For what it’s worth (which isn’t much), a previous description of Navabharata had the following to say about the history:
History to Imperial contact
Navabharata was settled by an undercapitalised program of the Indian government, and suffered early economic collapse. Struggling to recover, in 2205 it was conquered by a mercenary force paid by the tycoon Dewan Daresingh, who made himself Kaisar. Population spread, technology declined, and the colony split up into a bewildering jigsaw of maharajates, rajates, nawabies, and aristocratic republics.
Reintegration
An Eichberger ship visited Navabharata in 297 PDT but found little of commerial interest. From 310 or so adventurers from Tau Ceti and other advanced colonies began using their technological edge to make themselves kings on Navabharata. The most notorious was Sekandar Dev, who attempted with mercenary troops and imported weapons. to conquer the whole planet from 317. In 328 Sekandar Dev was murdered and supplanted by a group from Orinoco who used advanced medicine etc. to pass themselves off as gods. This ploy was widely imitated, and from 346–380 Navabharata was racked by wars between rival oantheons using high-tech weapons. 1–2 million people were killed with fusion weapons, besides nearly 100 million dying in accidentally-introduced plagues, and 50 million in famines resulting from war and the introduction of plant diseases and pests.
Intervention by the Eichberger Foundation from 375 cut off the importation of weapons and mercenaries and the further immigration of would-be gods. Navabharata was isolated during the Formation Wars, during which time the ‘gods’ settled down to form a patchwork of aristocratic states, and attempts at global conquest more-or-less ceased.
Recent history
Each of the major pantheons on Navabharata was represented at the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Luna, but they were persuaded to form a federation and sign as one colony. On the delegates return to Navabharata in 461 it took fifteen years to settle the terms on which the various pantheons would be represented on the Council of the Realm, and on which the chairmanship should rotate. The upshot has been a very weak central government, with few powers beyond appointing the Imperial judges. As far as colonial jurisdiction is concerned, 17 maharajahs, 119 rajahs, and 229 nawabs are virtually independent.
The idea there was that Navabharata de-modernised for 450 years before the conquerors started carving out petty kingdoms for themselves with high-tech gewgaws, and that the god gambit was a ploy by one group that was successful for tactical and logistical reasons but that were imitated. Perhaps the other ruling groups had to apotheose to resist, perhaps it was just a fad. It doesn’t matter which.
Yes, and just as surely people have guilty secrets.
(“Values” and “Taboos” need a bit of polishing. I’m not happy that I am expressing myself effectively in describing Navabharata’s other shames. A Navabharatan becomes ashamed/angry if he is made to give something without getting a quid pro quo, or if he has been trespassed against without retaliating.)
Glancing over those statistics, I’m curious: What is the measure of “equality” and how is it applied game mechanically, if it is? Just looking at the matter narrativistically, I’m seeing a planet where a small elite portray themselves as literal gods (or maybe not, depending on translation!) and rule their petty theocracies with near-total autonomy being rated as 0.32, and I’m not sure that an equality of, say, 0.032 would look like.
In “On the Genealogy of Morals,” part II, Nietzsche attributes the origins of justice to the early generalization “Everything has its price; all things can be paid for”—with the price of injuring someone being that other people will make you suffer.
“Equality” is one minus the Gini coefficient of household income per household member after taxes and transfers. A value of 0 would represent an infinitesimal proportion of people getting all the income, and 1 would represent everyone having the same income. 0.32 is a very small value: the most unequal countries on Earth these days have values of about 0.38, and those are very undeveloped countries in Africa, in the South Africa to Botswana range.
It is strictly an economic measure, hence its placement in the table. It does not (directly) take social or political inequality into account (though those do of course produce economic inequality, which does get included).
P.S. It looks as though the USA has an “equality” of about 0.62. So the get the equivalent of Navabharata you could take half of the income from every family in America and give it all to whomever currently has the most income.
Suppose that 99% of the population all had the same income, and that the remaining 1% each had 200 times as much. The Gini coefficient of income would be 0.34.
On one hand, I’m not surprised to see you using the Gini coefficient; it’s one that an economist would naturally think of. On the other hand, I’m curious as to how you arrived at that rating for Navabharata and more generally how “equality” is determined when you’re creating inhabited planets. On the gripping hand, I’m even more curious about whether you’ve worked out a way to apply the index game mechanically.
Well, eyeballing it might easily be as accurate as most game mechanical approaches.
What I kind of would like now is maybe something akin to the GURPS CR system, with “equality” scores from 0 to 6, and sketches of the resulting societies. So for example ER 4 would be a country like the United States. Of course the extremes would be more Platonic ideals than actual social patterns: a godking served by a vast army of destitute servants, or a hivelike communism, maybe. (Though you could turn the first into the second very easily by removing the godking, or replacing them with the collective personality of The State or The People.)
