The Great Game: Strategic overview

Well, I think I shall follow Bob’s excellent suggestion, since the only thing that really happened this session was the war between Hungary and Poland, with Spain intervening on the Polish side. I sent Hungary considerable money, and also persuaded Burgundy and Italy to do the same, so that Ear was able to hold the Poles to a compromise peace where Sterk just gained Bogutjar. Considering the price of really massive inflation, not to mention the rebels, I do think Sterk might have been better off giving in gracefully a few years before, but whatever. It’s not as though I mind a weakened Poland.

In fact, matters have progressed to the point where I’m not really that worried about the Baltic anymore; it’s the North Sea I look nervously across. England has a navy equal in size to mine and Spain’s (respectively second and third in naval power) combined; the two-Power standard is alive and well, two centuries before its time. And with the utter defeat of Italy’s navy in the last war, there are no other naval powers to speak of. Then there are the nine (yes, nine!) COTs. Control of southern India is just icing on the cake. What’s worse, Bob is a peaceful sort, unlikely to provoke a vast coalition against him by making an obvious bid for hegemony. England’s one weakness is its lack of manpower; but with the largest economy in the world, that can be made up for by mercenaries – indeed, the recent Polish-Hungarian war is a fine example of mercenaries being decisive, though Hungary hired them with subsidies rather than her own monies. With that said, though, England does have a vulnerable point in her French and American colonies, not to mention the scattered COTs; the Royal Navy isn’t that dominant, it would find it difficult to defend the whole Empire simultaneously. The world waits for the first English mis-step; we’ve seen potential hegemons before, and where are they now? Groaning under 30% inflation.

Speaking of Poland, the former Colossus of the Baltic now takes its life in its hands whenever it goes to war. Between the inflation, the relatively low technology, being late into the colonial game, and (with respect to Hungary) the low manpower, Poland doesn’t look very scary anymore, to the point where their partition has been seriously discussed. Alas, both England and Spain want them kept alive as an ankle-biter, and also to prevent Norway and Hungary gaining their COTs. I am considering if it would be possible to, at some point, inflict a really crushing defeat on the Poles and destroy them as a Great Power capable of real warfare; a vast come-down from the days when the Piasts inherited the Kingdom of Rus, and all of Europe mobilised against them!

Then there is Hungary. Vast, but poor and backwards; their strength is their huge manpower reserves, and in Vicky, of course, they’ll have all the resources of Siberia. Sort of like Russia, really. But they desperately need to industrialise. Still, they’ve been taking the occasional bite out of the Mughals for some time now, and none of their neighbours can really stand up to them. When Hungary marches, Kings tremble.

The two minor powers of the eastern Med, Byzantium and Jerusalem, have beaten each other into exhausted impotence. Byzantium nominally ‘won’ the latest round of warfare, annexing Aleppo with its COT; but neither of them is a significant factor when the Great Powers clash, even on the ankle-biting level of Poland. Inflation, no industries, and no colonies to speak of; they will no doubt go on beating on each other until the end of time. Well, what do you expect? It’s the Middle East, after all.

Italy, having just lost no less than two COTs in a war, can, I think, safely be considered a revisionist, not to say revanchist, Power. Their trouble is the loss of their navy; their strength is the small size and high income of Italy proper, allowing them to hypertech considerably. I expect them to spend this session recovering, building up their navy again and investing in military technologies, and then burst out at a well-chosen moment to attack Burgundy or England. Or they may form the core of a balancing coalition against England; certainly they have every reason to be annoyed at the English. With Italy’s income, rebuilding a large fleet would not take so long as all that.

