Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[falcc]

I've been enjoying a talk by David Graeber on the history of debt, and one of the main concepts is about how neighbors "owing" each other as a way to continue friendly relations predates currency and even barter. I'll post it here because it's all really interesting, and it might be something Threetoe would enjoy with his history background if he hasn't seen it already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs&feature=emb_logo

The big picture stuff is debt is way more common and interesting than coinage. Not that I don't love people shouting in marketplaces, but once religions and cultures are more varied there are so many more cool ways of organizing than metal that is used for an extremely niche application. I've seen a lot of topics on debt on the forum but most of them are about repaying of debts rather than how good and useful people constantly owing and forgiving each other is for making stories with the people living around you. For example, you can have the interesting parts of the economic arc without having to track coinage again.

People in the fort know who their friends are, and a great way to increase the meaning in that is to have them regularly giving each other gifts.  It's nice to get yourself a new bracelet but it's only new for so long for any given dwarf and then it becomes meaningless again. Having a way to gift someone with an "acquire something" desire a good mood is also one step towards a new friend. All those exchanged goods still have a tracked value, roughly like how trading works now but in exchanges over a period of time instead of barter. If someone takes far more often than they give it can be a source of drama and poor reputation, or fines imposed by the sheriff which can use the real value numbers. As people interact and exchange more it can create relationships that extend to creating inter-family marriages or other ways to become closer. Or, if the friends you're exchanging debts back and forth with are important people they can reward you with some kind of high rank or status that can.

Not only do none of these exchanges require a pouch of coins sitting around, but most of equivalent numbers them don't even need to sit in memory for long. At the end of every year the fort can simply look at all the favor owed from one dwarf to another and zero out where appropriate. People who owe a lot of debt will have it kept track of for the following year as greedy or criminal outliers that make it easy to see where Fun might arrive from. Otherwise people can keep their memories of good deals and reputations they've gained but not need to hold onto a lot of extra numbers if a fort is retired.

And, of course, all sorts of religious and cultural events, including peasant revolts, involve the complete forgiveness of debt. Generous people can forgive debts all the time and feel good about themselves for it (as they should) while the greedy should cling to their numbers much longer. Various punishments or arguments can end with forgiveness of debt or fines that replace personal debt with a general debt to the fort. A siege could leave on the condition that their debt to your fortress is erased. Why, a whole huge, and fun, part of the game can be clearing the memory of specifics and ironing them into a general reputation like it does for secret identities. Think of how fast things will run even with this little edition.

Of course that doesn't mean currency doesn't ever have a place. As in history, currencies work well for imposing taxation on conquered lands. They make a lot of sense on soldiers, criminals, and people that do business with either since they're unlikely to stick around for the system of debts to operate well. But once you have a strong enough reputation with a merchant you should be able to enter into a debt bargain with them as is appropriate for local friends. Take some fish now while you're hungry and come back with grain to share after the harvest is ready. Similarly bartenders will be generous with lines of credit for those that are well known, instead of just making everything free, creating for them an ongoing relationship with interesting people and making them centers for gossip. This way coins don't need to be in nearly as many places but actually serve better for inter-kingdom trade if a place has to pay tribute to the civ that mints those coins.

I hope you'll consider how debt and debt forgiveness could fit in with the increased role of religions and of course cultures as those updates approach. And perhaps, in some slight degree, even how they could serve as part of on-going villainy work.

[Azerty]

Good idea.

Debt was really important when coins were scarce (as opposed to poverty): someone might be wealthy enough to buy something but not have the needed species to buy it. It still was the case some decades ago, when shopkeepers listed their patrons and owed sums of money, to be paid at the start of the next month and, in rural areas, at the time of the harvests. So debt was a daily reality.

In addition to societal evolutions listed in the OP, debt helped to spearhead several concepts such as the beginnings of calculation (indeed, calculus was used to describe the pebbles counting cattle); moreover, such debts needed to be registered something, which drove the existence of legal systems to enforce them (a larbe part of civil law deals with debts, or is related to them) and several techniques to prove them, such as tally sticks (their use was legal in France until 2016, and is still legal in places who imported the Napoleonic Code such as Belgium and Italy).

We even could see such debts be negociated: for exemple, credit given to the fortress by merchants from 1 buying items might be used to buy the wares of another caravan from B, which could then use this debt to buy items from A, maybe at a discount relative to A's reliability, a bit like NetHack credit shops.
This is how paper-money came to be: it initially was IOUs on a bank holding bullions.

[Iä! RIAKTOR!]

This is interesting too, but coin economic will be simpler to add back. Just copy code of quiver to pouch - so dwarves will have pack of coins without need to haul them one by one.

[NW_Kohaku]

Amusingly, I also had a very similar suggestion to run a credit-based economy over a decade ago after reading David Graeber's book.

And for it, a simpler solution would be to just have a debit account like in modern banks for internal fortress transactions, while coin currency is only used for transactions with foreigners.  This is absolutely historically accurate, as the world has never had enough metal currency to sustain the economic activity of the people who live there, and ledger books or even cruder tally sticks have been the primary means of transaction.

Again, with Graeber, the reason you have transactions like bartering with caravans is because a debt with someone who can or will pack up and leave needs to be paid off at point of purchase or else there will be no means of collecting on that debt.  Hence, you'd expect coins to only matter in caravans for making up an imbalance in the barter or in taverns hosting foreigners.  There is little to be gained in using coins between dwarves that are part of the same fort, and that's before we start dealing with the nightmare that coins created in terms of having to track the minting date of each one.

The greater problem with having any economy at all is the glaring obviousness of the wealth inequality it causes through things that aren't really the fault of the workers (but hey, what else is new in capitalism?) You tend to wind up with a few jobs where workers can work round-the-clock and make tremendous wealth because they are put in a job that has raw materials provided to them nearby and never face supply shortages, while other jobs have long delays in between working shifts, or the haulers (whose jobs are still vital) are dead broke and starving while the brewer is a millionaire.  Now, sure, you can let dwarves buy food from going into debt then forgive the debt, but then what's the difference between having an economy or not when it doesn't impact anything?  You might as well declare there's a grain dole for everyone and that the food is free, which is basically the state we're at, now.