Let's look at history in our universe before we get into Stirling's fiction. Why were kings powerful?
Mythological answer: because they were descended from and appointed by gods.
Economic answer: because social labour had produced a surplus that maintained, and was controlled by, a ruling class.
My response: appreciate the mythology and understand the economics.
In Stirling's fiction:
high technology stopped working in the Change;
economies retrogressed to cannibal, tribal, feudal etc;
many populations have taken refuge in diverse mythologies;
and beings answering the descriptions of gods, saints and demons have become active both in the Change and in the subsequent course of events.
Now, in this context:
"The Destined Prince with the Magic Sword is wonderful, but less wonderful when he asks you to cough up every tenth bushel and piglet and takes out a mortgage on your farm." (Chapter Fifteen, p. 463)
Myth meets economics. A divinely appointed High King must raise taxes to wage expensive wars against demonolaters. Why can't the gods be more helpful by making him financially independent, e.g., with a secretly located, privately owned gold mine?
Actually, a gold mine wouldn't help if the expenditure were large relative to the society's resources -- it would just lead to inflation.
ReplyDeleteYou've got to divert resources from consumption or investment to a form of "sterile expenditure' in either case.
Thank you. I received an email notification of this comment because it is on my Science Fiction blog whereas I have unfortunately ceased to receive such notifications of comments on Poul Anderson Appreciation so I might miss some. Thank you also for recent comments on PAA posts about THE SKY-BLUE WOLVES.
ReplyDeletePaul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling,
ReplyDeleteAnd in fact we saw something like that in real history during the 16th and 17th centuries, where the gold and silver mines of Spain's empire in the Americas led to exactly what you described: inflation in Spain and Europe. Plus the diverting other resources from other uses by Spain to precisely that kind of "sterile expenditure" as Spain strove to achieve her vaulting ambitions.
Sean
Would another example be stockpiled nuclear weapons after WWII?
ReplyDeleteKaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteNo, at least not on the part of the US and UK. The resources devoted to the nuclear weapons of the UK/US never amounted to more than a small percentage of the resources of those countries, as measured in terms of GDP. To say nothing, of course, of the sheer NECESSITY of those weapons to make the cost of attacking the major Western nations CREDIBLY expensive and dangerous to Stalin and his successors (down to at least the death of Brezhnev).
It was the USSR, crippled as it was by the nonsense of socialism and an unworkable Marxist ideology, which found the devoting of more and more resources to the military as a whole, not just nuclear weapons, more and more unbearable. It was the internal contradictions of Marxism which finally led to the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Sean
Nuclear weapons are expensive in absolute terms, but much cheaper than massive conventional armies.
ReplyDeleteWe never came close to matching the weight of the Warsaw Pact forces facing us in Central Europe, because our counter-strategy was a credible threat to blow up the world.
The Soviets had 50,000 tanks and nowhere to go.
More generally, paying taxes is much cheaper than having foreigners burn down your farm, kill you and carry off your children as slaves.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
DeleteMany thanks! Your comments here fleshed out and made more specific the same argument I was making to Paul. I do think there were times, during the Cold War, that the Western Allies came close to "drawing down" conventional forces dangerously low. So low there must have been times when the Politburo in Moscow must have been tempted to run the risk of a nuclear exchange with the US.
Sean