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A Rabbi Shows Up in the “Dresden Files”

21 Wednesday Jan 2026

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I just finished the latest installment of Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” series, Twelve Months. I won’t comment on the book as a whole, other than to say that it was enjoyable. But I do find myself mildly irritated by a bit character that Butcher introduced.

Without spoilers, I can say that despite the grab-bag of Lovecraftian, Celtic fae, and other supernatural bits all thrown in, important aspects of the “Dresden Files” setting are Catholic in flavor. There was a single secular Jewish character up to this point, who ends up taking on a, ahem, religiously incongruous job as the series progresses. But in this book, Butcher chose to introduce a religious Jewish character, Rabbi Aaronson, as an ally to the local Catholic groups fighting the nasties. I am not sure why Butcher did so. Aaronson appears in only two brief scenes, has no plot function and only a few paragraphs of “screen time,” and his only activities are to blow the shofar and be crotchety.

Perhaps Butcher is setting Aaronson up to be a more important character later, which would be consistent with some previous character introductions. If so, Butcher is going to have to step up his game. His thin characterization of Aaronson leans very hard on the stock Hollywood trope of the alte kacker, the old fart, beloved by secular Jewish scriptwriters working out their daddy issues on screen. Butcher also leans on two pieces of religious paraphernalia and depicts questionable things about both.

When Harry asks if Aaronson is carrying a “real shofar,” Aaronson says yes, and that he had forgotten how hard a shofar is to blow. This is unlikely. A shofar is not a rarely-used bit of ancient history. Especially if he is in the habit of using a shofar as a supernatural weapon, it is probable that Aaronson would be one of the men blowing the shofar each year, nearly every day during the month leading up to the High Holidays. (I am also skeptical about Aaronson carrying his shofar around in a baldric, which I have never seen anyone do in real life, but I suppose it’s not impossible.)

Additionally, Aaronson is described as wearing a “shawl.” Presumably, this is an imprecise reference to a tallit or tallis, often called a “prayer shawl” in English. Though a tallis is generally only worn during prayer, its appearance here is in keeping with Hollywood’s lazy stock depiction of rabbis always wearing a tallis under any circumstances, presumably as a reliable visual shorthand that “This Guy Over Here is a Rabbi” for audiences who might not pick up on less blatant indications. (Off the top of my head, this bit of costuming shows up in Babylon 5, Cabaret, and The Simpsons.)

While in ancient times some Jews would indeed wear a tallis during mundane activities, nowadays I can think of only one reason a real-life Jew might wear a tallis outside of prayer or when walking to synagogue—certain mystical practices are best done wearing a tallis. Ironically, that might even be a decent explanation in-universe, given the context. However, Butcher does not seem to be aware of this, given that nothing else in Aaronson’s presentation suggests (yet?) that he is a mystic.

Obviously, it’s Butcher’s story and he is under no obligation to write his characters with verisimilitude. But as long as he feels like putting in a Jewish character, why not make the character more interesting? Why rely on stock tropes, especially when they are low-quality tropes?

I don’t think Butcher has committed any great sin here. He certainly didn’t do anything as obnoxious as Orson Scott Card’s book Enchantment (which made the main character Jewish yet had his Jewishness play exactly zero role in his character or the plot—other than an in-passing ultimatum that he convert to Christianity, immediately acceded to without any drama or plot significance). But I am interested to see if Aaronson will be playing a greater role in the future, and whether Butcher will write him as a more interesting character in the process.

This does, I think, illustrate some of the pitfalls of writing characters from different cultures. I emphatically do not say that no one should do this, or that this is insensitive or cultural appropriation, or that you need to spend valuable page time genuflecting to whatever historical tragedies might apply. But chances are, you don’t know what you don’t know. And to be a good writer, you should do your research.

Butcher notes that he relies on a group of beta readers to review his drafts; knowing that he was introducing a religious Jew, he would have been well served to find an observant Jewish beta reader, at least for those few paragraphs. You really can find us, even in fandom.

Where are the Healthy Relationships in Modern Fiction?

12 Thursday Sep 2024

Posted by in Self-Actualization, Writing

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Over the years, both as I read and watch popular entertainment and as I put out calls for short stories as an editor, I have noticed a recurring bad habit in some writers: they have their characters speak nastily to each other, with no particular purpose, when they don’t know how to create real story conflict. Rudeness becomes a cheap substitute for drama.

Of late, I’ve started linking this tendency to a more serious one: popular entertainment depicts very few healthy relationships, especially not healthy marriages. Most marriage partners in print or on screen are either infidel, treacherous, unsatisfied, or unfulfilled. This is not to say that writers should instead show relationship partners as blissfully happy all the time; anyone in a successful marriage will say that it takes a lot of work. But little modern fiction shows that work, or successful marriages at all.

