Khorvaire in a broken economy? - Downloaded from the Wizards Community, all coding removed by Solauren

Khorvaire in a broken economy?

Post/Author/DateTime Post
#1
Amaril
Feb 27, 2009 12:51:59 What if after the Last War the Dragonmarked Houses were actually losing money due to a decrease in revenue? What if the economy in Khorvaire was actually suffering because of lack of able employees and war deficits? How would the various nations assist (or neglect) their citizens in such a time?

Would the Five Kingdoms have difficulty stimulating their economies because of empty coffers? Would the Dragonmarked Houses layoff employees due to decreases in demand?

What other effects of a post-war recession might the people of Khorvaire suffer?
#2
bobiago
Feb 27, 2009 15:49:43 I can see the massive war deficits being funded by loans from Riedra - perhaps those debts will return home to roost. Maybe in the form of a sinister Marshall Plan.
#3
Amaril
Feb 27, 2009 15:59:41 But how would the game play within the setting change? What would happen if there were fewer crew members on fewer airships or elemental galleons? Would we see fewer skycoaches in Sharn? How many favorite establishments in Sharn would close down. How many more homeless would Sharn have in its lower wards?

Would Karrnath prosper more having undead servants and soldiers rather than having to pay their employees and soldiers? Would Aundair's farmers become less prosperous? Would enrollments in Wynarn and Morgrave rise or decline? How many civilians would turn to adventuring to strike spontaneous fortune or die trying? Would the governments of the nations of Khorvaire encourage or discourage such brash actions?

Would the PCs find more competition as adventurers and mercenaries? Would they have a harder time selling their loot after an adventure? Would their purchasing power be enough to stimulate an economy?
#4
Scrinoverlord
Mar 03, 2009 7:20:33 Tune in next time for:

Eberron: Full Life Consequences!

...

I'm sorry, I just had to do that. Beat me for my lack of useful input:D
#5
Amaril
Mar 03, 2009 9:22:20
Tune in next time for:

Eberron: Full Life Consequences!

...

I'm sorry, I just had to do that. Beat me for my lack of useful input:D

I get the reference, but I'm not sure how it applies to this thread.
#6
yakman
Mar 03, 2009 16:10:25 I've posted my economic theory for the Last War on these boards before, and I've done a little bit of thinking on the economics of Khorvaire.

Khorvaire IS a broken economy... at least how I see it.

After all, Khorvaire was a single country for a long time--and then fought a hundred-year war. Trade routes are disrupted (Karrnath, for instance, is now cut off from all land transportation from the other 5N), people can't get access to goods that they were used to (or they pay exorbitant prices for them), and worst of all, Cyre, the jewel of Galifar is in ruins.

This last part is critical. Cyre was the home of Houses Cannith and Phiarlan, was the richest country, and presumably the location of Galifar's best craftsmen and artisans and most successful merchants. Now that it's gone (and Sharn has yet to fully take over those roles) Galifar's old economic system is in shambles.

With the peace, that comes the prices of demobilization. Tens of thousands of men who spent years of their lives at war now return without a trade. Merchants, smiths, leatherworkers, armorers, who made their livelihoods off the war are now without customers. In another economy there would be a "Peace Dividend"... but in much of Galifar, we have the opposite. Because there are not jobs to occupy those who participated in the war effort, they have to find employment in the black market (as bandits, thugs, other questionable activities), or they take up fairly unproductive work in the agricultural sector.

The surge of men looking for jobs on the farms strengthens the hands of feudal lords and landholders, worsening the conditions of the peasantry... and this time the peasants know how to fight back. The countryside is frequently the scene of "bush wars" as landlords and peasants fight for control of marginal territories, which prevents investment, hampers the ability of governments to tax wide swathes of the country, lowers farm output, and forces countries to send their militaries against one side or the other, which both costs money and angers the various factions.