We now come to Burgundy, which by my rough estimate is the third of the Great Powers. (I think there are three real giants, England-Spain-Burgundy, then a bit of a drop down to Italy-Norway, then another step down to Hungary-Poland, and then minors. Everybody down to Poland, or possibly Hungary, can defend themselves reasonably well and force a compromise peace on an attacker; but the three top Powers are the major leagues, capable of fighting on several fronts and projecting force anywhere. I would not care to fight either England, Spain or Burgundy on my own.) Burgundy is the most heavily industrialised country in the world; but its trade and colonies are not of the best, and it has a large Protestant and Catholic population in Europe which is still being converted. Nonetheless, the wealth of the Rhine valley feeds vast armies; not so much of a navy, at this time, but one could be built quite fast. At this moment Burgundy is an ally of England, having used English money (gained by renting out Calais) to finance their factories. Presumably they will remain so at least until the lease on Calais runs out; a COT makes a fine hostage. Even after that, I see no real reason for Burgundy and England to quarrel; they have no clashing colonial or European interests – unless, that is, one of them should decide to attempt French culture. If it hasn’t happened in the first 200 years of the game, though, it presumably won’t. One might expect Burgundy and England to remain allies for a considerable time to come, then, cooperating in holding down the rest of us.

That leaves Spain as the outsider of the three largest powers; and Ego is a fairly aggressive sort, who won’t be happy until Spain is pre-eminent. I have no doubt he will try to put together an anti-British coalition. He should have no difficulty recruiting Italy. Norway has issues with both sides, and can presumably bring in Hungary – our alliance is long-standing – and should therefore be eagerly sought as having the balance of power. Poland is not really sufficiently powerful to add anything to this discussion, except as a biter-of-ankles to distract Norway and Hungary. However, Ego may reasonably feel that he is unable to move until his navy has been considerably expanded; while I doubt he can build something capable of dealing with both Norway and England, if the chips should fall that way, he should certainly be able to put together something to contest one of us in one ocean. I do know that it is an ambition of his to get the three Norwegian colonies that remain in South America; he may decide to knock Norway out of the running first, and turn to deal with England later. (If so, we’d have a nice rerun of the Cuban campaign, now with the Norwegian DP sliders adjusted for battle.) Spain, then, is the wild card, the one Power both dis-satisfied with the status quo and having sufficient power to change it all by itself.

Finally, Norway. I am no longer very worried about my control of the Baltic; between the second-largest navy in the world, and a much larger economy than Poland, I am fairly confident of my ability to sit on the Piasts in a one-on-one war; coalition warfare is something else again, but that cuts both ways. The question is, however, how I can expand. Industrialising is one option; I’ve also got a bunch of pagans that need to be turned into good Scandinavian Protestants; and there are a lot of unfortified provinces about. But somehow, only new provinces Really Satisfy. One option is to partition Poland to the point where I could claim Russian culture; alas, the other powers would probably object. I do intend to continue expanding my trade; in particular, there are a lot of European COTs where I could dominate – not as lucrative as the Asian stuff, but rather less competition! Economic dominance of Poland may the best I’m going to get. Then, I do expect a showdown between Spain and England, with their various allies, at some point; intervention to create a winning side could be highly beneficial, though I’d have to be careful not to antagonise both parties by too openly playing them against each other. (Antagonising one of them is probably unavoidable.) At the moment, I do lean to Spain, what with the English threat to become hegemon; but then again, I also have some long-running quarrels with Spain that England could help me settle. Decisions, decisions… I see several options, but powers not quite of the first water have to tread carefully! Perhaps I should just annex large tracts of China, instead.

I shall give myself an extra point of plutocracy for this.

There Will Be War: The Billung Vendetta

Today we had several incidents of interest, which I relate OOC for easier understanding of the IC explanation later. First, note that the major powers are colluding to keep the Pope homeless, by attacking and annexing him wherever he pops up. As it happens, my son Guttorm was an extremely pious sort, and managed to get elected Pope. Twice. Both times he was thrown out and had to return to my court. Shortly after the second time, I got – and unfortunately didn’t take a screenie of – the event “You are a vengeful person” for him. Indeed I am!

However, that was a minor incident. The major thing that happened in this session was the Poison War. That is to say, the vendetta between Yngling and Billung. Last session I had carefully arranged an inheritance of the Duchy of Lancaster, a German duke on the Baltic coast. Carillon paid to change its law to Salic, and I was out one inheritance. I retaliated by diligently searching the save for Billungs in courts with low Intrigue, and sent out my assassins – partly to kill Billungs, and partly in the hope of making Carillon do something ill-considered. Carillon, just as I had intended, paid me back in kind; I lost two excellent sons. Carillon, however, got his badboy up to the very edge of a Death Spiral, and then God delivered him into my hands! In particular, while his king was besieging the latest incarnation of the Pope, he got the event “Into the Breach”, and the King led the charge. And died. And his 3-year-old son with the 0 diplomacy and 0 prestige inherited. And all hell broke loose.