Marital conflict is a potent source of drama, to be sure. But fiction is also a source of role models, teaching us what a better life can be like. And at a time when a third of U.S. marriages end in divorce, and growing numbers of people never marry at all, I fear that our stories are only reinforcing this trend. Instead of holding up an ideal of healthy marriage to aspire to, they instead tell us that healthy relationships are rare or impossible. Instead, the audience unconsciously absorbs the idea that it is normal for people to treat each other horribly.

And if people don’t have role models in their own lives for what a healthy relationship looks like, they desperately need to find them in fiction.

Am I overreacting? If I am, then people shouldn’t be told to depict other ideals in fiction, such as racial equality, gender equality, representation of marginalized groups, and the like. If such depictions are so powerful and so needed that we have an entire industry of sensitivity readers to encourage them, then it should concern us when healthy relationships become a marginalized group in our fiction.

Perhaps part of the problem is that it is easier to write damaged relationships than healthy ones. If so, we as writers need to aspire to greater artistic heights—especially when we can teach real people how to be better to others in the process. It does take real effort and skill to make a relationship work. We shouldn’t abandon people to just figure it out by themselves.

(Maybe I need to put out another call for writers?)

Story Conflict, Reader Interest, and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”

24 Friday Nov 2023

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Some months ago I read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my children. I had not read the book since primary school, and it was interesting reading in a number of senses. One of them is that it seems to violate modern advice on how to write a novel—and yet it is a beloved piece of children’s literature regardless. So is the advice wrong? Or incomplete? Or are modern audiences just different than they were decades ago?

Conventional wisdom for authors is that a strong plot is based on a strong conflict or interweaved conflicts—and that each scene needs to advance the conflict in some way. (Or perhaps every other scene, if you follow the Deborah Chester model of action-reflection-action-reflection.) Without conflict, it seems, audiences get bored and simply stop reading.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory seems to follow this model initially. We are introduced to the desperate poverty of the Bucket family, which is juxtaposed against the delectable decadence of a wondrous chocolate factory in the same town. The stakes are raised by the contest of the Golden Tickets, and one by one the tickets are claimed by other children who are truly horrid in their own ways. Charlie, meanwhile, shows his virtue by accepting his suffering without complaint, and doing what little he can to help the rest of the family.

But once Charlie finds the last ticket, the conflict as such seems to vanish. Charlie and Grandpa Joe go from one wonderful experience to the next, passive observers rather than active agents in the story. The other children suffer various unexpected fates, of course, but what exactly is the underlying conflict?

Moreover, the narrative gleefully brings itself to a halt several times, and invites the reader to enjoy such diversions as Square Candies that Look Round, which play zero role in the plot. Especially in such a short book, why does Dahl allow himself such self-indulgence?

Perhaps the more useful way to address the first issue is to reframe it. The story is not presenting a conflict—it is presenting the reader with two mysteries. The first mystery, created by the contrast between Charlie’s selflessness and the other children’s incredible vices, is whether Charlie will receive his just reward, and whether the other children will receive their just punishments. And the story goes on to answer that question in the affirmative, presenting a straightforward morality play as the other children receive punishments that fit the crime, so to speak. Charlie, being a good boy, does not overstep his bounds during the tour and seems to be in no danger.

Or is he? During my reread, I was struck by the depiction of Wonka himself. He seems indifferent to the danger that the other children are placed in, and even seems to relish the thought of Veruca Salt heading off to the incinerator, for example. As their parents understandably go into panic, Wonka blithely promises that “they all come out in the wash.” The net effect is quite sinister—and Dahl is a master of sinister, as you can see in his stories for adults such as “The Landlady.” (One might even be tempted to read Wonka as a devil-figure, with his goatee and his profession of tempting children with sweets. Dahl certainly had the literary chops to be thinking in that direction.)

So the other mystery is what are Wonka’s intentions, especially with Charlie? And this mystery is deepened as the story progresses, until we finally learn that Wonka was looking for a successor. In that one moment of eucatastrophe, both of the key mysteries of the story get resolved in a whoosh of joy.

But what of the Square Candies that Look Round, and other such flourishes? My read is that Dahl was trying to maintain a sense of wonder, even if it didn’t advance the plot per se. Rather than presenting conflict specifically, Dahl’s technique is to provoke interest in general. Conflict is only one tool to provoke interest; mystery and wonder are others.

Slavish focus on plot action was not always mandatory for authors. In earlier eras, authors often would digress into various topics just because they were interesting. (One could think of Victor Hugo’s multiple-chapter celebrations of, for example, the sewer system of Paris.) Today, that sort of thing seems to have fallen out of fashion—with some notable exceptions. Neal Stephenson sometimes gets grief for his unexpected monologues on the proper way to eat Captain Crunch cereal and the like.

