[PTTG]

Hogarth worldlines are designated for which seem useful as political experiments, and yet are ultimately misleading due to weirdness.

Hogarth-1: caused a major stir in political circles when it was discovered, as it was a late TL8 in 1997, with fusion power, a stable population at 5 billion, and a very high global standard of living. Initial studies pointed to the divergence point being the Anglosphere's widespread acceptance of abortion in the mid 19th century. Originally called Plenty-1.

It rather fell apart when it was discovered that siliceous organisms in Earth's upper mantle were able to convert sacrifices of blood and flesh into bursts of mana and magical workings, and had contacted select humans in 1908.

Hogarth-2: Global Communism was declared in 1900, an alliance between The People's Republic of America, The Commonwealth, The USSR, and Republican China. The dream of actually bringing Communism to all, however, was only achieved just over 50 years later through a series of wars. Today, in 2021, grinding TL-7 poverty is the norm, despite the political organizations of the world being fairly low in corruption.

Homeline thought this was pretty clearly a result of the political structure, but after some time it discovered that this was part of a small skerry. A different worldline, this one 25 years ahead of Hogarth-2, was manipulating history to transport food, minerals, and other raw material from Hogarth-2 to their own, where the organization sold it at a massive profit, and had been doing so for 150 years. Apparently it had been secret on their own timeline for the first few decades, but after the secret broke, the technology was too far integrated into the economy to stop.