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Fantasy economies


Alytha

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That's probably true, but they're still limited by the technology. So far as we know, Middle-Earth doesn't and didn't have any means of transport other than by water or by animal-drawn cart. It makes shipping food long distance rather difficult (although considering how absurdly valuable mithril was supposed to be, maybe that makes sense - expensive metal for expensive food).

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How naive and isolated and quaint and generally from a different planet those good folksy Two Rivers kids are is something that takes, well, thousands of pages to really fade away though. (OTOH, Siuan was Amyrlin and still appeared to talk entirely in fish quotes. Randland dosen't do immigrant assimilation, apparently.) 

I've met people from seriously rural areas who moved to the city. Some of that "Holy Shit, look at all this!" stuff doesn't fade very quickly.

And plenty of people hang on to their way of talking when they move. Especially when not in public.

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That's probably true, but they're still limited by the technology. So far as we know, Middle-Earth doesn't and didn't have any means of transport other than by water or by animal-drawn cart. It makes shipping food long distance rather difficult (although considering how absurdly valuable mithril was supposed to be, maybe that makes sense - expensive metal for expensive food).

Yeah, this is where an enterprising Middle Earther should have set up a food and general good transportation operation with the eagles for fun and profit.

More seriously I just read on Wikipedia:

Since they lived underground, Dwarves did not grow their own food supplies if they could help it, and usually obtained food through trade with Elves and Men. In the essay 'Of Dwarves and Men' in The Peoples of Middle-earth it is written that Dwarven and human communities often formed relationships where the Men were the prime suppliers of food, farmers and herdsmen, while the Dwarves supplied tools and weapons, road-building and construction work.

The trade between the actual labouring of farming and construction work seems to suggest these communities were a lot closer than one would have thought.

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They require economics classes in school?

In California it's a requirement in high school along with government (a semester for each senior year, usually). Not positive about all the other states, but I was under the impression most high schools featured economics in some form.

I'm not sure which is worse: authors without a grasp on economics, or ones that screw up basic geography.

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Economics are technically a requirement, but AP Government fulfills the requirement despite having no actual economics component. Because.

FWIW, the kind of stuff we're discussing - trade routes and population constraints and city locations and so on, in my highschool and uni experience, falls under economic (or ocassionaly social/urban/historical/whatever) geography. Basic 'pure' economics is just logic games that somehow always magically produce a perfect supply/demand X of inevitable market solutions, and I would think would be of extremely limited use in writing a secondary world.

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I thought it was 20,000 wildlings not 100,000.

She was referring to Drogo's khalasar there.

Econ was a required class when I was in High School.

It was for me too (in South Carolina), combined with government, but in reality weighted toward the "government" end. But it tends to be one of those required classes people don't care much about, and is taught to the lowest common denominator. Often taught by a coach who just needs something to teach (mine was). But Datepalm's right about basic econ--when I took a real econ class in college, it was all supply and demand, externalities, efficiency, how GDP is calculated, how price floors or ceilings affect a market, and so on.

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How naive and isolated and quaint and generally from a different planet those good folksy Two Rivers kids are is something that takes, well, thousands of pages to really fade away though. (OTOH, Siuan was Amyrlin and still appeared to talk entirely in fish quotes. Randland dosen't do immigrant assimilation, apparently.) 

RE: The Inn, it could possibly be used for other Two-riversfolk (like from outlying farms) when staying in town.

I'm from a relatively sparsely-populated area, people actually used to build tiny cottages to stay over for sunday (to go to church) becuase a lot of people just lived too far away to be able to get there and back in a day.

Mind, this is a post-enclosure kind of environment, so it's a bit anachronistic, but still.

and yeah, Geography, not economics :P (Still fondly remembers all those little color-coded maps with icons representing resource extraction sites and primary farming areas...)

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Two Rivers tabac need not primarily come from Emond's Field. It is made clear that other villages in the Two Rivers interact more often with outsiders. Always seemed logical to me that the other towns were bigger traders and Emond's Field was a backwater of a backwater.

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Inns are another thing I intended to post about but forgot in the OP.

The staple of all epic/heroic fantasy is the well-stocked inn in the middle of nowhere or in a tiny village.

How do these places survive?