I don’t believe that modern audiences are so very different than in former years. Yes, attention spans are shorter, and some readers are conditioned to expect more action. But if, regardless of these challenges, you think you can provoke reader interest with a sparkling piece of writing even if it doesn’t advance story conflict, I would say go for it.

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part II

22 Saturday Jul 2023

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Revolution, State Formation, War, Writing

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In a previous post, I discussed the theory of Jeremy Weinstein on why some rebel groups act in a relatively restrained manner towards civilians, while other groups engage in indiscriminate violence. He argued that much of the difference stemmed from the initial resources available to the group, and how that affected the incentives of people to join the rebels. Poor groups were forced by circumstance to become “activist” groups, that is, to appeal to a base of civilian support and to recruit personnel who were “investors,” i.e. willing to endure short-term sacrifices for the sake of the group’s long-term goals. In order to do that, activist groups were forced to maintain strong discipline to convince the civilian populace that it would protect them from abuses by its soldiers. Poor groups that failed to do so soon withered away from lack of recruits or food.

By contrast, groups that began with access to money and guns from external sponsors, or from control over valuable resources such as drugs or gems, lacked the strategic imperative to seek civilian support. Moreover, they had a strong incentive to expand their membership by offering high pay or other benefits, and therefore attracted “consumer” members, those seeking short-term benefits that flowed from their membership in the rebel group. Groups largely made up of consumers had a much harder time preventing abuse of civilians, since their members were prone to looting or to abducting civilian women or murdering people they disliked for personal reasons. And such groups also had fewer reasons to impose strong discipline: because they had independent resources, they suffered few (initial) disadvantages from tolerating abuses of civilians.

In this post, we will continue Weinstein’s argument and examine the consequences of the previous paragraphs for rebel groups’ governance of civilian areas.

As rebel groups gain control over territory, they have to decide how to handle the civilians living there. Civilians can provide useful resources to rebel groups: information about government activity, new recruits, food, and tax revenue. However, civilians are strategic actors: they can choose to support the rebels or the government, and if neither option seems attractive they will try to flee the area entirely or to resist both sides.

Rebel groups have options in how to build governance structures in response. These can be said to vary on two factors: inclusiveness (AKA participation) and the extent of power sharing. (This is true of regime governments as well, which is not surprising since a rebel group administering territory is basically a kind of government.) A participatory governance regime tries to address the preferences and needs of the populace, while a non-participatory regime treats civilians with indifference at best, as targets of predation at worst. But even participatory governments need not actually share power over decision making, a tempting option in wartime. However, the more that a rebel group shares real power with civilians, the more that civilians will trust the group (or the government in similar circumstances) to uphold its bargains in the future. And in response, rebel groups that build participatory structures of true power sharing are likely to elicit more cooperation from civilian populaces.

Why then doesn’t everybody build such structures? Weinstein argues that the difference hinges on three factors (though he subdivides the factors somewhat differently on pages 171 and 196 of his book without tying the differences to his findings—tsk tsk, Cambridge University Press editors!):

  1. The degree to which the rebel group needs support from the populace;
  2. The extent to which extracting resources from the populace is dependent on civilian productivity; and
  3. The time horizons of the group’s members (i.e. whether they are predominantly “investors” or “consumers”), and the resulting ability of the group to make credible commitments to the populace.

A group that has significant starting resources needs the support of the populace less if at all, and will tend as a result to build non-participatory structures that do not share power. This tendency is exacerbated by the short-term orientation of its members, who want to plunder the populace and seize loot. Even the need to get food from the populace will not moderate this tendency much, since civilians cannot simply stop growing food and will therefore usually have food available to seize.

One complicating wrinkle occurs when the group can extract valuable resources from the populace, but only if the people commit their work to generating such resources. For example, the Shining Path in the Upper Huallaga Valley gained most of their revenue from the drug trade, but they therefore depended on civilians to grow coca. Out of self-interest, then, the rebels built structures that were responsive to civilian interest in having a predictable market for coca leaves, charging fixed taxes and administering public markets. (We would describe the resulting governance structure as inclusive but not featuring true power sharing.) 

A rebel group in this situation could instead choose to enslave civilians en masse, and some try, but this tends to result in civilians fleeing the area or throwing their support to the government in response. Still, the short-term orientation of group members tends to cause the breakdown of the inclusive structures over time, as individual members steal opportunistically. As a result, even non-activist groups that try to take the interests of civilians into account for selfish purposes often fall back on control by force.

An activist rebel group, on the other hand, is dependent on the support of the civilian populace for its very survival. As a result, it will prize the cooperation of civilians, and will tend to create governance structures that both are participatory and share true power, so that civilians will trust them to uphold their bargains. Because activist groups are largely made up of members with longer time horizons (i.e. patient “investors”), the members will submit to such checks on their power for the sake of the group’s strategic goals.