Addendum: Dividing the percentages up at 91.67, 75.00, 58.33, 41.67, 25.00, and 8.33, I see that the world basically splits up into three groups: Southern Africa, the less developed world, and the more developed world. Iceland and Ukraine almost make it over the edge into a fourth group. On the other hand, the US Census Bureau gives the US a much higher Gini, with only two states falling into what I’m calling the “developed countries” range: Utah and Alaska. It’s curious that the World Bank and Census Bureau estimates are so different; I wonder how their methodologies differ?
You have to be very wary of the fact that the Gini coefficient is a unique characteristic of a distribution, not of an economy. You could calculate a Gini coefficient of the number of hairs on people’s heads. Very commonly people confuse the Gini coefficient of the distribution of income with the Gini coefficient of the distribution of wealth.
Gini coefficients of income get into differences between the distribution of income before the effect of taxes and transfers and after taxes and transfers, also, the difference between the distribution over individuals and the distribution over households. Then there is the effect of transfers-in-kind such as public education and free health care, and public services such as effective policing that obviate expenses rather than increasing what is recognised as income.
As for Gini coefficients of wealth, they are fraught with problems with valuations and exclusions. Home mortgages are customarily included but home values are not (which stupidly counts middle-class people with millions in home equity as being poorer than the destitute homeless. Student debt is counted in countries that have it, but the value of professional skills and oligopoly licences is not.
And then, of course, there is the issue of wealth and income that don’t officially below to any one person, but which may have very different effects on real material inequality, depending on what benefits they produce for whom.
The idea of making up a scale with limited discrimination and qualitative definitions is probably compelling. I must get around to it some day. Perhaps using star and half-star emoji.
Well, the idea of “total wealth” is inherently problematic, because you could assess the value of any one item of wealth, tangible or intangible, by asking how much people would take to give it up or would pay to keep it, but you cannot do that for all the assets in a society at once, so it’s not operationalizable. Even at the level of one country, I suppose you could imagine selling all the assets of Australia and its people to some other country, but after you did so, Australia would not be a going concern, so it would be sort of like a bankruptcy sale, I think. You can go on the basis that every asset was at some time bought, sold, or produced, but that only works if you assume that value is conserved over time. . . .
You get a robust and informative result by totalling the sums that would hypothetically be realised if each asset were sold alone, because in the usual ideal circumstances the return to each asset is the value of its marginal product
Do you? You can’t sell all those assets alone AT THE SAME TIME. If you only sell small samples at each time, you have to assume that no meaningful change in value occurs over the span required to sell them all; alternative, if you keep selling till everything is sold, the marginal utility of the later assets will have been altered by the very fact that you’ve sold the earlier ones.
It seems like what my old math professor Errett Bishop would have called a “nonconstructive proof.”
No, but then you never will and don’t want to, either. So what would happen if you tried isn’t of much interest.
The income (possibly imputed) that the owners get from having the assets, the power that each of them has to liquidate it with the economy as a going concern is related by way of the discount rate to the value of its marginal product.
The marginal value of selling just one of the assets is, I think, what you want, because that’s what an individual actor is likely to do. Sure, if George Soros sells all his shares and buys gold, that’ll have a huge effect on the markets and he won’t realise anything like the potential value of selling a small stake multiplied by the number of stakes; but that doesn’t make him not a very rich person.
Yes, but if, to oversimplify ruthlessly, George Soros has N assets, for a very large N, and each single asset is worth $x if sold by itself, it seems meaningless to say that his total wealth is $xN. If he starts selling assets, the value of the remaining assets will change. When he’s sold a substantial number, the value of the rest will change A LOT.
We have this thing with illiquid assets all the time. You can’t realise their whole value quickly, but they still produce an income (perhaps in kind, or imputed), which has a certain net present value at the discount rate determined by the market. The owners enjoy the income of an asset with the stated value. They won’t (unless irrational, distressed, or under duress) sell them for less than the full value. Assets have uses other than to be liquidated, and they have values in those uses, and the total of those values is informative.
I’m not happy with this design of Navabharata’s culture or this formulation of its values and taboos. It keeps turning into a caricature of India, which I don’t want. The social units based on occupation have to go. So far I have the following, but I’m groping ineffectually with the “taboos”.
Law & enforcement
source
customary
enforcement
bailiffs & investigating magistrate
powers & resources
3/10
judgement
magistrate
procedure
investigative
protections
1/10
penalties
death
for major felonies
flogging, hard labour
for lesser felonies
caning, fines
for misdemeanours
peculiar laws
death penalty for “blasphemy” and “sacrilege”
telecoms strictly licensed
high-tech vehicles restricted
serfdom
retaliation against “intolerable provocation” is permitted