At the beginning of the session the Norwegian-German border lay north of Skåne, thus:

At the height of the rebellion, Germany looked like this:

And now, ten years later, we are negotiating whether the border will be on the Elbe or on Danevirke:

Note also how Prussia has grabbed some extra Baltic coastline. Truly, those assassins were worth every penny!

The Great Game: The Yngling Spirit

South of Cuba
June, 1603

“Ok, boys, that’s the plan, and I think it’s not too bad. But, well, you know what they say about plans. So, don’t get too stuck on it; there’s always going to be some luck in the thing. If it comes right to it, you can’t go too far wrong if you just get alongside a Spaniard and damn well shoot the buggers.”
The captains nodded; they knew about plans, and they also knew that a Norwegian ship of 60 guns was a match for a Spaniard of 72. Outnumbered or none, they expected to win. There was confidence in their steps and their looks as they dispersed to the launches, heading back to their own ships. Soon, sails were being rolled out and boarding pikes gotten out of storage all across the Norwegian fleet. Shouts of “Run out your guns!” and “Out tompions!” floated on the fitful dawn breeze. The Spaniards were downwind, between the Norwegians and Jamaica, with nowhere to run. They’d have to fight. It looked as though they were willing enough; the entire fleet, more than sixty ships, was flying battle ensigns, gold and scarlet flowing lazily as they tacked north.

Naval battles of the Caribbean campaign. Norway smash!

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The Spanish captain was icily correct as he surrendered his sword. The moaning of wounded men was stunningly loud without the rolling cannonades that had assaulted Trygve’s ears for hours; only at the fringes, where frigates pursued the fleeing Spaniards, was there still any firing. He looked about; nobody could say the Spaniards hadn’t fought to the end, the Madre de Dios had been battered near to wreckage. There wasn’t enough left of the main mast for even a jury rig; it would have to be put under tow. Men were lying all about the deck, fallen where they’d tried to stop the boarders from the Håkon Håkonsson; the little murdering pieces along the railing were all dismounted. The gun decks would be worse. There wasn’t a single gunport left intact, they’d all been smashed into a long hole going the length of the ship. He decided not to inspect it until the surgeon had had a chance; he was as unsqueamish as the next Yngling, but there was nothing pleasant about looking at the ruin of bodies. He’d have to think about a prize crew; his own casualties had been heavy, it would be a difficult job getting both ships back to port. Water, a watch over the Spanish prisoners, he’d have to detail someone to confiscate their arms, and there was always the risk of some zealous underofficer setting a fire to deny the ship to the Norwegians. Work, work, work…

Even so – he looked again at the Spanish captain. His face was a mask of control over utter rage and despair. Better the problems of victory.

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Siege of Cuzco
August, 1604

Einar heaved an exhausted sigh. The siege was not going well; he’d had to put down another three of the Inca auxiliaries. The smallpox seemed to get them much faster than his own men, or the Spaniards. At least they worked well with a touch of the whip, not like the Iroquis. Useless in a fight, of course, but then he didn’t really have enough ammunition for his hirdsmen, anyway. He looked out at the Spanish works; no real cannon, just little three-inchers unloaded from some ship. They’d be in range tomorrow. He wasn’t sure whether his improvised earth barrier would strengthen the drystone walls enough to stand up to them; still, it would take them at least a few days to batter a hole. He reckoned out again the days that remained of his life. Spanish guns making a breach, maybe three days plus however long they could hold the breach. Several months if the embrasures worked. Running out of food, two months. Running out of water, two weeks unless it rained. Running out of ammunition, two, perhaps three Spanish assaults, but they hadn’t made any in a while. Tired of losing men, perhaps. Mutiny among the men, an unknown quantity. It depended on whether they believed his story that the Spanish would let the Inca sacrifice prisoners to stop the smallpox. It had worked so far, hird regulars weren’t usually very bright. Some of them might even still be hoping to win, and get out of here. He decided that he would shift his mental bet with himself; the water looked like the most likely option, it hadn’t rained in a month.

