DF is not affected by peer pressure, trends, human nature, or subliminal messaging etc, IRL people believe what they hear and see on tv or from leaders of social/religious groups, governments, or even strong charismatic people (like cult leaders)... or even like sheep they follow because someone is bold enough to stand out from a crowd, we as humans are also prone to follow through watching our parents and surrounding environment which influence our likes and dislikes, dwarves are not humans so they would not necessarily be influenced the way humans are to everything besides you dont need to fill every favourite thing to make the dwarf happy if they have an exceptional or masterwork bed they would still get happy thoughts and since every dwarf likes a range of different things from animals to jewels to colours there is pleanty of room to make them happy from 1 or 2 things that orther dwarves have similar tastes for.... reducing the need to get...
eg urist mcmahogany likes cats for their fur, mahogany for its texture, and persimmons for their acidity, urist mcgemcraft likes citrine for for its solidarity, spider silk for its softness, oak for its bark and persimmons for their colour... so 2 dwarves with 1 persimmon and if a meal is made well they both get happier, even if they both have a bed made fro cherry tree wood... and with time why not allow a dwarf to change tastes in things,
There are only a limited number of historical characters and many abstracting pop members. We cannot individually calculate personal demands for the entire population of the world and then have a functional economy, this means we have to either ignore personal demands (so beds are beds) or we have to bundle them together into larger units. The historical characters can track the demands individually but can be assigned an abstract number of copycats which simply adds extra demand so that the economics of things happening in the wider world to meet demands make sense. Since historical characters tend to be important/famous it also fits sort of with the kind of influences you were mentioning.
Each historical character born copies most it's likes/dislikes from it's parents with some amount of 'random mutation' in the form of new random likes/dislikes. Promoted historical characters (like those that form the bulk of our immigrants) simply have a random set of likes/dislikes from the population they come from, this situation prevents the economy from being distorted by the historicisation of a large number of people.
I like the sound of both of these myself as potential ways to incorporate economy and trade into DF questions regarding the use of money though... would sites create money based off their base civ/mountain home? And if a site goes independent and creates its own currency whats to say other towns or civilizations wont accept or recognize said currency or that the value of it would be too low and the material its made from is more valuable than the money itself? (Australia got rid of 1 and 2 cent pieces as the metal more valable than the cent value they represented for example)
Yes they would create or seek to acquire the money of their civilization. Because money is traded for anything else that is in demand however then they would trade their own currency for foreign currency if doing so allowed them to buy foreign goods sold in that currency which are 'below' money in their list of demands.
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Topic: Economy II: The Return of the Shop (Read 5386 times)