Handwavery and the Economics of Pendor
Dec. 7th, 2006 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn a recent conversation on my favorite MMORPG, Usenet, in the group rec.arts.sf.written, I wrote that "I've often tossed a book on the simple grounds that the writer's grasp of economic reality is so flawed it makes an unreconstructed Marxist look like John Maynard Keynes." The truth of the matter is that handwave my own economics a lot in my SF (I'm trying to be much more careful in my fantasy) precisely because we don't know just how weird the universe is going to be.
But the Journal Entries do have some basics: between the Pendorian years 1500 and 9000 (I haven't decided about after that), human beings have two standards of exchange: the Liu (Light Industrial Unit) and the Lau (Light Agricultural Unit). The Lau is like coinage, and is used mostly to buy short-term consumables like food; the Liu is large bills and is used to pay rent or buy larger items. AIs (and some humans) trade in other categories: there's the Heavy Industrial Unit, light and heavy computational units. There are a few others, but think of them all as components of a stock market with exchange rates fluctuating depending upon supply and demand.
At one point, I wanted Dove to have money. In handwavy style I gave her some, but I was trying to figure out how much. The Twins explain to her that the townhouse they've rented costs them 4 LIU a month, and the current exchange rate between LIU and LAU is 1:300, and you can pretty much buy an average meal for a singe LAU. Which would mean that renting a two-bedroom townhouse in the Capitol City of the Galatic Empire costs about $6000 a month. Except that on the Corridor's civilized worlds, acquiring a few LIU is really easy. Acquiring a lot is harder: there are just too damned many distractions (and the AIs like it that way).
Anyway, remember the 1000 words I wrote yesteday for Polestar? Threw 'em out: total fishhead. Wrote 500 today of Dove & the Twins' conversation (hence my exegetic discussion of the economics implied by their conversation) and 400 in Polestar where Mava meets Aderyn and tells her the impossible: "I'm from Earth."
But the Journal Entries do have some basics: between the Pendorian years 1500 and 9000 (I haven't decided about after that), human beings have two standards of exchange: the Liu (Light Industrial Unit) and the Lau (Light Agricultural Unit). The Lau is like coinage, and is used mostly to buy short-term consumables like food; the Liu is large bills and is used to pay rent or buy larger items. AIs (and some humans) trade in other categories: there's the Heavy Industrial Unit, light and heavy computational units. There are a few others, but think of them all as components of a stock market with exchange rates fluctuating depending upon supply and demand.
At one point, I wanted Dove to have money. In handwavy style I gave her some, but I was trying to figure out how much. The Twins explain to her that the townhouse they've rented costs them 4 LIU a month, and the current exchange rate between LIU and LAU is 1:300, and you can pretty much buy an average meal for a singe LAU. Which would mean that renting a two-bedroom townhouse in the Capitol City of the Galatic Empire costs about $6000 a month. Except that on the Corridor's civilized worlds, acquiring a few LIU is really easy. Acquiring a lot is harder: there are just too damned many distractions (and the AIs like it that way).
Anyway, remember the 1000 words I wrote yesteday for Polestar? Threw 'em out: total fishhead. Wrote 500 today of Dove & the Twins' conversation (hence my exegetic discussion of the economics implied by their conversation) and 400 in Polestar where Mava meets Aderyn and tells her the impossible: "I'm from Earth."
no subject
Date: 2006-12-08 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-08 06:33 pm (UTC)And yes, when you start adding in energy costs, the question of Sdisk vs. truck vs. rail vs. aircraft just becomes another case of transportation economics.