He fingered the little pistol in his pocket; a gaudy thing, taken from a Spanish officer with more money than sense. It would be inaccurate beyond three paces. But good enough for his purposes. Ynglings were not taken alive.

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San Jose hill
May, 1605

“Stand firm, you dogs! I’ll gut the first man who turns!”
It was no use; the regulars had had enough. Harald suited action to words, running his sword through the kidney of a young German who had thrown down his musket and was turning to run; but he could not stop the flood wave of rout. The hird was not going to stand still and be cannonaded, and that was that. For the hundredth time he wished he’d had just one more regiment, one more company, of the Guards to send. Just half an hour, fifteen minutes even, until his counter-attack worked its way through the hills and came in on the Spanish flank. He had hoped the hird would stand that long; but no. Three little cannon, popgun three-pounders from some sloop posted here against pirates, had sent his last reserve running; and now the Spanish regiments were shouting their triumph as they came forward, advancing on his flank. There was nothing for it; he’d have to disengage, pull back, and hope he could rally enough men to make a stand short of Havana. He was almost crying from frustration as he turned about to canter back to his staff. They’d been so close! Just this one battle, and the Spaniards would have had nowhere left to run. They could have held Cuba forever, perhaps even retaken Jamaica.

The Cuban campaign :

Three guns, and half an hour; of such things are empires made, and lost.

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Håkon’s Hall, Bergen
January, 1609

“Brothers, we must face facts. Our army is just not good enough.”
“We did well enough in Poland.” The older man spoke in the tone of one who knows perfectly well that his objection will be met, but who wants to have it on record as being shot down.
“Yes, against garrisons and trained bands! The Piast’s regulars were all away in the south, fighting the Hungarians. What battles did we win against regular troops in the open field? Mexico, Cuba, even Danzig – when did we face equal numbers and prevail?”
“True. But what’s to be done? There are not enough Ynglings to make the Guard our only army; and if we give the stril good weapons and training, how are we going to keep them down?”
“Well – it need only be a temporary expedient. In a few generations there will be enough of us to do our own fighting. Anyway, how do we keep them down now? The regular hird outnumbers the Guard three to one.”
“And we are careful to station German with Russian, Iroquis with Balt. Half the men in our regular units don’t speak the language of the other half! We don’t give them powder until the day before a battle, and drill them half as much as the Guard. We give the sergeants privileges over the men, and the Norse privileges over the Germans. So we creak along, and put down the occasional revolt easily. But it’s not a system for making good fighting men.”
“Well, that’s just it! We need good fighting men. Suppose we gave them more privileges?”
“No. It’s not the downtrodden slave who rises up, it’s the man who has a little, enough to see what more he might want.”
“Do you have a better idea? We can’t go about losing wars every five years!”

There was silence for perhaps half a minute. The King stirred uneasily; he had let his ministers argue freely, as was Yngling custom, ready to step in and impose the consensus when it was reached. Usually the agreement would come much faster, though; Yngling thought like Yngling, as the saying went. At length the Minister of Trade spoke; he had been diffidently silent while his more senior colleagues of War and Outland Relations argued.

“I have an idea, though perhaps you won’t like it.”
“Well, nobody else has any. Speak out, brother.”
“It seems to me there are two problems. One, we haven’t enough Ynglings. Two, we can’t really trust the regular hird, because we can’t give them the opportunity to rise to our level. There just isn’t enough wealth in Norway, and anyway someone has to do the scutwork. I think we can solve both problems. Brothers, my father has two sons; he also has three daughters.”
“Well? What’s your point?”
“Suppose we recognise our sisters’ children as Ynglings?”

