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Trading with Bandits

13 Sunday Nov 2022

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

bandits, fiction, Peter Leeson, politics, worldbuilding, writing

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!)

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War as Negotiation

21 Sunday Nov 2021

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

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bargaining model of war, Fantasy, Fearon, fiction, war, worldbuilding, writing

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 Oren Litwin in Better Fantasy, Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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fiction, politics, war, worldbuilding, writing

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.

*****

(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 Oren Litwin in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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fiction, politics, worldbuilding, writing

(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 Oren Litwin in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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fiction, Institutions, politics, State Formation, worldbuilding, writing

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?

Writing Exercises for Stories with Foraging Bands

01 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Better Fantasy, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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fiction, worldbuilding, writing, writing exercise, Writing prompt

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

This is meant to accompany this post about egalitarian bands and this post about class conflict. If you like the exercises below, read those posts before working through them.

Let’s say you have an idea for a story that involves a society of people who don’t have a fixed home. Perhaps they are wandering cattle-herders, or perhaps they forage for roots and berries in the jungle, or perhaps they are wandering space-gypsies who survive off of volatile gases harvested with ramscoops. In any case, these exercises should help you flesh out your idea consistently, and understand how it can drive conflict and story dynamism.

  1. Spend a few minutes and list five possible reasons why your band chooses not to have a fixed home. (You don’t have to use all five in the actual story. Brainstorm.)
  2. What forms of wealth might be different between people? Try to list at least three. Does a given form of wealth tend to be dissipated over time, via feasting or gifting or divisions between heirs or another means? Or does it build on itself?
  3. What special status might someone in the band (or some family) have that others do not? Try to list at least three, remembering that not all special statuses need be in the same family. (For example, one family might be chiefs, another might be shamans, another might have the hereditary right to guard the Sacred Hospitality Blanket, and so on.) How might such status be gained or lost?
  4. How does the band handle internal conflict? Are there mechanisms for doing this? Would conflict threaten to tear apart the band? What is at stake?
  5. Why might outsiders come into conflict with your band? List five possible reasons. (“We raid their settlements and take slaves and plunder” is an acceptable reason! So is “They want to wear our sparkly purple skin as trophies.” What else?)
  6. Why does having a wandering band fit in this story? What aspect of such a band fits the theme or the conflict?

Suggestions for more? Let me know in the comments!

Wealth, Power, and Social Orders

26 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by Oren Litwin in Economics, History, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Uncategorized, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

fiction, government, social orders, State Formation, worldbuilding, writing

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

Suppose there were two people on a desert island. One owns a crate of food; the other owns a gun. What is going to happen?

Very shortly, the person with the gun is going to also “own” the food; the other person might be dead, or might be reduced to the level of a slave. (In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood, “There are two kinds of people in this world…”)

This illustrates the fundamental problem of property’s relationship to power: if an actor has a lot of power but little wealth, it will often try to gain more wealth through violence. If an actor has much wealth but little power, it will often try to use its wealth to gain power—if only for self-defense! And this dynamic has played out throughout history, leading to endless cycles of bloodshed and misery.

To survive, as North, Wallis, and Weingast (NWW) argue, groups of people need to come up with some solution to this danger—a way to align the interests of those who have wealth and those who have power. This is called a social order.

NWW identify three kinds of social orders: the foraging social order, the limited-access or “natural” social order, and the open-access social order. Foraging bands deal with the problem of wealth and power very simply: group members have roughly equal wealth, physical strength, and social status. There is relatively little incentive to take more with violence, as the other group members will unite to destroy you.

As we will discuss fully at another time, egalitarian bands use several techniques to enforce social equality: malicious gossip, mandatory gift-giving, and the threat of splitting the group if one faction becomes too powerful, to mention a few. However, these methods do not guarantee success; it often happens that a respected chief is able to accumulate enough personal loyalty, wealth, and prestige that he can gain lasting control over the group, which is passed on to his descendants.

That brings us to the limited-access order, which has been the predominant mode of social organization throughout the history of states. In a nutshell, those with power are also given control over wealth as a consequence, in a tacit agreement between elites in order to minimize conflict between them. In the words of NWW, “By manipulating privilege, interests are created that limit violence.” The most obvious example was European feudalism, in which brigands with large armies “went legit” and set themselves up as landed aristocrats, along with supporting networks of bureaucrats and clergy to help them run things. As NWW put it, “In all natural states, economics is politics by other means: economic and political systems are closely enmeshed, along with religious, military, and educational systems.” One could also look at Soviet-style communism, in which wealth flowed to the regime leaders by virtue of their control over the military and police apparatus.

