--- Steven Brust <skzb at dreamcafe.com> wrote: > Let's say Vlad earns $1500 imperials. In our terms, > that would be about $25,000. [example deleted] > You see the problem? Things don't match up. That would follow from (1) different marginal costs for labor and capital in Dragaera (as well as different technologies) and (2) an absence of trade between Dragaera and the U.S. Both seem reasonable assumptions. It makes me think about another question, which is: what does the Dragaeran economy at the time of the Vlad series look like? There are two observations that seem hard to reconcile: 1. In _Orca_, Kiera describes to Vlad the trouble caused by the death of Fyres. This trouble looks remarkably like the difficulties recently experienced by the U.S. savings & loan industry. Part of the trouble is caused by (or, perhaps more accurately, not prevented by) the Imperial system of banking regulation. From the discussion it seems that many people are borrowing money from many other people on a scale that suggests a functioning and liquid capital market. 2. If Dragaera has anything that looks like real-world capital-intensive industries -- either in the agricultural or manufacturing sectors -- Vlad hasn't mentioned it. In _Phoenix_, Verra tells Vlad in essence that the revolutionaries are working off a theory of society that does not correspond to the present state of the Empire. (Crossreferencing with what we know about the arrival of humanity on Dragaera -- and here I am thinking about the Serioli in _Dragon_ and Sethra in _Issola_ -- maybe humans brought that kind of social theory with them when they came.) Since the theory of society looks an awful lot like Marxism, we might guess that Dragaera does not look much like industrial capitalism, which corresponds most of what we've heard about it. So where is the capital generated by the bankers going? Someone has to be using it to generate a return, or no one would bother investing it. Some of it is going to what looks like a fairly large transportation industry -- Kiera's remarks about the importance of trade (which she describes primarily in terms of exchange of raw materials) to the Empire, and the lime from one area used to make bricks in another, may indicate that Dragaeran methods of production involve proportionally more effort spent on moving things from one place to another than ours do. Some of it -- a lot of it, probably -- is going to fund Imperial borrowing. (There is a pretty interesting discussion of Imperial finances in the early part of _Five Hundred Years After_, but of course the Interregnum would have produced drastic economic changes, along with changes in every other part of Dragaeran society.) Unless the economy is growing fast, though, the Empire won't be able to offer a particularly generous rate of return on its equivalent of Treasury bills; and if the Empire can't offer a good return, its borrowing shouldn't be able to support the kind of market that Kiera describes in _Orca_. There's also sorcery, of course. It may be that the Dragaeran society is relatively capital-intensive because it spends huge amounts of resources on training and maintaining sorcerers -- and according to Vlad at various times, almost everyone is now a sorcerer. So Dragaera has a system involving large investments in human capital? Or maybe the unexplained capital investments are somewhere else, somewhere that Vlad hasn't described because he isn't interested in it. One place to look for the answers to these would be the lives of the Houses described as bourgeois -- Jhegaala, I think, and Chreotha, and maybe a few others -- which are the ones Vlad very rarely talks about. -- Greg Rapawy __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com