The Economics of Fantasy Worlds

[marycatelli]

Unsurprisingly this often veered into SF as well.

One panelist defined it as how a society is structured to get goods produced and services performed.  We never really brought out the aspect of scarcity which is central to economics.


The central problem with economics is that you have to somehow or other get to the interesting stuff with adventures and fights and the economics aren't very interesting, often.  Unless you are really good at it.  Making Money for instance.  Then, in his earlier Discworld books he worried about things like feeding Ankhmorpork.

The problem with The Dispossessed:  any children can be parked on the society to raise, anyone can take grain from the graineries, and shunning turns shirkers into hard workers instead of having them band together as criminals like the gangs that formed in the Soviet gulags.  Which brought out a panelist on

Post-scarcity.  I suggested a replicator world would have two sources of wealth:  inventing stuff to replicate, and making stuff by hand, because you can get a premium for hand-made even now.  The panelist said that the replicator could dup it down to the atoms.  I said then you need it to replicate a lie-detector.

One panelist believed that fantasy was magic -- poof -- whatever you want.  Which is silly.  Fantasies constrain magic for the sake of story, which means that all they do is rejigger the costs of stuff.

Comments

[mythusmage.livejournal.com]

Did anybody get into the subject of desire, the perceived need for things and the price people are willing to pay for them?

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

I think desire would be a sub-group of scarcity.

[marycatelli]

closely related certainly

[marycatelli]

Nope.

One could argue that it's part and parcel of scarcity -- things no one wants aren't scarce even if very rare -- but since we never got that far. . . .

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Interestingly enough, my fourteen-year-old got into a discussion on fantasy economics online on a Minecraft server. Apparently there is a way to get what's essentially a money-generating machine in the version of the world they were playing in. My son was explaining about devaluation of currency and the problems this could cause. I said I was impressed, and he said "Having NPR on in the background all my life has its advantages."

Certain communities do seem to find shunning effective, but maybe it's effective because there's somewhere to push the miscreant out to, whereas if you're in a gulag, there's no place (other than wilderness and death) for the shunned person to go.

[marycatelli]

There are situations where it would help -- money was invented to faciliate trade, and if people had to resort to barter for the scarcity of it, more money would help -- but those are rare.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Very true--it's not money's that's the issue--it's having a money *tree* (or equivalent) that's the problem.

[marycatelli]

Well, it would still cause inflation, I suspect, though not as much since it would be sucked off into other transactions. . . just that the ability to exchange would be worth it.