A key aspect of the natural order was that impersonal law and procedural equality did not exist. The regime was not a neutral arbiter of people’s social and commercial disputes; it existed to defend the privileges of the ruling coalition as a class, and thus your treatment by the regime depended on your personal relationship with the ruler or other elites. As NWW put it, “Personal relationships, who one is and who one knows, form the basis for social organization and constitute the arena for individual interaction, particularly personal relationships among powerful individuals.” This limited the ability for people to form complex organizations, in business or society more generally: if they could not settle disputes internally, the state would not do the job for them and the organization would collapse.

Partly, this was by design. Elites protected the value of their “rents” by deliberately restricting the ability of those outside the regime to organize groups of people. It may seem strange to us, in our society of mass organizations, but in the feudal era it was tantamount to treason to organize an independent guild of craftsman outside of the regime-sanctioned guild, or to have a town of people who swore loyalty oaths to each other. That was why English entrepreneurs needed to petition the Crown for the right to form a joint-stock corporation, for example. And in Communist or Fascist regimes, even such mundane organizations as chess clubs needed to be approved by the regime. In this way, a limited-access regime is able to retain control over economic activity and take its cut, and to prevent possible competitors from arising via new organized groups in the populace.

Again, the natural order is the most prevalent throughout history. It is almost inevitable for those with power to demand wealth, for those with wealth to seek access to power, for the two classes of people to become incestuously intertwined and then to use their power to suppress competition. Think of the relationships in many Latin American countries between oligarchs and generals. Think of the paramount business associations and unions found in much of Western Europe, organized and maintained by the state, which have the effect of protecting incumbents and squelching entrepreneurialism.

The biggest problem with the natural order, however, is that it is fundamentally unstable. If someone becomes too powerful or too wealthy too quickly, suddenly there is a mismatch between what he has and what he (or others) might want. This generally leads to a breakdown of the delicate balance of power in the regime, culminating in violence or even civil war. This is why, argue NWW, autocratic regimes tend to underperform democracies in economic growth over time: because their relatively better performance during good times is outweighed by frequent destructive episodes of civil war and social breakdown.

(This is a crucial reason why dictators need to gain control over their countries’ wealth: not merely out of greed, but to protect themselves from rich competitors. Regime outsiders who strike it rich represent a deadly threat to the regime.)

The third form of social order, the open-access order, is a historical anomaly: it first emerged only a few centuries ago in Britain, as elites gradually transformed their particular privileges into general rights (through a long and subtle process that NWW discuss in detail). This does not merely mean democracy, though Britain and the United States are the chief examples. In the open-access order, elites have no special privileges in law, and military power is removed from partisan politics or the extortion of wealth, becoming a neutral enforcer of the political system; it stays neutral because no single political or business leader has the opportunity to bring it under his or her control.

What distinguishes the open-access order, and what makes it work, is that anyone is allowed to enter politics or business, and to organize companies or political parties or activist groups without the permission of the regime. And you need both parts: political freedom is protected by economic dynamism, as new companies challenge the old leaders and displace them before they get too cozy with the government. Economic freedom is protected by electoral competition and turnover in political leadership, which makes policies that benefit the mass populace relatively more attractive to ambitious politicians compared to policies that benefit a handful of powerful companies. (See the post on selectorate theory.) NWW call this the “double balance.”

It should be noted, however, that for all its achievements the open-access order is profoundly fragile and in danger of backsliding into a natural regime. This can happen in either of two ways (or both simultaneously). First is for the government to become too powerful relative to the economy, in which case it can throttle free competition. Second is for individual businesses to become too wealthy and influential compared to their competitors or the government, which leads businesses and governments to build corrupt relationships with each other, with businesses gaining special privileges and returning the favor by keeping favored politicians in power. To a degree, such backsliding is always present (the military-industrial complex comes to mind, as does the growing political power of Google, Amazon, and Facebook). And the natural tendency is for such collusion to accumulate like layers of sediment over time.

As Mancur Olson warns in his The Rise and Decline of Nations, it is always easier to organize a small group of powerful actors to lobby government for some subsidy, than it is for the mass of the citizens to organize against them. This is because the average person is barely affected by the average subsidy and won’t bother to get involved, whereas the beneficiaries have a great deal to gain. Over time, this tendency results in a steady calcification of the economy and the government, as interest groups accumulate to feast on the populace’s wealth through direct or indirect means. The only way to prevent such decline, Olson suggests mordantly, is for an invading army to sweep away the existing corrupt relationships.

Fortunately, this invasion can be metaphorical. David P. Goldman (AKA “Spengler”) argues that American corruption declined in the 1980s, as the new tech industry displaced the existing corporate titans despite their close relations with government. The same can happen in the political sphere, if a determined political faction dismantles corrupt bargains and is rewarded electorally for it. That is the strength of the open-access system.