From my understanding the war bonds that financed the war were issued without interest payments required until after the war concluded. This causes several issues. FIRST, the 5N have to pay back a century's worth of war debt--and their economies are shot. SECOND, because the war was fought with a century's worth of capital, there were few investments over the preceding hundred years aside from the war effort. This means that those towers in Sharn might not be as stable as they look, that roads were not maintained, that ports are silting up, etc.. So you have two conundrums: governments must pay back ruinous debt obligations with decaying infrastructure... meaning that every year that goes by, their capacity to finance the debt becomes less and less.
#7
julescarv
Mar 03, 2009 16:40:09 I don't think there would be a "recession" in the modern sense, for two reasons. First of all, recessions are based on an industrial economy with a sophisticated financial sector, in which changes in money supply lead to increased or decreased effective demand, not just lowered or raised prices. Khorvaire is a primarily pre-industrial, agrarian economy. There are economic problems that can effect such an economy, but a recession -- as in, lack of sufficient demand -- isn't really one of them. Second, even if there were a sufficiently sophisticated industrial and financial economy, the amount of destruction caused by the war means that there will be a lot of work to be done rebuilding, so I think demand would be high and a recession unlikely. In addition, the fact that the Khorvese economy in many ways substitutes magic for capital means that economic transitions from a wartime to peacetime economy would be easier. Capital equipment needed to produce a tank is different from the capital equipment needed to produce a TV. Magical skills, on the other hand, are very versatile by comparison.

Rather, the problems are essentially supply side, not demand side -- a bunch of buildings have been burnt to the ground, so people don't have houses. A lot of people have severed limbs and other war injuries, and are thus unable to contribute as effectively as they otherwise might to the labor force, but still need food, clothing, a shelter. There is also, of course, the issue of decaying infrastructure as laid out by Yakman.

Shorter JulesCARV: Khorvaire has many economic problems. I don't think a recession (insufficient aggregate demand) is one of them.
#8
yakman
Mar 03, 2009 18:17:25 I disagree.

many people don't have work, so they have no money. governments probably can't finance reconstruction efforts (what with a hundred years of debt payments), so infrastructure isn't being rebuilt. people who do have incomes are probably stuffing their money into mattresses (or Kundarak Vaults) in anticipation of civil war or a Next Last War.

demand just isn't there for a good number of products.
#9
Nived
Mar 03, 2009 18:26:09 Last fall, around the start of the economic downturn a friend of mine suggested a game around the idea of the party being professional repo men for House Kundarak.

Ceased being funny before it ever came to the table.
#10
julescarv
Mar 03, 2009 18:49:14 I think that many people might all be trying to increase their gold reserves (what Keynes might have called an increase in liquidity preference), but the result of that would be deflation, not recession. I.e., production and consumption aren't deeply affected in the aggregate, and lenders end up better off and borrowers worse off. Post-war deflation was fairly routine, and it screwed borrowers to the benefit of lenders, but it didn't really lead to reduced total effective aggregate demand. Economic crisis is as old as humanity, but recessions and depressions really are only about 200 years old as far as I can tell. Speculative bubbles around tulip bulbs and their collapse lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and great impoverishment of those caught in the collapse (and wealth for those who got out at the right time), but it didn't deeply affect the real economy.

I can't claim a deep knowledge of economic history, but I really don't think recessions really happened more than two centuries ago or so. Economic crises did, but these were generally based on failures of supply. (such as crop failures) The Khorvese economy is one where I expect there is a lot of speculation (and more than a few bubbles, scams, and Ponzi schemes), but I don't think that the level of financial involvement in the real economy or structural rigidity of prices would lead to economy-wide recessions.
#11
yakman
Mar 03, 2009 19:21:48
I think that many people might all be trying to increase their gold reserves (what Keynes might have called an increase in liquidity preference), but the result of that would be deflation, not recession. I.e., production and consumption aren't deeply affected in the aggregate, and lenders end up better off and borrowers worse off. Post-war deflation was fairly routine, and it screwed borrowers to the benefit of lenders, but it didn't really lead to reduced total effective aggregate demand. Economic crisis is as old as humanity, but recessions and depressions really are only about 200 years old as far as I can tell. Speculative bubbles around tulip bulbs and their collapse lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and great impoverishment of those caught in the collapse (and wealth for those who got out at the right time), but it didn't deeply affect the real economy.

