and probably capitals to do it.

About the population projections, they are famously inaccurate. In the early-20th century the predicted population in the end of century will be capped in 3 billions (Year 2000 past, we were more than double of that,), and people warned about the possible food shortages and how it will cause famines and wars (And 2 world wars did happen). However in 1960s the green revolution kicks in (ironically some the technologies it required were developed in WWII in order to make chemical weapons), and we reach 3 billions as expect in 1960s, but keeps growing cause we can make more foods per acre. And a new projections arise with optimistic and the number shoot way up to even over 20 billions in 2080 (double in every 40 years, it's still true until now). Than it comes the worried about global warnings, and economic crisis, people begin pessimistic again. I would say If technology do catch up and start another revolution, (there is a concept of "blue revolution" developed recently, to turn the ocean into a greater food production yard than land farming, and ocean area is way bigger than land area, can you imagine what kind of revolution will it be at 2100?), I don't see why we can't have such revolution in food production every century in the next 300 years. And with the constant doubling rate every 40 years (basically means every 2 generations the people double, with 3 children per family, and less than 3 if the lifespan also keeps increasing), in 300 years, we will reach 1 trillion. I think it CAN be happening, since most of the surface on earth are empty, such as your own observations. And in Taiwan we have a population of 21 millions in less than 36,000 km^2. That is near 600 people/km^2. Imagine you can make NT into 600 ppl/km^2, how many people can you put it there.

Maybe the next-next revolution is to turn desert into farmland, a yellow revolution, or underground a brown one, and in space a black one JK.

P.S a question though, 200k of people aren't that small as a total. In fact as a ratio, that means 2k of people can be in the transportation business. That's quite a huge manpower. With an unemployment rate of 10%, 20k of potential labors. I think there is another problem about the composition of populations too. Those who are not employed are not within the labor force, but too old, too young, or unable. The actual labors all flooded into big cities. I know this happens in China and even in the little island of Taiwan where I lived. Many places in middle and southern part of Taiwan are actually most empty as well, more than 75% of population in the northern part with just 25% of the total land area. 1/3 of the population (close to 7 millions) live in the region where I live with 7% of the area. Nearly 3 millions in the city I live in with just 300 km^2. Yes, 300, that's 10k people per km^2, which means I can meet more people by just walking, than the entire population in NT Australia! I really can't imagine living in a place 30~40 times bigger than the entire Taiwan, with the number of people I can meet everyday, that must be very boring indeed!

[Maklak]

Wow, You are at about the level of Nw_Kohaku, when it comes to writing walls of text. Still interesting reading, but I don't agree with some of it. For example I don't share Your general enthusiasm about economy that we have today, growth, and technological development. You also seem very found of emergent systems, and free market, and hate anything planned. I think a little planning doesn't hurt and can smoothen economic cycles.

About that game. I was thinking about borrowing it for a week-long LARP with many games. Sounds fun and different. There are still some areas, I don't understand, tough. Namely, the goods creation. Everyone can create goods (like different kinds of sweets (which the king provides)) (self employed, or company) per turn, but not actual money. Then they trade that among themselves using monopoly money. Is this correct? Why won't this create oversupply of goods over say 10 turns? If I understand correctly, any leftover money can be exchanged for chocolate at the end (or even during play), but it seems, that spending it on goods in game gives you more stuff to eat. Is this also correct? If I were ever to try and play with it, I need to understand such things. I also intend on using cheap stuff, no more than 3$ worth of food pere person during the entire game. If I don't do it, I still want to understand, how the mechanisc for that game works exactly. 

About "Money as debt". That movie did rise some good points about injustice of our monetary system. Also about impossibility of perpetual growth economy, which is simply not sustainable. And why usury is the cancer of humanity.

About jamming trade routes / ports. This can totally happen. A way to model this would be to make a cap on how much stuff can be transfered. Overflowing causes increased latency, and cost. Over time capacity of a road or port can be increased by governments using money from fees from traders using them.

Toady One said something about the supply and demand model, he was using either in one of front page posts, or DF talk. I dont remember whre exactly. Oh well, we'll wait and see. 

[astaldaran]

I studied economics as a minor in undergrad and still try to read up on it (I follow Greg Mankiw's blog for example).

Anyway, one of the courses I took was about the history of economics---and probably the most interesting thing we studied was feudalism.  Essentially the popular modern theory goes that feudalism developed because labor was in short supply, that is in a farming community land was very plentiful and labor was relatively scarce compared to it. Therefore, when a need arose to defend themselves people offered their labor as payment to those who would defend them--village strong men who would spend their time training, making weapons etc.

Now it was to expensive to monitor people to insure that they worked x number of hours. In addition villagers/surfs were not willing to pay for protection in crops because that laid all the risk on their heads if there was a bad season. So a system of labor payments was developed where most of the week the surfs labored on a plot of land for their own use and then one or two days a week they labored on a plot of land for the local strong man.  This divided the risk between both parties and limited monitoring costs (you can tell pretty easily if someone has tilled the land, planted, etc).

Ofcourse strong men started to call the land theirs (in that they controlled it, they had the weapons) and thus surfs became bound to the land and limited land ownership emerged--though not in the sense of property rights today.

You can guess how this continued to eventually form the vassal state.


I think it would be interesting if dwarf fortress worked like this, where the  barons instead of being useless kings (like the royalty of England today, no offense intended--I just mean they don't have a governing function) they instead are barons because they are the best fighters and thus they are owed something by the peasants. And further they use their power over peasants to demand things.

This would mean you could give your nobles orders, but only military.  Perhaps your squadron leaders would be nobles instead of being appointed by you (or when they are appointed by you, they become nobles).

Now when a higher noble comes (like the king) he could demand stuff from the local nobles, who in turn (if they don't have it already) have to demand it from the dwarves under them. Thus the nobles can be punished by stronger nobles and the dwarves by any noble really.

Perhaps when the king comes (or other higher noble) he even brings soldiers (his squadron) and to make sure his orders are followed--not to say that he needs an army to take over the place but a few as a token of his power.

You could even have, from time to time (don't make it happen often), infighting between different nobles and their squadrons and dwarves under them. Perhaps each dwarf tends to separate himself from the dwarves of other barons. Nobles could even demand their own burrows where they demand their subjects to stay (and are punished if they leave).


The quasi property sharing community of a dwarf fortress lends itself really well to the baron--surf hiarchy.