But it remains fragile. In the United States, we ought to be alarmed by the unprecedented decline in new business formation in the past decade, and the manner in today’s tech oligarchy is actively stifling competition—even as they exert themselves in the political sphere.

As authors, how can we use these concepts? Here are some points of conflict: growing power brings the temptation to take the wealth of others. Growing wealth attracts violent vultures, or inspires the wealthy to gain power as well. Sudden shifts in power and wealth will threaten to destabilize the balance of power in a society, with war as a likely result. (A brief glance at the history of the Congo will provide many depressing examples.) These tendencies are rich ore for story conflict, and the thoughtful author can build powerful plots from them.

****

(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!)

So, About That How-To Book on Politics…

06 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by Oren Litwin in Better Fantasy, Politics, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Fantasy, fiction, politics, worldbuilding, writing

[UPDATE: The first volume is published! Check it out.]

Some years ago, I blogged about my plan to write a book about politics for writers, filling a gap in the existing materials on worldbuilding. Most writing teachers focus on details such as the structure of the nobility, or the form of government, or other political features that are actually secondary to the fundamental questions of power, rule, and conflict. I hoped that, using my scholarly background in political science, I could create a guide that succinctly gave authors a powerful tool to generate stories from political conflict.

So what happened?

In short, I’m very badly stuck on how to structure the book.

Basically, there are a series of key concepts that underpin politics: geography, technology (especially weapons technology), the related issue of legibility (how easily a ruler can monitor and tax the peasants), power projection, legitimacy and ideology, and the social order (how wealth and power coexist with each other), to name just a few. Starting with those, you can very quickly drill down to the fundamental type of story you want to tell, and design your world to facilitate that. The problem is that all of these concepts tend to interpenetrate, in a big gnarly ball of connections shooting every which way.

So in trying to essentially give a crash course on graduate-level PoliSci, where does one start?

And if someone wants a checklist for use in worldbuilding, what order would you follow?

I honestly don’t know. But if I keep dithering, the book will never get written, and all you aspiring worldbuilders will be left adrift in a sea of bad fantasy-kingdom pastiches. (Horrors!) My current plan, therefore, is to write blog posts about the various fundamental concepts piecemeal, without worrying overmuch about their order or relationship to each other. I will be collecting these posts, and past posts on related topics, in a new page called Politics for Worldbuilders, which you can see in the top of the blog.

Enjoy!

(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!)

The Odds Are Against Us—An Anthology of Military Fiction

21 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by Oren Litwin in Self-Promotion, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

anthology, edited anthology, fiction, Kickstarter, military fiction, publishing, request for submissions, Self-publishing, short stories, short story, short story anthology

Last month, I put out a request for submissions for an anthology of short military fiction. Now, the time has come. The first three authors have been selected, and the Kickstarter project is live!

We’re still accepting story submissions until April 1. The more money gets raised, the more that chosen authors will be paid, and the more stories we can publish. Join me to make this a reality!soldiers-2b

We Need Your Short Stories!

01 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by Oren Litwin in Self-Promotion, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anthology, aspiring author, call for submissions, fiction, Military, military fiction, NaNoWriMo, national novel writing month, short stories, short story, writing, writing contest

If you have visited this blog since the new year began, you might have noticed a new series of pages in the top menu. It’s part of a new concept I would dearly like to develop, which should provide more opportunities for authors to find paying work as well as giving readers more influence over the books that get written. I blogged about audience-driven book writing at the end of December, and now you can join with me to make the concept a reality.

I am accepting submissions for a new short-story anthology in the genre of military fiction (chosen mostly because it seemed to be underserved, compared to its reader base). The deadline for submission is March 1. Stories should be between 3,500 and 7,000 words long. Selected authors will be paid for publication rights. And in a few weeks, I will be launching a Kickstarter project to raise the funding for publication.

If you want to learn more about submitting your writing, check out the full description and short-story requirements here. And if you want to be notified when the Kickstarter project goes live (whether you are an author or a reader), sign up here. (If you want to suggest a new genre for the next anthology, please do so in the comments below.)

The full vision is for groups of readers to pool their funding, and pay authors to produce the works that they want to read. This anthology is Step One towards fully realizing that vision. For it to work, we need your stories—your talent, your craft, the vivid characters and gripping situations that you want to show the world.

If you have friends who are authors, or who are readers, please share this post and let them know of this opportunity. Again, this is a paying gig—and if the Kickstarter goes well, we may be able to publish stories from more authors than the minimum, making the anthology even more attractive for readers. This is not a zero-sum game; there are no limits. The more people who join together, the more that everybody wins.

Show the world what you can do.

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