I can't claim a deep knowledge of economic history, but I really don't think recessions really happened more than two centuries ago or so. Economic crises did, but these were generally based on failures of supply. (such as crop failures) The Khorvese economy is one where I expect there is a lot of speculation (and more than a few bubbles, scams, and Ponzi schemes), but I don't think that the level of financial involvement in the real economy or structural rigidity of prices would lead to economy-wide recessions.

recessions are defined as mild contractions in the economy. these certainly did occur before modern times.
#12
julescarv
Mar 03, 2009 19:54:52
recessions are defined as mild contractions in the economy. these certainly did occur before modern times.

Well, here's an old article from the the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics (Bank of Sweden prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel blah blah blah.) Paul Krugman goes into the difference between classical and Keynesian economies (not classical and Keynesian economics, but economies -- i.e., economies described best by classical or Keynesian economics). As I've said, I'm not an economic historian or anything, but I'm not sure on what grounds your basing what you're saying.
#13
yakman
Mar 03, 2009 21:12:29 THese, I believe, are the relevant paragraphs of the book review:
The other great change is the invention of the business cycle. Economic instability has, of course, always been with us. But economic downturns before 1800 were the result of "supply-side" events such as harvest failures and wars. They bore little resemblance to modern recessions, which are the result of slumps in monetary demand. To have a recession as we understand it today, you must have a structure of paper credit erected on top of or in place of the circulation of gold and silver - otherwise, the credit contraction so central to the phenomenon cannot get started in the first place. And you must also have a substantial part of the economy which is likely to respond to slumping demand by cutting production rather than prices - otherwise a financial contraction will lead to deflation, but not to an actual decline in output. Preindustrial economies could not have recessions as we know them, both because of the simplicity of their monetary systems and because they consisted mostly of farmers, who respond to a drop in demand mainly by cutting prices rather than by growing less.

Economic historians generally think that the first true recession was the slump that hit England after the end of the Napoleonic Wars - in other words, the first recession occurred, as one would expect, in the first industrial nation. Nations that industrialized later also had to wait for their chance to share the recession experience.

A few notes, from my own perspective.

The Krugman piece does not deny that recessions occurred before 1800--only that they were different--caused by supply-side disruptions. When he uses the term recession, he does not dispute that economic contractions occurred before 1800, only that perhaps the change in economies as a result of the industrial revolution means that the nature of these declines differed. Because the population before 1800 was overwhelmingly rural, bought and sold very little beyond basic necessities (which don't change much), demand was highly inelastic--by that I mean that people need to buy food and clothes no matter what--and contractions in demand were infrequent.

Certainly Galifar can be said to have undergone a supply-side disruption in 998.

Second, it is important to compare Khorvaire's economy to the RW... to try to place it before or after 1800. imho, Khorvaire is AFTER 1800. This is a world with railroads, mass production (of a sort), a developed exchange/verification system, and what could be seen as a sort of telegraph network... courtesy of houses Orien, Cannith, and Sivis, respectively. Crop yields are probably pretty good considering you can hire people to control the weather.

Third, there's a lot more cash floating around Khorvaire than there was in pre-industrial Europe. Everything costs gold or silver (and a lot of it), and the ECS states explicitly the amount of specie (coin) that lower, middle, and upper class families have.

Fourth, Khorvaire is exceptionally more advanced that Europe at 1800. The middle class is larger, technology is further ahead, cities are more important, fewer people live in the countryside. Only government is less developed (at least from what I see).

Finally, Krugman argues that the first "true" recession began after the Napoleonic Wars--a conflict that lasted over 20 years. That's similar to the Last War.

