GURPS Realm Management: New Economy Types

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure about that. I grant that if you have N people, and N(N-1)/2 possible relationships, the number of economic actions is going to be smaller than N(N-1)/2. But does it get increasingly small in proportion as N gets larger? I'd want to see at least a handwavy argument. At any rate, N(N-1)/2 seems to be a possible upper bound.

The argument: No individual has the capacity for more than K relationships/actions. (K is definitely finite, and probably vastly less than the population of the planet.) Thus out of the N(N-1)/2 possible pairings, no more than NK of them can actually represent person-to-person connections at a given time.

Originally Posted by whswhs

A deliberative process, where all N people sit down together and discuss what is to be done and "who, whom" and that sort of thing, has a single processor, in effect. All decisions have to filter through it. It becomes a bottleneck. Each potential action that's ruled out takes one unit of time, and those units multiply. And if you truly involve all N, then you will take a really huge amount of time for a single decision when you consult them for it.

Sure. I don't think the OP's description requires a deliberative process necessarily, but the 'single-core bottleneck' issue applies to any unified direct democracy process. (And many other types of course.) I did agree with you on the point that there's a lack of favorable scaling in capacity.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

The argument: No individual has the capacity for more than K relationships/actions. (K is definitely finite, and probably vastly less than the population of the planet.) Thus out of the N(N-1)/2 possible pairings, no more than NK of them can actually represent person-to-person connections at a given time.

On the other hand, if I have a stock trading program, it may be capable of making far more trades in a second than I can consciously be aware of, and with far more people than I can "know." Are those relationships? Are they at least actions?

[Michele]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure if your Benefits and Drawbacks reflect this.

Probably not; the Drawbacks might be harsher.

Note, however, that the way I designed this would mean it really has to be playtested for a while in order to see how it works, because it is inherently unstable. On the one hand, the Reform Windfall, which is a frequent possibility, can push Loyalty and Conformity higher and higher. But on the other hand, the Demagogue also is a higher-than-average possibility. That immediately causes Inefficient 1 for a while (which implies a drop in Loyalty) and in the long term an even worse drop both in Loyalty and Conformity.

So the likely result is that this government has to engage in internal propaganda quite often, and Loyalty might be on a roller-coaster.

Add that Completely Reliable, Usually Reliable, Facile and Very Facile Management are forbidden. The founder would do well to invest some +10% or more in order to increase the Management Skill by +2 or more.

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To go back to our real-world example, Yugoslavia, imagine getting as a Disruption the Political Schism. That penalizes the attempts to Bluff and Negotiate - including with the realm's own population. Now imagine that the mandatory check is a critical failure and you get, on top of that Political Schism, the Demagogue. That can only be countered with Bluff. That creates a bad situation that is pretty difficult to solve.
And since the Management isn't Facile, doing anything else than dealing with this crisis is extremely difficult.

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All that said, since one Government type has a size cap at TLs lower than 9, it would pretty easy to apply a size cap to this Economy type, too.

[Michele]

OK, here's a much harsher proposal.

Participatory
In a participatory economy, the people vote on what goods are made or what services are produced, and how both are made available to the population. Citizens are thus almost always happy, but the system might be unable to react quickly and effectively to changing circumstances or emergencies. On top of that, leaving decisions in the hands of uninformed and possibly short-sighted citizens may have its drawbacks; windfalls tend to be distributed out as consumer goods, which makes the populace even happier but doesn’t set reserves aside.
Up to TL5, this system can only work for Realms with up to 10,000 citizens. At TL6, it works with up to 100,000 citizens, at TL7 with up to 1,000,000 citizens, at TL8 with up to 10,000,000 citizens, and from TL9 technology makes it workable with any number of citizens. Realms that start with a participatory economy, and grow beyond these figures, might develop a mixed economic system: keeping the participatory mechanism for local/limited concerns and adopting another system for broader issues.
Examples: Modern-day Greenland communities; Tito’s Yugoslavia.
Benefits: Increase starting Citizen Loyalty by one step. Start with one additional Workforce point.
Drawbacks: The Management skill cannot be higher than the average IQ of the population (10 for humans); no modifiers that improve the Management Skill are available. Any Windfalls that grant RPs or additional Revenue are turned into the Reform Windfall instead, barring a successful Management Skill roll. In case of any Disruption not having foreign causes, roll against Management Skill; a critical failure results in the Realm being affected by the Demagogue Disruption as well.

[Ulzgoroth]

In the generally fictional situation of the populace being aggressively educated in effective electoral governance, perhaps some skill could be substituted for IQ?

Originally Posted by whswhs

On the other hand, if I have a stock trading program, it may be capable of making far more trades in a second than I can consciously be aware of, and with far more people than I can "know." Are those relationships? Are they at least actions?

Relationship-wise it's more a single one with your brokerage/trading service, I'd expect. That's how financial market stuff is usually done. You don't know or care who is on the other end of your trades.

Action-wise, 'run an algorithmic trader' could reasonably be described as one (admittedly complex) action.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

In the generally fictional situation of the populace being aggressively educated in effective electoral governance, perhaps some skill could be substituted for IQ?

Relationship-wise it's more a single one with your brokerage/trading service, I'd expect. That's how financial market stuff is usually done. You don't know or care who is on the other end of your trades.

Action-wise, 'run an algorithmic trader' could reasonably be described as one (admittedly complex) action.

Yes, but I'm not thinking of this in terms of what player characters would do action by action. That indeed is limited by the scale of human attention, and in a deliberative system, by the scale of a single human's attention (or the joint attention of a legislature or planning board or town meeting). But algorithms trading with each other enable an economy with vastly more actions and relationships than that.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Yes, but I'm not thinking of this in terms of what player characters would do action by action. That indeed is limited by the scale of human attention, and in a deliberative system, by the scale of a single human's attention (or the joint attention of a legislature or planning board or town meeting). But algorithms trading with each other enable an economy with vastly more actions and relationships than that.

I'm not thinking in terms of player characters either. Or maybe in a sense I am - I'm thinking about actions taken by actual economic agents. Which the algorithms aren't. Tying back to the underlying subject, a participatory system could vote on whether to run an algorithm, but voting at every step of the algorithms execution would be nonsensical.

(You don't need trading algorithms for one action by one person to create a complex cascade of consequences on many other people they never directly interact with. You can even achieve it without really having an economic system...)

[ericthered]

I'm wondering what the "Boring" Economy that has no drawbacks or benefits is...

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I'm wondering what the "Boring" Economy that has no drawbacks or benefits is...

If an economy were discovered that had no drawbacks, someone would invent new ones.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

The argument: No individual has the capacity for more than K relationships/actions. (K is definitely finite, and probably vastly less than the population of the planet.) Thus out of the N(N-1)/2 possible pairings, no more than NK of them can actually represent person-to-person connections at a given time.

This implies that there are no interactions involving more than two parties. The actual upper limit is 2^N-N-1 (for any given interaction, it either does or does not involve each person in the population, and we drop the case where zero or one parties are involved). Yes, this becomes utterly unmanageable on any scale larger than a family group.

On the original government type, I'm not sure what you're trying to describe (arguably a conventional free market involves voting for what will be produced, it's just that the voting is done with dollars). I don't have Realm Management yet so don't know the specific terms it uses, but it sounds like you're after a planned economy where the government type is a direct democracy.