In later posts, we will discuss rebel groups’ strategic use of violence against civilians, and their ability to sustain their membership over time.

******

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Building an Economy: Labor and Motivation

06 Tuesday Jun 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation

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We return at last to our discussion of the Land/Labor/Capital triad of the factors of production (plus entrepreneurship, which is nowadays considered its own factor). We’ll start with a broad overview of Labor as a factor of production, and then zoom into the role of motivation on labor productivity.

Labor is unlike other factors of production like raw materials, for two main reasons:

  • If you don’t use an iron bar today, you can use it tomorrow; but if you don’t work today, that work potential is gone forever. You can work tomorrow, but you could have worked tomorrow even if you also worked today. That is, labor is a perishable resource. (It’s also a flow, not a stock; you have a maximum intensity of work that you can do at a given time, and you can’t “store extra work” for later.)
  • Unlike resources like wheat, or gold, or cars, which are largely interchangeable with other units of the same resource, one person’s labor is not the same as another person’s labor. Our labor is affected by individual skill, training, motivation, and differing opportunities to apply that labor to useful work. Labor is thus heterogeneous. (Indeed, one of the trickiest problems with labor is the difficulty in measuring labor outputs, and in assigning people to where they can do the most good—a great source of frustration when you’re out of a job!)

As we are trying to build a simple but powerful model of a fictional economy for worldbuilding purposes, rather than trying to exactly describe the real world in all its messy glory, we’re going to identify three major factors that influence the labor productivity of a society:

  • Human capital,
  • Physical strength and health, and
  • Culture.

The rest of this post will discuss the impact of culture on labor productivity—and particularly, cultural influences on our motivations for working.

Culture has many effects on labor productivity—for example, whether individual initiative is rewarded or punished, whether people are used to teamwork and obedience or if they resist authority, whether people are diligent and careful in their work or take a slapdash attitude towards maintenance. (The eminent economist Thomas Sowell noted that in the early United States, a Scots-Irish Southern “cracker” would walk around or through a creek running through his property for years on end, without any thought of improving the situation; whereas a Puritan-descended Northerner would almost immediately build a footbridge. This is but one example of the larger pattern identified by Max Weber in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.)

All of that is important, but for now we will focus specifically on motivation. Different people are motivated by money differently, as John Médaille discusses. Médaille, in Towards a Truly Free Market (a fascinating argument for the Catholic-infused economic doctrine of Distributism), points out that employment is unlike most commodities in that “[l]owering wages does not [automatically] increase employment; only the prospect of selling more goods induces employers to take on more hands.” On the flip side, wages cannot rise arbitrarily high; at a certain point, either profit rates will go to zero (causing capital to withdraw from that industry in search of better returns elsewhere), or wages will rise above the capital substitution rate, i.e. the point where it makes more sense to spend money on infrastructure and robots than on people.

Moreover, unlike other commodities where rising prices stimulates more supply, higher wages will not automatically elicit more effort from people. In some cases, it actually reduces effort. Médaille presents three stylized models for worker motivation:

The surfer works only as much as needed. Once he earns enough money to feed himself and see to his other necessities in a minimal way, he stops working and goes surfing for the rest of the week. If you want to elicit more work from a surfer, you would actually need to pay him less. (This tendency occurs in many peasant societies. In 19th-century Germany, the ruling-class Jünkers found that they could increase agricultural yields by suppressing peasant incomes to a level of utter misery, forcing them to work more in order to survive; if they paid the peasants more, on the other hand, yields dropped as the peasants simply drank away the surplus.)

The homebuyer has goals: he wants to achieve a certain level of material comfort (such as buying a home), to take care of the family and achieve some level of social status. Increasing pay will elicit more work from the homebuyer as these goals become achievable—but only to a point. Once pay is high enough and the goals are achieved, the homebuyer will not continue to increase work output and may even start to reduce output at the high end, as other things (leisure time, time with family, social involvement, etc.) become relatively more important than another few thousand dollars in the bank.

The oil rigger, on the other hand, is highly motivated by money and will work more if he gets more of it. At a time in his life where he has few other commitments, the oil rigger is willing to work incredibly hard in exchange for incredible pay, with the plan of benefiting from the accumulated money later in life. The more you pay the oil rigger, the harder he will work, until the point of sheer exhaustion. Cut the oil rigger’s pay, on the other hand, and he will leave in disgust to find better opportunities elsewhere. (See also investment banking, many commission-based jobs, and so on.)

As a result, the productivity of a given society’s workers will be influenced by the relative proportions of Surfers, Homebuyers, and Oil Riggers among its workers. So what determines that proportion?