I don't think that my thesis of Khorvaire's "recession" is in contradiction to Krugman.
#14
DDiceRC
Mar 03, 2009 21:30:42 There could be a possible postwar boom. After the American Civil War, there was a continued steady stream westward to the open lands available there. Outside of Cyre, the war would probably not have touched every potential farm field or village. Even many of the major metropolitan areas apparently survived fairly intact. So for the able-bodied soldier returning from war, there could be the potential to get some land and start a self-sustaining (and possibly profitable) farm. Help should be in good supply in most lands. The insecurities among the nations would mean employment for standing armies and other security personnel. The biggest areas of worry would be national treasuries (emptied for war) and the magic/technology sector (which probably lose business with no war on). And, of course as mentioned, the loss of the artisans of Cyre. It might not be all doom and gloom.

Of course, the nations could simply raise taxes and spend money they don't have to "rebuild infrastructure" in the hope that would stimulate the economy, but that's a pretty far-fetched idea.
#15
leowulf
Mar 04, 2009 1:09:25 Does anyone have any info on how many people died in the Last War? I played that part up pretty big in both of the Eberron campaigns I ran. I brought up details like they started raising their dead to continue fighting, using arcane magic to conjure monsters to fight for them, petitioning their gods to grant them beings to fight on their side, relaxing sex roles to put more bodies into battle, even creating a new race of creatures solely intended for the war effort. But I have no idea really how the Last War affected demographics other than these things.

But now that the war is over, who is left to enjoy the peace, compared to who lived in the 5N before the conflict? And how would the altered demographics affect the economy of the day?
#16
yakman
Mar 04, 2009 7:27:41
Does anyone have any info on how many people died in the Last War? I played that part up pretty big in both of the Eberron campaigns I ran. I brought up details like they started raising their dead to continue fighting, using arcane magic to conjure monsters to fight for them, petitioning their gods to grant them beings to fight on their side, relaxing sex roles to put more bodies into battle, even creating a new race of creatures solely intended for the war effort. But I have no idea really how the Last War affected demographics other than these things.

But now that the war is over, who is left to enjoy the peace, compared to who lived in the 5N before the conflict? And how would the altered demographics affect the economy of the day?

