It is extremely difficult to have a "conversation" with someone so intent upon speaking that they don't bother to listen.
I am being accused, here, of what are essentially strawman positions that simply serve as a springboard for some anti-PC creed that is wholly irrelevant to the actual topic.
I'm going to return this back to the previous line of conversation, but there are couple things about what Wierd has said that I need to rebut (as relatively swiftly as is at all possible) before getting back to that...
It costs a fixed amount of resources to train a stone mason. They have to eat, they need a place to sleep, what they build at first will be of dubious quality, so yu have to sink development costs into their progression, and all that time, they could be doing work for you doing something they are moe knowledgeable or adept at-- this last is especially poingant, when discussing te training of a stone mason in an area devoid of local stone, like a savanah.
This (the bolded part, particularly) is very, very wrong.
This is exactly why you cannot dismiss things as "just economics". It's not just because you don't convey any meaning and reduce things down to slogans when you are conveying information to others, but also because it is seductively easy to not question these assumptions you are making, yourself.
Money (the only resource of importance in this equation) is
never fixed. The worth of money is
always relative. (Or, to put it into an overly simple phrase, "This is wrong because Exchange Rates".)
Inflation/a weak currency is one of the most powerful allies of a developing nation.
This flies completely in the face of what most monetarists are going to tell you, but it's nevertheless a forgotten truth about economics that everything from Free Trade Theory to far more provincial economics relies upon.
First, inflation is always the debtor's friend. This applies with normal inflation on normal loans, as well. Inflation counteracts interest. However, this is
especially true when loans or investments of capital are taking place across economic zones based upon different currencies, because...
Second, inflation is an automatic tariff on imports to your economy, and an automatic discount to consumers of your exports.
A (US) dollar in the US only buys a dollar's worth of raw materials for building a factory, and only a dollar's worth of labor in that factory. A dollar in a country with a much weaker currency, however, can buy five times as much. This is the core essence of why "outsourcing" even works in the first place, and the
why of why Southeast Asian labor costs ever got low in the first place.
I listen to the news all the time, and constantly hear both fears of inflation here in the US, and complaints about how unfair it is that China is "artificially keeping its currency low" (read: is enjoying the benefits of inflation) in basically the same sentence. Why is China purposefully doing to itself the thing the people on the business channels fear might happen here? Because it is the key to developing their industries - both because it cuts off their own people from importing goods (hence, driving up demand for local goods) but also because it drives up demands for exports from their country. The question then becomes why do we Americans fear it? Well, only the people who are using the relative high value of the US Dollar, British Pound, and the Euro to invest in the rest of the world at super-discount rates are actually at risk.
Even within pure laissez-faire Free Trade Theory, where they basically eschew all tariffs entirely, they are relying upon the inherent tariff-like nature of monetary exchange rates to be a sort of perfectly self-calibrating tariff. Trade imbalances are inherently remedied through inflation or deflation.
You're talking about how obviously stonemasons in one place are going to be cheaper than in another, but you're not stopping to question the assumption of
why things got that way.
The reason why most of Africa (and much of rural India, and many other parts of non-economically-booming Asia) are so behind is because of that other part of what you were starting to grasp at: That some places, it's already cheaper to just take the people who are already trained than train someone new.
Much of Africa, if you want power supplied to your factory, you better build your own damn powerplant, because they aren't available elsewise.
You need educated skilled laborers? You better build where there are already schools training people in those tasks.
This is the only advantage the first-world nations with those huge currency values really have - they have the built-up infrastructure and training to make building high-skill jobs more affordable, even with higher effective wages and building costs. China is making this happen by subsidizing huge amounts of infrastructure construction and education programs to stuff their workers into the factories that get built cheap. Nations like America and Germany that are still developed-world economic powers use the fact that they are the only ones capable of turning out the huge supply of skilled workers through (what's left of) their education systems to bring the industries to the supply of workers.
But now consider the plight of Spain and Greece.
They're not nearly as bad-off as Africa in terms of infrastructure, but they're much worse off because they are crippled by their lack of inflation. They have lost their industries, and they cannot build new ones because there's no reason anyone would want to build their factories in those nations.
Their high-value currency, the Euro, is basically strangling their growth.
Why does the Euro do this? Because why should they build anything in Greece when they can just import it from Germany, where it's cheaper to build everything?
That's what the Euro was really designed to do: Make it easier for established industries to export their goods to other Eurozone members because they don't have to face the uphill battle of having the "tariff" of an exchange rate with a weaker currency, so that their exports are functionally cheaper.
Greece didn't have the money to buy those goods because they weren't producing enough to offset this trade imbalance? Well, according to Free Trade, this
should have been balanced out by weakening Greece's currency... but they share the same currency, so that never happens. Instead, Germany (or its banks) simply loans the money to Greece that Greece then uses buying back up German goods, supporting the German industry just like the Eurozone was supposed to.
What could go wrong?