Ronald Inglehart’s 1997 book Modernization and Postmodernization argued that societies exhibit coherent patterns of cultural development that are partly predictable, based on economic conditions that allow for and stimulate cultural change. This change generally happens across generations; people’s values are usually set by their experiences in childhood and early adolescence, and do not change much as they get older. But in times of rapid economic change, the values of the next generation can differ significantly from those of their parents. Moreover, even though economic conditions make cultural change possible, the resulting cultures also have an independent influence over later economic performance.

A key argument is the scarcity hypothesis: people tend to most value things that are in the shortest supply. In a time of social disorder, people will value authority and tradition; in a time of poverty and starvation, people will value material things. In a time of material abundance but soul-crushing conformity, people will value self-expression and autonomy. And these values persist once they are stamped into a person during adolescence and early adulthood, even as external conditions change.

In this book and in later research, Inglehart argues for two discrete axes of broad cultural variation between societies (and to a much weaker extent, between individuals): traditional versus secular-rational values, and survival versus self-expression values. (He initially thought that these axes were independent of each other, but later research suggested that they correlate strongly.) A society with “traditional/survival” values is a Traditional society, marked by deference to tradition, low economic growth and consequently significant poverty and insecurity, and little importance placed on political rights or personal fulfillment.

In a society with growing wealth, increasing state capacity, and bureaucratic organization, this cultural pattern gives way to the “secular-rational/survival” configuration, which Inglehart calls Materialism. In short, the spread of rational methods and organization is thought to bring true prosperity into reach—all we must do is work hard to achieve it. As a result, traditional authority is displaced by Science, Industry, and the State, and people develop strong work ethics beyond what are typically found in traditional societies. Work brings reward, and so the more you work, the better you are rewarded.

As wealth grows even more, societies reach a point where increasingly hard work no longer yields as much marginal benefit. Material safety is now taken as a given by those who grew up with it; this new generation shifts from a survival mindset to a self-expression mindset, which Inglehart calls Postmaterialism. This generation lacks the focus on material reward that marked their parents’ work ethic; they work in order to express their values, not merely to feed themselves, and are not as willing in the aggregate to spend nights and weekends in the office for the sake of higher pay.

(Obviously, Postmaterialism depends on the material prosperity that enables it. If material conditions suddenly regress, a cohort with Postmaterialist values will struggle to adjust, and the social consequences of this struggle may be dire.)

So as worldbuilders, we can think about the cultural attitudes at play in our invented societies, and how they will influence labor productivity and the economic development of the societies. There are some fun stories that can be told on these themes; can you think of any?

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Trading with Bandits

13 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Credit, Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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Suppose you were a merchant going into the mountains, seeking to trade for rare spices. The local clans know where the spices are; but they would much rather kill you and take all of your trade goods than part with their own valuable spices, even in a profitable exchange. You know this, and they know you know this. Is there any way that you can trade with the locals anyway, and escape with your life and a good profit?

There are a few ways to entice the locals to trade peacefully. One is to invest in military strength to deter attack—hiring bodyguards or improving your own martial skill. Another is to offer the possibility of repeated interactions, meaning that you will keep coming back with more trade goods if each trip goes well. Therefore, if the locals behave peacefully they will end up making far more profit over time than if they simply plunder your caravan. (This strategy only works if the locals trust you to come back, and if their time preference isn’t heavily weighted to short-term gains rather than long-term gains. If they need lots of money today, they might be willing to plunder you and sacrifice the long-term profit.)

Another method was to threaten the bandits with retribution from your allies, even if they are not present at the time. Your own weakness could be counterbalanced by the strength of your allies. This was one of the perks of being a Roman citizen, for example—everyone knew that a Roman was inviolate. If you harmed a Roman, you could expect legionnaires to be knocking on your door in short order. This did not prevent banditry entirely, but it certainly kept it to a much lower level.

All well and good; but let’s spice things up a bit. What if the merchant were the bandit, and the local clan were too weak to resist? And what if the clan had a permanent village, so they couldn’t simply escape from the traveling merchants until they had passed by? The merchants have powerful weapons, and while they wouldn’t mind striking a fair bargain if they needed to, they would cheerfully sack the village and take all of its valuables and people as booty if they thought it worthwhile.

If the weaker party is immobile and cannot escape, the above methods to induce peaceful trade no longer work. By assumption, the village is unable to invest in greater strength. And since the merchants are mobile, the village cannot easily threaten it with retribution from its allies. Repeated interactions are trickier too; merchant expeditions are expensive, and the merchants would want a high enough profit margin to be worth the bother.

So what is there to do?

I shamelessly stole the title of this post from the journal article it is based on, by Peter Leeson. Leeson, who would later enjoy some fame for his work on the economics of pirate ships, investigated our second case with the dangerous merchants and weak village, and gained some insights by looking at trading patterns in Central Africa. There, trade networks would connect producer villages deep in the interior with the European trade outposts on the coasts. The producer villages were at constant risk of being attacked by the merchant caravans, so they developed two major strategies to protect themselves.

