10-01-2013, 09:47 PM | #11 | ||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Index of inequality
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10-01-2013, 11:45 PM | #12 |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Index of inequality
[QUOTE=Agemegos;1653691
What would work for you?[/QUOTE] A bit more complex, but what might work for me would be the Lifestyle that is affordable by the very poorest, the poor, the average, the rich and the very rich. Lifestyles are a concept from the Shadowrun RPG, in which you pay a monthly amount of $ and for this gets a home, a certain quality of food, entertainment, clothing replacement and a vehicle. I'll be making something similar for Sagatafl at a later point, at least with some detail for the TeLs that interest me the most, early medieval (for my Ärth setting) and present day or a bit earlier (I'm a fan of the more brainy 70s and 80s action thriller films). GURPS' Cost-of-Living is almost the same, but is a bit less fine-grained, in that each CoL maps to a particular Status with only about 10 possible values. The Witchcraft RPG has something similar, but tied to a character's Wealth stat with, again, about 9 or 11 possible values, going all the way from a homeless street person and up to multi-millionaire. So, what I'd want to know is, what Lifestyle can the very poorest, those at around the 0.1% mark, afford, what Lifestyle can the poor, at around the 2% mark, afford, what Lifestyle can the median or average (I'm not sure which of these two is best, but it's early morning and pre-breakfast here) afford, what Lifestyle can the 98% mark afford, and what Lifestyle can those at the 99.9% mark afford? Thus five items, each one "explaining" to me what one of these five "types" can have and what they can't have, in terms that are immediately understandable, and preferably (because that'd be much easier to read) a single figure for each. Just stating an amount of dollars, or credits, for each of those five types, doesn't strike me as satisfactory, because it cannot be assumed that food and rent costs the same everywhere. So, any kind of universal indicator of quality-of-life, for those particular five marks, which include the very bottom and the very top. GURPS posits that CoL does not go up with rising Tech Level, meaning that the poor are able to afford increasingly better quality of life, as technology improves, and while that has been criticized, it is in principle correct. |
10-01-2013, 11:48 PM | #13 |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Index of inequality
It might be, but he's describing an entire planet, and I believe it's for a general-purpose RPG, not for a more specific campaign, such as Interstellar Traders or Social Engineers, so "spending" the necessary square inches that a graph takes up might not be a good idea.
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10-01-2013, 11:51 PM | #14 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Index of inequality
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There are massive taxation differences, both income tax and VAT, between Denmark and the USA, so I have only a very poor sense of how much a real-world $ is worth. I could go to Google and ask it to translate 1 USD to DKK for me, but that tells me nothing useful. If Agamegos uses a universal game world currency, of course, then the problem largely goes away, ignoring the potential that the cost of living may be higher on some planets than on others. |
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10-01-2013, 11:55 PM | #15 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Index of inequality
It might be eventually, though the question does arise: when I'm trying to produce a one-page table of the most essential information about a planet and society, how many square centimetres does the distribution of wealth deserve?
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
10-02-2013, 04:27 AM | #16 | ||
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Index of inequality
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But other important considerations (for me) would be:
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10-02-2013, 06:00 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Index of inequality
How does the proposed system allow for various socio-economic systems and definitions of property? I can see issues, for example, if the poorest 10% of the population are property rather than holding property (but this may still not correlate to standard of living - for example the emperor's chief eunuch may be legally a slave and own nothing, but will live better than the majority of the population) and likewise for communistic/collective societies where it's difficult to attribute assets to any one person.
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10-02-2013, 09:59 AM | #18 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: Index of inequality
I like Gini, but since you are going to be showing data for low tech planets, I recommend the subsistence correction. Essentially, for very poor places, a low Gini can be associated with high inequality due to the relative size of the surplus.
Example: If a low tech colony has an average production of 3 SVUs per colonist per day, but bare survival on that colony requires 2.8, the Gini is never going to show much inequality, even if the entire productive surplus is consumed by one individual. |
10-02-2013, 02:57 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Index of inequality
Quote:
So we must suppose that the Gini coefficients listed are not for the distribution of wealth but for the distribution of income, after taxes and transfers, including non-marketed income, and adjusted for oddities of household structure. I don't even know how some of the adjustments could be done. We will have to consider the "inequality" values reported as merely indicative. One of the chief appeals of the genre (rationalised planetary romance) to my mind is the clash between preconceptions such as "social class" and alternative social constructions such as Tau Ceti where the "worker" and "rentier" economic roles are not socio-economic classes but stages in the life cycle, and Simanta where "white collar" and "blue-collar" jobs belong to different parahuman species.
__________________
Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
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10-02-2013, 03:19 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Index of inequality
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Bill Stoddard |
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Tags |
income inequality, planetary romance, sci-fi, society description |
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