the broad consensus (at least from the conversations on the boards that i've seen) is that there are about as many people alive in the 5N (barring Cyre) in 998 as there were when the war began.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Amaril Feb 27, 2009 12:51:59	What if after the Last War the Dragonmarked Houses were actually losing money due to a decrease in revenue? What if the economy in Khorvaire was actually suffering because of lack of able employees and war deficits? How would the various nations assist (or neglect) their citizens in such a time? Would the Five Kingdoms have difficulty stimulating their economies because of empty coffers? Would the Dragonmarked Houses layoff employees due to decreases in demand? What other effects of a post-war recession might the people of Khorvaire suffer?
#2 bobiago Feb 27, 2009 15:49:43	I can see the massive war deficits being funded by loans from Riedra - perhaps those debts will return home to roost. Maybe in the form of a sinister Marshall Plan.
#3 Amaril Feb 27, 2009 15:59:41	But how would the game play within the setting change? What would happen if there were fewer crew members on fewer airships or elemental galleons? Would we see fewer skycoaches in Sharn? How many favorite establishments in Sharn would close down. How many more homeless would Sharn have in its lower wards? Would Karrnath prosper more having undead servants and soldiers rather than having to pay their employees and soldiers? Would Aundair's farmers become less prosperous? Would enrollments in Wynarn and Morgrave rise or decline? How many civilians would turn to adventuring to strike spontaneous fortune or die trying? Would the governments of the nations of Khorvaire encourage or discourage such brash actions? Would the PCs find more competition as adventurers and mercenaries? Would they have a harder time selling their loot after an adventure? Would their purchasing power be enough to stimulate an economy?
#4 Scrinoverlord Mar 03, 2009 7:20:33	Tune in next time for: Eberron: Full Life Consequences! ... I'm sorry, I just had to do that. Beat me for my lack of useful input:D
#5 Amaril Mar 03, 2009 9:22:20	Tune in next time for: Eberron: Full Life Consequences! ... I'm sorry, I just had to do that. Beat me for my lack of useful input:D I get the reference, but I'm not sure how it applies to this thread.
#6 yakman Mar 03, 2009 16:10:25	I've posted my economic theory for the Last War on these boards before, and I've done a little bit of thinking on the economics of Khorvaire. Khorvaire IS a broken economy... at least how I see it. After all, Khorvaire was a single country for a long time--and then fought a hundred-year war. Trade routes are disrupted (Karrnath, for instance, is now cut off from all land transportation from the other 5N), people can't get access to goods that they were used to (or they pay exorbitant prices for them), and worst of all, Cyre, the jewel of Galifar is in ruins. This last part is critical. Cyre was the home of Houses Cannith and Phiarlan, was the richest country, and presumably the location of Galifar's best craftsmen and artisans and most successful merchants. Now that it's gone (and Sharn has yet to fully take over those roles) Galifar's old economic system is in shambles. With the peace, that comes the prices of demobilization. Tens of thousands of men who spent years of their lives at war now return without a trade. Merchants, smiths, leatherworkers, armorers, who made their livelihoods off the war are now without customers. In another economy there would be a "Peace Dividend"... but in much of Galifar, we have the opposite. Because there are not jobs to occupy those who participated in the war effort, they have to find employment in the black market (as bandits, thugs, other questionable activities), or they take up fairly unproductive work in the agricultural sector. The surge of men looking for jobs on the farms strengthens the hands of feudal lords and landholders, worsening the conditions of the peasantry... and this time the peasants know how to fight back. The countryside is frequently the scene of "bush wars" as landlords and peasants fight for control of marginal territories, which prevents investment, hampers the ability of governments to tax wide swathes of the country, lowers farm output, and forces countries to send their militaries against one side or the other, which both costs money and angers the various factions. From my understanding the war bonds that financed the war were issued without interest payments required until after the war concluded. This causes several issues. FIRST, the 5N have to pay back a century's worth of war debt--and their economies are shot. SECOND, because the war was fought with a century's worth of capital, there were few investments over the preceding hundred years aside from the war effort. This means that those towers in Sharn might not be as stable as they look, that roads were not maintained, that ports are silting up, etc.. So you have two conundrums: governments must pay back ruinous debt obligations with decaying infrastructure... meaning that every year that goes by, their capacity to finance the debt becomes less and less.