The first strategy, paradoxically enough, was to demand that the merchants paid their side of the bargain upfront, and extend credit to the village. The village would then provide its own goods to the merchants the next time they came by. This allowed the village to reduce its stores of plunderable goods during the merchants’ first visit, since they wouldn’t need to pay right away. That way, the merchants would have less reason to plunder the village, since there would be little booty to plunder. And when the merchants came back, they had already paid for their goods and would have little incentive to use violence—unless the village tried to cheat them and withhold payment.

Since the merchants were stronger than the village, they could safely extend credit and know that they could punish the village for cheating if they needed to. (The reverse would not have been true; the village could not dare pay goods up front—that is, lend money—to the merchants, because they could not possibly enforce the bargain.) And the merchants had an incentive to play along: if the village didn’t think it was safe to stockpile its trade goods, it would simply produce no goods for trade and only enough to subsist on. That would make it unprofitable for traveling merchants to come all the way out and plunder them, discouraging violence.

But there was still a problem: what if the village makes a bargain with one set of merchants, then produces the trade goods that it owes, only to be attacked by another set of merchants?

To mitigate this risk, the village would expect the merchants that it bargained with to protect the village from other merchants. That is, part of what the village was trading for was protection. It was worth it for the merchants; they would lose out if their precious trade goods were stolen by some other group of merchants.

Still, the whole business was touch and go. For the system to work as described, the merchants had to be sufficiently patient to prefer long-term riches to short-term plunder, and be able to protect the village and enforce exclusivity against other merchants—and the village had to be able to reduce its stock of trade goods to unprofitable levels for the merchant, to make plundering a poor proposition and induce the merchant to offer credit. If the village’s trade goods were of the sort that was difficult to deplete or hide (such as livestock, or slaves or people who might be enslaved), then the village would have a difficult time indeed avoiding attack.

****

In your own worldbuilding, you might not necessarily have these specific situations. But the concepts involved are delicious for generating story conflict. Stakes are high, incentives can balance on the edge of a knife, and much will depend on the characters involved. A good deal can be messed up by an impatient character, or implacable enemies might recognize an alignment of interests that can encourage the first tentative steps toward peace.

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

War as Negotiation

21 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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Suppose that Country A and Country B are having some sort of crisis, and Country A threatens to invade unless it gets its way. (A common occurrence, sadly.) But wars are costly, even if you win. Mobilizing your army diverts resources away from other critical activities, such as harvesting crops for the year. Battle casualties represent huge losses of human talent and labor. And every time you fight a war, you run the risk of losing. That all being the case, why would anyone decide to fight a war? And when?

That is, we have to explain four things: the choice of Country A to threaten war, the choice of Country B not to submit, the choice of either country to actually start the war, and the choice of the other country not to simply surrender and save itself the trouble of fighting.

There are many ways of explaining this sequence. But one powerful model to use, because it is so flexible and easily covers a whole range of situations, is the bargaining model of war developed by James Fearon and others in that vein.

The key variables of this model are:

  • The cost of fighting, for each side;
  • The total potential benefits of winning; and
  • The likelihood of each side winning.

Essentially, if you know for a fact that you are likely to win, and that the benefits of winning exceed the cost of fighting, you are very likely to fight—and the other side is very likely to back down.

For example, suppose that you lead a company of 100 mercenaries, and you have the chance to attack a gold mine held by 30 opposing mercenaries. If you do, you expect to lose 15 of your troops, but you would gain the lucrative gold mine and you would very likely be able to keep it. Given that, chances are you’re going to attack the gold mine, even at the cost of some of your troops. And knowing this, the 30 mercenaries are likely to retreat or surrender before you attack, because it is pointless to fight and die when they know they would lose.

On the other hand, the losing mercenaries know that they could kill 15 of your troops if they do fight, and they know that you know it too. So they could negotiate with you for a settlement where they are allowed to take some amount of gold with them as they go—say, the equivalent of 10 mercenaries. So even though they would lose, the weaker side has an incentive to push for some share of the loot before they capitulate.

War thus becomes a bargaining process, where the two sides are essentially negotiating over how to split up the stakes of a war.

If so, why do people fight wars at all? Why not tally up opposing forces, figure out who would win and how much the net profit would be, negotiate some sort of settlement where the stronger party gets the same or greater profit and the weaker party is left with something, and avoid all the messy killing and burning and looting?

The most common reason is uncertainty. In the real world, it is often difficult to know who would win a war. It is also difficult to know how costly a war would be, and even what the benefits would be of winning. As a result, says the theory, any factor that increases uncertainty would tend to make war more likely, because each side hopes that it will end up being worth it to fight. And even if one side knows it would lose, the other side might be so overconfident that it asks for far too much of the “loot”; the weaker party may then decide to fight anyway, in hopes of keeping at least some of what it has.