There's a lot more to economics than just "Economics!"
Not only does this mean that there might be pacifist goblins, but they still exist in the game. Just create a world where goblins are assimilated into a human culture right now - there's going to be tons of them in the human civilization, and they're going to be thriving.
Yes, and they will be a minority, constantly fighting their innate nature. Eg, anomalies.
The problem with this is that not only are you not taking the time to understand the implications of what others are saying, but it's pretty apparent you're not taking the time to connect the dots to understand the implications of
your own argument at this point.
Stop and consider what it means when you're talking about having
all doctors be humans.
Humans have a need for better agriculture knowledge, and better civic designs. They can either invest in that knoweldge themselves, or they can get that "technology" from the other races. Compare for instance, building a crappy city layout themselves, VS just paying the dwarves to build it for them in exchange for food, wood, and various raw materials. Paying to have it done is usually almost always less expensive and more desirable than doing it yourself. This is why you hire an electrician, or a plumber, or go to see a doctor, rather than studying EE, learning all the ins ans outs of plumbing, or going to medschool, just so you can do all those things for yourself. It is simply more efficient to outsource specialist labors to specialists.
This means that if you need domesticated farm animals, you get ones trained by elves, and pay for it with exotic seeds, lasting organic beauty enriched items like bonsai, or high quality craft goods that last a long time. The elf trained ones will be VERY well trained, owing to many lifetimes worth of experiencer doing that thing by the trainer. You simply can't do a better job yourself.
If you need a castle built, or need a city expanded or renovated after a disaster, you hire a dwarven civ to do the work, and pay them with materials they don't have in abundance; like wood, or medicines.
Each race would have local imperitives that the others would not have, and as such, greater intrinsic needs to fill, which would get disproportional investments of resources. Humans would become traders, building sailing ships, and become physicians and apothicaries. Elves would become naturalists, sages, conservationists, and exquisite animal trainers. Dwarves would become engineers and architects, and masters of military strategy.
You can't export surgery. It doesn't fit in a box too well.
If you're going to stratify a society into race-based job systems, it
inherently means you're going to have to start integrating the races into a single culture. (The same thing you're saying you're opposed to...)
What you're talking about is making each "culture" (read: race) completely dependent upon another culture. (Which is insane and unprecedented in the medieval world to have trade between nations on basic commodities, since trade was so expensive and difficult that you could not rely upon any food shipment getting through. Worse, depending on another nation for your food is basically like
begging them to hold your nation's stomachs hostage unless you hold something equally mandatory for their survival.)
Essentially, there is absolutely no way that elves, humans, and dwarves can live apart from one another in this situation that you have set up, and yet, this is what you think things will be like:
Even if the experience is simply something like this: ("the humans are chopping down the forest again!" --"didnt' we discuss this with their leader, and come to an arrangement?" --"Yes, but he apparently died 300 years ago! Their current leader is barely a 20 year old child!" "Goodness... did something happen to him? He looked well last we spoke..." "my lord, it seems humans rarely live past 120 years!" "Oh my! We must speak with this young man!"), eventually they will notice that humans have a nasty habbit of putting things that happened "a long time ago" into the "it isn't important anymore!" Basket, whereas the elves would not. After a few such incidents, is when I would expect "elven diplomats" to start showing up.
Yup, elves sure don't understand those humans they didn't have contact with for 120 years in spite of being dependent upon humans for all their medical needs, and having humans dependent upon trading with them for all their farm animals.
Are you starting to see the problem with equating race and culture and assuming that culture never changes?
This isn't even starting to get into what happens when humans and elves aren't mingling - humans
have to be the ones to tame their own animals, then.
But then, we get back to the problem of dismissing "pacifistic goblins" as some sort of trivial problem that never occurs or has to be thought of or dealt with...
It's not an outlier, it's a completely common occurance in this game for many
races to exist in the same
culture, because the culture (the entity) can be applied to
any race in the game, even at this point... and Toady hasn't even seriously started working on multi-cultural cities yet.
Yes, goblins are going to behave differently from some standpoint, as they have natural distrustful and violent tendencies, but you know what? That's not culture. Elves loving nature isn't racial, it's cultural. Elves raised in human cities really
are mostly just pointy-eared humans, but for some emotional and physiological differences. The respect for nature part, however, is not genetic, it's cultural.
And talking about and understanding this divide is what makes the story of "pointy-eared humans"
far more interesting than blithely gluing the Hat from their Planet onto their heads so that an elf raised in a cave who has never seen a non-mushroom tree will inherently have a better understanding of forestry than a dwarf raised in an elven retreat.
You have to understand what these cultural exchanges
mean, and what the differences are between the cultural beliefs and the psychological predilections of race are, and that's not some sort of bizarre PC claptrap to talk about.
This is already far too long...
I'm going to write the "on topic" post that continues off these themes in a sequel post.
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Topic: Working through Medieval stasis (Read 31615 times)