I can see that a village would need a place for people to meet and have a drink, but would they have guests who eat there and need a room regularily enough?

You'd need a cook and a couple of people to clean, whom you'd have to pay, unless you recruit some people from the village to do that at need.

You also need to have the kitchen and bar stocked at all times though...

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Oddly enough, our favorite, ASOAIF has one of the most unrealistic economies in all of fantasy. As in... if Westeros frequently experiences decade long winters they would not have any viable economy, nor people, because a winter that lasted that long would kill off everyone that lived there. One bad winter would shut down the whole system and I just don't see how they would ever recover from just one bad winter cycle, let alone the thousands they've had apparently.

Even in our modern world with all our technology if we had a ten year (and longer ones are possible, according to the books) long winter it would be a devastating apocalypse that would probably be the end of us.

But, this is why the economic viability of their world should be one of the last concerns of the writer. It's not really important except to nitpickers like us :P

As for LOTR, I always bought into it because Tolkien gives the impression that the world is quite empty. All of the places we see on the journey are small and/or in decline. Only Gondor has a large population and even that is very much reduced. Less people require fewer resources, so it never seemed unrealistic that the countryside seemed mostly empty. And you have to remember the areas the fellowship traveled were in general the backroutes and roads-less traveled, for obvious reasons.

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Inns are another thing I intended to post about but forgot in the OP.

The staple of all epic/heroic fantasy is the well-stocked inn in the middle of nowhere or in a tiny village.

How do these places survive?

I can see that a village would need a place for people to meet and have a drink, but would they have guests who eat there and need a room regularily enough?

You'd need a cook and a couple of people to clean, whom you'd have to pay, unless you recruit some people from the village to do that at need.

You also need to have the kitchen and bar stocked at all times though...

An inn isn't neccessarily a full-time job. Rather something a farmer might do in addition to his farming.

Also, cleaning and cooking is what children (although usually other people's children) are for.

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Oddly enough, our favorite, ASOAIF has one of the most unrealistic economies in all of fantasy. As in... if Westeros frequently experiences decade long winters they would not have any viable economy, nor people, because a winter that lasted that long would kill off everyone that lived there. One bad winter would shut down the whole system and I just don't see how they would ever recover from just one bad winter cycle, let alone the thousands they've had apparently.

Even in our modern world with all our technology if we had a ten year (and longer ones are possible, according to the books) long winter it would be a devastating apocalypse that would probably be the end of us.

But, this is why the economic viability of their world should be one of the last concerns of the writer. It's not really important except to nitpickers like us :P

As for LOTR, I always bought into it because Tolkien gives the impression that the world is quite empty. All of the places we see on the journey are small and/or in decline. Only Gondor has a large population and even that is very much reduced. Less people require fewer resources, so it never seemed unrealistic that the countryside seemed mostly empty. And you have to remember the areas the fellowship traveled were in general the backroutes and roads-less traveled, for obvious reasons.

It would require some certain assumptions about the weather and quite a command economy, but if summer is "constant" you might be able to get like... three or four harvests a year during summertime.

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Yeah, they get several harvests but how much of that food is storable for years and years with Medieval tech? Also, one would burn through a lot of food when none is coming in anymore at all. and you need more calories just to surive the bitter cold. Some other tidbits:

-The winters are describe as incredibly cold, and the snow is said to be very deep, which would basically shut down any sort of land travel. That kind of constant, penetrating cold would kill off any weak people, and would require constant fires to keep homes warm, which would require a hell of a lot of firewood, which better be close on hand, because traveling to get it would be impossible.

-All the game and wildlife in the Northern and Central parts of Westeros would migrate South, or die, so hunting and fishing is out.

-After a couple of years of little to no sunshine, and the same bland diet, people would start to get serious dietary deficiences/health/mental problems, and even more would die.

-The cold weather would shut down the ports except maybe in the Southern Reach and in Dorne, which would severly limit the foreign trade, although I doubt Westeros gets much in the way of food and other essentials from the other parts of the world. Still those cities that survive do to foreign trade money would be in a serious hurting because that revenue would be gone.

- I could buy them lasting maybe two or three years of continous winter, but anything beyond that I just think would equal everyone dead.

Anyway, it's always been a cool concept so I'm glad GRRM put it in :P

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