#7 julescarv Mar 03, 2009 16:40:09	I don't think there would be a "recession" in the modern sense, for two reasons. First of all, recessions are based on an industrial economy with a sophisticated financial sector, in which changes in money supply lead to increased or decreased effective demand, not just lowered or raised prices. Khorvaire is a primarily pre-industrial, agrarian economy. There are economic problems that can effect such an economy, but a recession -- as in, lack of sufficient demand -- isn't really one of them. Second, even if there were a sufficiently sophisticated industrial and financial economy, the amount of destruction caused by the war means that there will be a lot of work to be done rebuilding, so I think demand would be high and a recession unlikely. In addition, the fact that the Khorvese economy in many ways substitutes magic for capital means that economic transitions from a wartime to peacetime economy would be easier. Capital equipment needed to produce a tank is different from the capital equipment needed to produce a TV. Magical skills, on the other hand, are very versatile by comparison. Rather, the problems are essentially supply side, not demand side -- a bunch of buildings have been burnt to the ground, so people don't have houses. A lot of people have severed limbs and other war injuries, and are thus unable to contribute as effectively as they otherwise might to the labor force, but still need food, clothing, a shelter. There is also, of course, the issue of decaying infrastructure as laid out by Yakman. Shorter JulesCARV: Khorvaire has many economic problems. I don't think a recession (insufficient aggregate demand) is one of them.
#8 yakman Mar 03, 2009 18:17:25	I disagree. many people don't have work, so they have no money. governments probably can't finance reconstruction efforts (what with a hundred years of debt payments), so infrastructure isn't being rebuilt. people who do have incomes are probably stuffing their money into mattresses (or Kundarak Vaults) in anticipation of civil war or a Next Last War. demand just isn't there for a good number of products.
#9 Nived Mar 03, 2009 18:26:09	Last fall, around the start of the economic downturn a friend of mine suggested a game around the idea of the party being professional repo men for House Kundarak. Ceased being funny before it ever came to the table.
#10 julescarv Mar 03, 2009 18:49:14	I think that many people might all be trying to increase their gold reserves (what Keynes might have called an increase in liquidity preference), but the result of that would be deflation, not recession. I.e., production and consumption aren't deeply affected in the aggregate, and lenders end up better off and borrowers worse off. Post-war deflation was fairly routine, and it screwed borrowers to the benefit of lenders, but it didn't really lead to reduced total effective aggregate demand. Economic crisis is as old as humanity, but recessions and depressions really are only about 200 years old as far as I can tell. Speculative bubbles around tulip bulbs and their collapse lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and great impoverishment of those caught in the collapse (and wealth for those who got out at the right time), but it didn't deeply affect the real economy. I can't claim a deep knowledge of economic history, but I really don't think recessions really happened more than two centuries ago or so. Economic crises did, but these were generally based on failures of supply. (such as crop failures) The Khorvese economy is one where I expect there is a lot of speculation (and more than a few bubbles, scams, and Ponzi schemes), but I don't think that the level of financial involvement in the real economy or structural rigidity of prices would lead to economy-wide recessions.
#11 yakman Mar 03, 2009 19:21:48	I think that many people might all be trying to increase their gold reserves (what Keynes might have called an increase in liquidity preference), but the result of that would be deflation, not recession. I.e., production and consumption aren't deeply affected in the aggregate, and lenders end up better off and borrowers worse off. Post-war deflation was fairly routine, and it screwed borrowers to the benefit of lenders, but it didn't really lead to reduced total effective aggregate demand. Economic crisis is as old as humanity, but recessions and depressions really are only about 200 years old as far as I can tell. Speculative bubbles around tulip bulbs and their collapse lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and great impoverishment of those caught in the collapse (and wealth for those who got out at the right time), but it didn't deeply affect the real economy. I can't claim a deep knowledge of economic history, but I really don't think recessions really happened more than two centuries ago or so. Economic crises did, but these were generally based on failures of supply. (such as crop failures) The Khorvese economy is one where I expect there is a lot of speculation (and more than a few bubbles, scams, and Ponzi schemes), but I don't think that the level of financial involvement in the real economy or structural rigidity of prices would lead to economy-wide recessions. recessions are defined as mild contractions in the economy. these certainly did occur before modern times.
#12 julescarv Mar 03, 2009 19:54:52	recessions are defined as mild contractions in the economy. these certainly did occur before modern times. Well, here's an old article from the the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics (Bank of Sweden prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel blah blah blah.) Paul Krugman goes into the difference between classical and Keynesian economies (not classical and Keynesian economics, but economies -- i.e., economies described best by classical or Keynesian economics). As I've said, I'm not an economic historian or anything, but I'm not sure on what grounds your basing what you're saying.