And any factor that increases certainty would tend to discourage war. If the costs and benefits of war are better known, both parties will recognize when a war would be wasteful—or when the benefits of fighting are so obvious that the winning side cannot be deterred. And of course, if it is obvious who would win a war, the weaker side is likely to capitulate to save itself greater loss; the stronger side, too, is unlikely to demand too much, since it knows the point at which the other side would fight regardless. So, many conflicts would be avoided because the game is not worth the candle, and many others would end with the sides negotiating some sort of settlement, without fighting.

A second reason for war is if the “loot” cannot be split up between the sides. For example, in a war of extermination, there is simply no option of a settlement; you win, or you die. Less drastically, if two countries are fighting over control of a strategic mountain pass, there is no way to share the pass; one side is going to end up in control, and the other side will be shut out. So the stakes are higher, and there is less opportunity to negotiate a settlement.

Finally, what if you should be able to negotiate a settlement, but you don’t trust the other side to keep it? Or you can’t convince the other side that you can be trusted? Then it becomes much harder to negotiate an end to the crisis, and much easier (so to speak) to go to war instead. For example, rebel forces negotiating with a government have a very hard time coming to an agreement. Each side fears that any concessions will simply make the other side stronger; and often, the rebel forces are being supported by a rival country, which will sometimes pressure the rebels to keep fighting even when they want to stop (or vice versa).

That’s the basic model. It can be elaborated on in many ways, such as adding concerns about reputation or honor in a repeated game. (If you surrender once, maybe countries can bully you into submission over and over again in the future. So the long-term costs of surrender may end up being much higher that the immediate costs of fighting, all things considered, even if you know you will lose.)

So in your fiction, if you want to set up the conditions for a jolly old war, these are the key points to adjust: the cost of fighting, the prize for winning and whether it can be shared, the relative strength of the sides, the ability of each side to commit to a settlement, and the uncertainty of each side about any of the foregoing. A relatively simple model, and quite powerful—my favorite kind of writing tool!

******

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. I am now moving my attention to the planned second and third books in this series; the subject matter of this post fits into the third book, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

War in Fantasy Fiction

08 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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The stories we write reflect our own beliefs of the world. If our beliefs change, that has the effect of changing the stories we write. This is particularly noticeable when thinking about how our stories handle war.

Nowadays, most fantasy or sci-fi stories feature only a few different types of wars:

  • The no-alternative war against some life-destroying calamity (such as Shai’tan in the Wheel of Time series, Ruin in the Mistborn series, or the Flood in Halo).
  • The defensive war against a ruthless invading empire, that has no reason for its invasion other than sheer lust for conquest.
  • The rebellion against an Evil Overlord who murders peasants for the lulz.
  • The seemingly noble war that was actually orchestrated by selfish interests, such as weapons dealers or oil companies (or their fantastical equivalents).

All four of these are based on the understanding that most wars are wrong and undesirable. To be heroic, it seems, a fictional war needs to be the last resort; where it is not, the protagonists are typically manipulated into war by the true villain, and the revelation of this perfidy sets off the true struggle, often featuring former enemies allying against their common foe. (This last category seems a particular favorite in American media, especially in the wake of Vietnam and Iraq.)

But the core understanding that these stories imply—that most war is wrong—would have baffled people living in earlier ages. Not very long ago, it was considered perfectly reasonable for Louis XIV to invade his neighbors for the sole purpose of magnifying his own glory, or for Napoleon to invade multiple continents for the same reason. In an earlier age, Aristotle assumed that wars were usually unjust when fought between fellow Greeks, but were always just when fighting against outsiders, for any reason.

In many tribal societies, fighting neighbors was the traditional way to gain respect or take plunder; often, such fighting had elements of a sports contest, with ceremonial weapons and rules that rewarded personal bravery rather than sheer killing efficiency. (In the Iliad, Paris was seen as effeminate and dishonorable because he used a bow, rather than fighting enemies face-to-face with spear and sword. Many American Indian societies would honor warriors who “counted coup” on their enemies—touching them in battle without killing them.)

Our modern dislike of war is obviously preferable to the older glorification of it, in the real world. But for fantasy or sci-fi writers, it is worth thinking about how people in your worlds might view war differently. Otherwise, you might unthinkingly base your story on a view of war that doesn’t really fit with the rest of your worldbuilding, and would seem anachronistic.

Thucydides, the famous chronicler of the Second Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, writes that while some wars are justified on noble grounds, such as enforcing justice against enemies who break oaths or otherwise violate norms, most wars are ultimately motivated by three things: fear, honor, and interest.

Fear is fairly easy to understand. You fear that your enemy will harm you now or in the future; so you either defend against an immediate attack, or you begin a preventative war on your own terms while your enemy has not reached its full strength. The tricky bit here is that fear is based on your perceptions; among the reasons that preventative war is frowned on today is that sometimes, countries assume that a neighbor poses a threat when the neighbor actually had no intention of harming them.

