At the moment there is no choice as to whether to X or Y in your example. A dwarf does not have to decide whether it wants to eat goat meat or get itself a new *pig tail cloak*. Provided that both items are in stock it can have both since both items are freely available and not commercialised, there is no need to evaluate whether it would rather have one or the other.
Except in cases where one or both items are not available to take freely. This is where being able to steal, barter/trade, beg, or receive a gift would be really nice to have (from the dwarf’s point of view).
I cannot think of a situation where pricing will work better than direct rationing.
The dwarves might if we give them the behaviors necessary.
Or maybe they will agree with you.
Ultimately there is a whole legion of factors that apply in a real-life economy that do not apply in Dwarf Fortress and unless Toady One turns into an elf and lives for centuries this will always be the case. For one the population of a player settlement is capped by default at 200 people and the largest AI settlements only ever have 10,000 people.
Real world cities however can have millions of people.
So? Why not try and implement as good a model as possible for the game’s purposes? And who is to say that this model couldn’t work for smaller populations (actually… the model and others I have come across deal with much less than a million people... more around hundreds... and recapitulate macroeconomic phenomena quite nicely)? :3 Regardless, none of us here can make the ultimate judgment as to whether it is worth Toady doing.
Also, for what it is worth, bartering and trade between peoples and individuals predated the first urban settlements by many millenia.
The deceptive part is the assumption that it will make the game easier to manage.
I never said it would be easier to manage, at least not likely easier than managing a central planned economy for a population of 200.
The truth is that it merely adds a whole legion of additional values to keep track of.
A truth I gladly embrace.
It is certainly possible to have the computer track down all the values for the player I admit. But that comes to a question of realism, the game could tell you how much money is in every dwarf's pocket. But how on earth do we actually know that information, magic?
Hmmm… perhaps I am not being clear. The agent based economic models I am talking about model individuals as having access to information as you and I would in real life. For example, with the paper I linked, the only information handled and learned by a shopkeeper are things they would realistically come to know, such as the amount of goods traded through the shop, initial start-up costs for the shop, overhead costs, etc.
As for what information the player could access and how, they would only have access to information that individuals in the fort could (not saying that all individuals would have access to all information!!!)... sort of similar to what you suggest with the manager. For example, I would only be able to know how much of a good was traded through a given shop as accurately as it was recorded by the shopkeeper and if the shopkeeper and/or the document recording the information was still accessible.
I should really formally write out this suggestion and organize it… synthesizing the stuff I’ve learned here…
In my system I have at least modelled the labour required in running the system and transmitting the information. The player is only informed as to the current unmet demands as a result of the labour of the dwarf reporting the demand at an office and (perhaps) the labour of the noble collecting the information.
This is fantastic and I am all for it!
Internal commerce requires us to keep track of all the existing values (supply+demand) AND a whole set of existing values, in order to make far more complicated maths about prices basically. All of this however adds no additional functionality into the game at present.
At present, I agree with you, no. But as behaviors get more complex as planned… it might and, I think, likely will. We really can’t know until we try.
The manager is more than just the player. The manager represents the fact that things do not run themselves and that there is labour involved in administrating a centrally planned system. However the 'Player's Labour' is too much of a factor at present, I would like to make it for instance so that in order for the player to do anything it must be 'done' by a suitable noble, so essentially the only thing the player does is control nobles.
Ok. I understand now. I actually like this.
Trade however is unlikely to happen. This is because the other dwarf has nothing to give the dwarf in return for the microline table, since everything he has was taken from the stockpile for free. If the dwarf comes along with something that he does not want but he knows the microline table dwarf wants then the microline table dwarf will refuse the trade because he can simply take the item from the stockpile once the other dwarf gives up and stockpiles the item.
This assumes that the dwarf is willing to part with the thing the table-owning-dwarf wants without something in return. What if it is useful to the dwarf? Useful enough to not want to give it up for free back to the fort, but not so useful that she wouldn’t be willing to give it up for a microcline table.