#13 yakman Mar 03, 2009 21:12:29	THese, I believe, are the relevant paragraphs of the book review: The other great change is the invention of the business cycle. Economic instability has, of course, always been with us. But economic downturns before 1800 were the result of "supply-side" events such as harvest failures and wars. They bore little resemblance to modern recessions, which are the result of slumps in monetary demand. To have a recession as we understand it today, you must have a structure of paper credit erected on top of or in place of the circulation of gold and silver - otherwise, the credit contraction so central to the phenomenon cannot get started in the first place. And you must also have a substantial part of the economy which is likely to respond to slumping demand by cutting production rather than prices - otherwise a financial contraction will lead to deflation, but not to an actual decline in output. Preindustrial economies could not have recessions as we know them, both because of the simplicity of their monetary systems and because they consisted mostly of farmers, who respond to a drop in demand mainly by cutting prices rather than by growing less. Economic historians generally think that the first true recession was the slump that hit England after the end of the Napoleonic Wars - in other words, the first recession occurred, as one would expect, in the first industrial nation. Nations that industrialized later also had to wait for their chance to share the recession experience. A few notes, from my own perspective. The Krugman piece does not deny that recessions occurred before 1800--only that they were different--caused by supply-side disruptions. When he uses the term recession, he does not dispute that economic contractions occurred before 1800, only that perhaps the change in economies as a result of the industrial revolution means that the nature of these declines differed. Because the population before 1800 was overwhelmingly rural, bought and sold very little beyond basic necessities (which don't change much), demand was highly inelastic--by that I mean that people need to buy food and clothes no matter what--and contractions in demand were infrequent. Certainly Galifar can be said to have undergone a supply-side disruption in 998. Second, it is important to compare Khorvaire's economy to the RW... to try to place it before or after 1800. imho, Khorvaire is AFTER 1800. This is a world with railroads, mass production (of a sort), a developed exchange/verification system, and what could be seen as a sort of telegraph network... courtesy of houses Orien, Cannith, and Sivis, respectively. Crop yields are probably pretty good considering you can hire people to control the weather. Third, there's a lot more cash floating around Khorvaire than there was in pre-industrial Europe. Everything costs gold or silver (and a lot of it), and the ECS states explicitly the amount of specie (coin) that lower, middle, and upper class families have. Fourth, Khorvaire is exceptionally more advanced that Europe at 1800. The middle class is larger, technology is further ahead, cities are more important, fewer people live in the countryside. Only government is less developed (at least from what I see). Finally, Krugman argues that the first "true" recession began after the Napoleonic Wars--a conflict that lasted over 20 years. That's similar to the Last War. I don't think that my thesis of Khorvaire's "recession" is in contradiction to Krugman.
#14 DDiceRC Mar 03, 2009 21:30:42	There could be a possible postwar boom. After the American Civil War, there was a continued steady stream westward to the open lands available there. Outside of Cyre, the war would probably not have touched every potential farm field or village. Even many of the major metropolitan areas apparently survived fairly intact. So for the able-bodied soldier returning from war, there could be the potential to get some land and start a self-sustaining (and possibly profitable) farm. Help should be in good supply in most lands. The insecurities among the nations would mean employment for standing armies and other security personnel. The biggest areas of worry would be national treasuries (emptied for war) and the magic/technology sector (which probably lose business with no war on). And, of course as mentioned, the loss of the artisans of Cyre. It might not be all doom and gloom. Of course, the nations could simply raise taxes and spend money they don't have to "rebuild infrastructure" in the hope that would stimulate the economy, but that's a pretty far-fetched idea.
#15 leowulf Mar 04, 2009 1:09:25	Does anyone have any info on how many people died in the Last War? I played that part up pretty big in both of the Eberron campaigns I ran. I brought up details like they started raising their dead to continue fighting, using arcane magic to conjure monsters to fight for them, petitioning their gods to grant them beings to fight on their side, relaxing sex roles to put more bodies into battle, even creating a new race of creatures solely intended for the war effort. But I have no idea really how the Last War affected demographics other than these things. But now that the war is over, who is left to enjoy the peace, compared to who lived in the 5N before the conflict? And how would the altered demographics affect the economy of the day?
#16 yakman Mar 04, 2009 7:27:41	Does anyone have any info on how many people died in the Last War? I played that part up pretty big in both of the Eberron campaigns I ran. I brought up details like they started raising their dead to continue fighting, using arcane magic to conjure monsters to fight for them, petitioning their gods to grant them beings to fight on their side, relaxing sex roles to put more bodies into battle, even creating a new race of creatures solely intended for the war effort. But I have no idea really how the Last War affected demographics other than these things. But now that the war is over, who is left to enjoy the peace, compared to who lived in the 5N before the conflict? And how would the altered demographics affect the economy of the day? the broad consensus (at least from the conversations on the boards that i've seen) is that there are about as many people alive in the 5N (barring Cyre) in 998 as there were when the war began.