Interest too is not difficult to see. Many countries seek to build empires, to plunder their neighbors and enrich themselves. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in order to seize its rich oilfields; Japan invaded Indonesia, in part, to secure its oilfields since Japan had little domestic oil production. Individuals too have interests, as we know.

Honor, on the other hand, is perhaps the hardest concept for us moderns to understand, or appreciate why people would fight and die for it. Yet most wars in history probably were motivated by honor more than concrete interests.

Why did Alexander the Great feel driven to conquer the world? And why would his army follow him? Because they sought glory that would last throughout the centuries (and it worked, since we still remember them today!). But remember that glory was important for the Greeks; their version of the afterlife, Hades, was a place of pale shades with little reward and punishment for moral behavior (as most of us today are used to). The Greeks believed that enduring glory, kleos, was perhaps the most worthwhile thing to strive for in life, since that was all that would last once you were dead. Glory was worth dying for, and more importantly was worth killing for.

More concretely, honor can have practical importance. In dangerous settings, a nation that does not fight to defend its honor will soon be bullied into subservience by its neighbors. Displaying your willingness to fight even over trivial offenses can sometimes prevent wars, because it signals to hungry neighbors that you will not be cowed.

For authors, remembering that people have many reasons to fight wars, depending on the moral and political calculations of the setting, can open up space for fresh and interesting stories. If you don’t want to write stories featuring amoral war, there’s nothing forcing you to do so; but people have all sorts of motives for everything they do, war is no exception, and the stories that can emerge from that can be fun.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. I am now moving my attention to the planned second and third books in this series; the subject matter of this post fits into the third book, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Writing Exercises on “Keeping Power”

18 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

This exercise is meant to apply to concepts of this post, which discusses a flexible model for quickly sketching out the key political conflicts in your setting—focusing on who the ruler must keep happy in order to stay in power. If you like the exercises below and want to use them, first read the linked post and then come back.

  1. Spend five minutes thinking about your setting, then list all the kinds of people who have any influence at all on who the leader is. Are they powerful generals? Wealthy merchants? Priests? Voters in a democracy? Voters in an oligarchy or stratified society? Nobles? Regional governors? Board directors or shareholders of a corporation? This is the selectorate.
  2. Of all those people, what is the minimum level of support a leader would need to stay in power? How many different ways are there to put together such a support coalition?
  3. What could a leader offer his/her coalition members to keep them loyal? How could the leader threaten them?
  4. If a coalition member is disloyal, how easily could the member be replaced by the leader with another member of the selectorate?
  1. If the selectorate is unhappy with the leader, how easily could a new support coalition be built behind someone else?
  2. How might policies that favor the support coalition harm people outside of it? (For example, taxing the populace and giving a subsidy to coalition members.) How might potential policies to benefit outsiders harm members of the coalition, and thus be rejected? (For example, building a port that would make grain cheaper, when your supporters are rich landowners who sell grain.)
  3. How could new classes of people join the selectorate? (For example, women gaining the right to vote.) Who would benefit from such a change?
  4. How could existing classes of people lose their place in the selectorate? (For example, a democracy becoming a dictatorship; or powerful religious leaders being displaced by a religious purge.) Who would benefit from such a change?
  5. What might change to allow the leader to need fewer supporters, or to force the leader to seek more supporters?
  6. Looking at all the possibilities for conflict that you listed above, which has the most resonance for the story you want to tell?

Writing Exercises for Social Orders

07 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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This exercise is meant to apply the concepts from this post, which discusses the tensions between wealth and power and how they end up shaping the entire structure of society. If you like the exercises below and want to use them, read the linked post first and then come back.

  1. Spend five minutes and list all the forms of power—loosely defined, for our purposes, as both the ability to harm people and break things, and the ability to force other people to do what you want—in your setting. Fighting ability, magical power, or command over a band of robbers count; what else?
  2. Spend five minutes and list all desirable goods in your setting. Money or valuables count, but so would fame, social status, immortality, attractive romantic partners, et cetera.
  3. For our purposes, let’s define all of the above as “wealth.” For each relevant type of wealth, how might someone use different forms of power to get more wealth? List as many possibilities as you can.
  4. Likewise, for each type of power, how might someone translate different forms of wealth into more power?
  5. Now, imagine that centuries pass in which powerful people try to gain wealth, and wealthy people try to gain power. List at least five scenarios for how the society might end up looking. If a given group of people became stronger over time, who else would be threatened? How might they react? Who would win? Imagine as many possible social conflicts that you can, vary the outcomes, and list them all.
  6. Of all the ideas you’ve listed, which have the most resonance for the story you want to tell?