The only kind of trade that is actually possible is where one dwarf only wants a table in general and the second dwarf wants specifically a microline one; agreeing to share items that are sharable also makes sense (items having multiple owners).
An agreement to share is another solution to a demand in addition to trading or stealing or what-have-you. This should also be something allowed in the game. And the models I suggest in no way exclude this.
No, most of the things that you and presumably the overpriced paper you are linked too take for granted as somehow natural are anything but.
First off, sorry about the pay wall. Here is a free version should you care to read it:
http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Peter_Howitt/publication/horg.pdfSecond off, what am I taking for granted as natural? What do you even mean by natural? And what does it matter?
Anyway… it did get me thinking… I should have said that the default situation would be that every individual has the option to either steal, barter, or ask for what they want, as well as to give stuff freely to other individuals. Essentially, the individual determines and enforces property rights until other structures are in place to do so (i.e. government institutions). This would lead to a decentralized economy of some sort on its own. All of these still must take into account value of not just commodities but also the intangibles (fears, hopes, etc.), and actually these intangibles would be what determine the values of commodities, at least largely at first. Gotta think this through a bit more...
People's very thinking is determined by the basic social order they live in and this determines their economic behavior+logics. The basic social order is POLITICAL act not an economic one, so to use an analogy economics is simply the smoke rising from the political fire.
It is an foundational political decision that things are for sale and that people have only limited wealth to use to buy things. This is enforced by a state with laws backed up with police and armies. As a result we end up with a particular psychological setup by which we have to rank all our desires and this leads to all the supposadly spontaneous economic behaviours described by economists.
What do you mean by political vs. economic?
Regardless of semantics, I fail to see how anything I say necessarily refutes this or is in conflict with this concept at a fundamental level with the exception that a decision that something is for sale (and its enforcement) can be an individual one.
And even the most simple of decisions involves a ranking of desires. For example; if I have the choice between getting eaten by a lion I just encountered or running away, I obviously would rank running away from the lion above being eaten. Even the fruit flies I work with for a living make calculated decisions, with certain choices being ranked above others measurably!
As another perhaps more relevant example… let’s say in proto-human times, I find a rock and pick it up and want to make something with it, but someone else wants to make something else with it. Regardless of any formally recognized “ownership”, I, as the person in closest interaction with the rock, have to make the choice whether or not to go ahead and do what I want to do with the rock, or accommodate the wishes of the other, which in this case would be exclusive of my wishes. If I end up doing what I want with the rock (essentially declaring that I have the rights over this rock… in other words I own it), I will have to back it up myself in the absence of any other institution. If I end up giving the rock to the other person, I will likewise have to deal with the consequences; I will have given up not only the rights over the rock, but the opportunity to do something I wanted with it which might have been important for my survival or happiness (not to mention any other social ramifications). However, as a third option… Instead of just giving it to the other person, I could also ask for something in return now (barter) or at a later time (credit of sorts) to compensate for my lost opportunity to ensure my survival or happiness, in which case everyone gets what they want (or something close to it).
This last option is a decision (I guess that “political” decision you talk about) that determines the rock is for sale. What determines that people have limited wealth in this case is the fact that there was only one rock in that place and time appropriate for the things me and the other proto-human wanted to make, that I was closest to it and picked it up first, and that making it into one thing precludes making it into another. Enforcement of my decision would depend on how much the other person respected me, or how much stronger or persuasive I was compared to the other proto-human, unless I had buddies to back me up.
If this is in keeping with what you meant by a “foundational political decision”, then we are in agreement.
There is no need to prohibit most of those behaviors because they do not make sense for individual dwarves to engage in to start off with.
How so? Please elaborate.
In order to have a market economy emerge items must first be coercively restricted from general availability, which is their natural state when you think about it.
Of course! I agree entirely. However, what happens when a person decides to "own" something as in the proto-human example I detailed above? Is picking up the rock not coercive restriction of availability, taking it away from its “natural” generally available state?
This actually gets me thinking, though, if there shouldn’t be a more nuanced definition of ownership in the game and these models for the purposes of the game. Property isn’t a thing, but a status of rights over an object… hmmmm…