social classes at TL1

[DanHoward]

I'm inclined to put Rome at TL3. Classical Athens would be a better archetypical TL2 society.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Anyways, after Deir el Medina and Athens and the early Chinese censi we really do not have much before the late middle ages. Societies only become able to track these things precisely in the 19th century with income taxes and well-staffed, professional censi (when one of the Gracchi offered public land to citizens, the next census roll was 25% bigger from people who had been avoiding registration and conscription finding a census taker ... today pretty much everywhere not in the middle of a civil war has a census accurate within 1%).

As I understand it the Roman census involved a lot of self certification - the higher your census class, the more political weight you had.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

I'm inclined to put Rome at TL3. Classical Athens would be a better archetypical TL2 society.

Per GURPS Imperial Rome Rome was more TL2-3 then straight TL3. While Classical Athens was indeed TL2 the Heroic Period was TL1.

[ErhnamDJ]

Have you considered looking at pre-contact Mesoamerican society? That's a TL1 society that we do know quite a lot about.

I think you might be better off coming up with some back-of-the-envelope calculations about how many people are needed to support someone not devoted to food production.

Population size and density likely have a lot to do with the level of specialization, which will in turn determine how many people are in each social status. If you end up with a very low population density, you might want to compare your people to higher-TL earthlings who lived under similar population densities. Your nixies' lifestyle sounds somewhat similar to those of the pre-contact people of Florida. Perhaps that would be worth a look as well.

[muduri]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I was wondering about that 80% Status -1. Is that for a TL1 society as a whole? My impression was that most TL1 societies were overwhelmingly rural, perhaps around 90%, and that rural populations tended to center at Status -1. But city populations may have a quite different distribution; "lives in a city" as such conveys certain social advantages, and it also tends to raise your cost of living, largely because of the expense of food transport.

Three notes occur to me - I'll see if I can thread them in as separate posts since they're not so related to each other.

The first: good point on this. Even if we go with the 10/80/9/1 distribution for the whole society, I agree that things would be different in a city. I have only a wild guess so someone who actually waded through the statistics in Heartland of Cities feel free to give the real numbers ha.

But I'd agree that by the bronze age 0+ will gravitate towards the city, balanced by enough laborers and servants to support them (which, fair enough, is still a large number). 10/60/27/3 say for Earth TL1? Or 10/70/18/2 for a more mercantile society where the urban poor can get by (nixies, or Earth TL2 where with coinage supporting the palace is no longer the bulk of the function of the city)?

[muduri]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Now, I'm going to say that I wonder if the average wealth in any society ought to be at Average, 1.0.

This is an interesting point. Don't want to get the thread into the "what does DX 15 mean in the real world?" weeds but it occurs to me there might be a bit of a tension in GURPS between qualitative Status 0, "you know, a normal freeman", and quantitative Wealth 0, "average wealth for the TL". At least at TL6+ they seem to match up fairly well, but yes it seems like making the math for the wealth distribution work out is tricky. In the end is your typical fellah at Status -1 but technically on average at a sort of "Wealth -0.2"?

[muduri]

Originally Posted by whswhs

There's a sort of theorem in economic anthropology...

Finally, mini side question, do you have an economic anthro background? That would explain incisive whswhs comments on a lot of threads. I also did anthro in undergrad - but mostly of religion - so it's nice to find another one!

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by muduri

Finally, mini side question, do you have an economic anthro background? That would explain incisive whswhs comments on a lot of threads. I also did anthro in undergrad - but mostly of religion - so it's nice to find another one!

I took two cultural anthropology courses as an undergraduate: One on traditional Chinese society and one general survey course. Each time I wrote a paper that I made a serious effort on, and got a C minus. Each time I wrote a second paper where I said, in effect, "the hell with it," and just put down whatever came into my head—and got an A. And I decided I totally did not understand anthropology. Over the course of my later life (that was half a century ago), I've read a variety of anthropological works, including some economic anthropology, but I haven't studied the subject systematically.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by muduri

This is an interesting point. Don't want to get the thread into the "what does DX 15 mean in the real world?" weeds but it occurs to me there might be a bit of a tension in GURPS between qualitative Status 0, "you know, a normal freeman", and quantitative Wealth 0, "average wealth for the TL". At least at TL6+ they seem to match up fairly well, but yes it seems like making the math for the wealth distribution work out is tricky. In the end is your typical fellah at Status -1 but technically on average at a sort of "Wealth -0.2"?

If you look at statistical distributions, a Gaussian distribution has about equal numbers above and below the mean by equal distances. But there are distributions where you have a mean fairly near the bottom, and then successively decreasing numbers at higher levels, trailing off to very high levels with only a few cases that have a major influence on the mean.

So say, for example, we have this pattern:

10% Status -2 0.2 Wealth adds 0.02 to total Wealth
40% Status -1 0.5 Wealth adds 0.20 to total Wealth
40% Status 0 1.0 Wealth adds 0.40 to total Wealth
9% Status 1 2.0 Wealth adds 0.18 to total Wealth
1% Status 3 20.0 Wealth adds 0.20 to total Wealth

Then total Wealth adds up to 1.00, and mean Wealth is 1.00. But mean Wealth for everyone but the 1% is 0.808, in between Status -1 and 0. And median Wealth is 0.75, or halfway between. The small pool of high-Status people drag the mean Wealth up significantly.

(I haven't tried to work out a statistical distribution for Status 2-8 that equates to mean wealth 20.0, but I expect it could be done with a little fiddling on a spreadsheet.)

And this isn't an extreme distribution; it's actually fairly close to symmetrical.

[AlexanderHowl]

A pre-modern nation state cannot have an average of Wealth (Average) without magic. Since the vast majority of the population will be agrarian laborers, the population will have an average of Wealth (Struggling).