A less disciplined group might have had uproar, but one did not rise to command Ynglings without command of oneself. Besides, the idea was so radical that it took time to shock. The Minister of War was first to recover; he spoke reasonably, in the tone of one pointing out an obvious flaw in another’s plan, overlooked no doubt simply by a minor bobble.
“Only men carry the blood of the Ynglings. Women don’t have the spirit that gives the mind form, they only carry the life essence. Children of a father who isn’t descended from Olav or Magnus, well, they just won’t have the Yngling spirit, that’s all there is to it. You can call them Ynglings, but they won’t be, any more than you can make bread out of rock by saying it so!”
Trade snorted. “Ridiculous superstition. You’ve been reading too much Aristotle; what does some ignorant wog know about breeding? If you’d visit your estate for more than swiving the stril girls, you’d know that the female is just as important as the male. Try getting fat pigs with thin sows, and see how far you get!”
Outland Relations broke in. “But humans are not pigs. The body is one thing, but what about the spirit? That’s shaped by the Yngling essence that we all carry.”
“Well, brother, I’ll match my sister Gudrun against you any day. Female she may be, but she has the fighting guts of any three men I know.”
“Still – let us suppose we let the women in. Come to think of it, some of my nephews are quite scrappy little buggers, might not do too badly in the Guard. How does that solve the problem of trusting the hird?”
“Well, in the first place, it doubles the number of Ynglings. That’s a start right there. But in the second place, who are all these women of ours going to marry?”
“The upper layer of stril, presumably, and sometimes their more distantly related Yngling cousins. Same as now.”
“Ah, but what if we permit soldiers with their time expired to marry Yngling women?”
“Then their children will be Ynglings…” The minister of War’s face lit up in a slow, almost unwilling smile. “And we’ll be able to trust them, because they’ll have a hope of joining the established order without the risk of a revolution!”
“Exactly. Of course, we’re still going to have to change our recruiting policies. Right now we get our soldiers from the dumbest, poorest part of the population, because we don’t want to give the smart ones guns. But we don’t want the dumb ones to be marrying our sisters and, even worse, fathering our nephews! So, we’ll have to start recruiting among the tradesmen, the farmers, that sort of man. It’ll take time.”
“Yes. Another thing – we still don’t want any strils thinking they can fight as well as an Yngling. Maybe we can look into the Guard drill – it’s been a while. There might be something we can improve. Right now a Guard unit can beat three times its number of regulars, and I don’t see any reason to change that. So if the regulars get better, the Guard must, too.”

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Demographic note : At this time there are about 60000 male Ynglings alive, meaning maybe 20000 of an age to fight. (Of course, the EU2 engine shows me with about 140000 casualties from this little fracas, but that’s ridiculous. Divide by ten, and call most of them regulars.) Acknowledging females as Ynglings would double the raw number, though not the fighting number (even Trade isn’t that radical, not yet anyway); but it halves the doubling time. On the down side, the Minister of War has a point : Every one of those male Ynglings is descended in the male line from one of the two Yngling brothers alive in 1066. That means they all share the same Y chromosome. (Well, in law and theory, anyway. Actual fact might be something else, fidelity in humans being what it is. Still, adultery tends to be with people of one’s own class – meaning Yngling males, presumably.) This would no longer be true if you permitted descent in the female line. Of course, ethnic identity is rarely constructed along rational lines!

As you can perhaps tell, I did not enjoy having the crap kicked out of my armies on a regular basis. It seems that in fine-tuning my DP sliders for economic competition, I’ve been falling behind in the military. Well, no more! Quality and Offensive is the order of the day. (Indeed, you’d think an Yngling Guards unit would be quite offensive just from the stench of arrogance rising from it. The looks down the nose ought to kill at a hundred paces.) I’ll also get more freedom and less plutocratic. Inno will remain low, however; the ones lucky enough to marry into the Yngling family will not be wanting to extend any of their new-found privileges to the ones still outside, dirty strils that they are! And also, there’s the plus royaliste que le Roi effect, where the new Ynglings want to show that they aren’t soft on the outsiders. There’s a safety valve that co-opts the best and the brightest, now; but if you aren’t lucky enough to marry an Yngling, Norway is about to become a rather worse place for you.

On a more comic relief note, I wonder what this guy thinks he’s doing? I mean, death to the Yngling oppressor pigs, sure, but – a one man army?

I haven’t been idle on the infrastructure front, either. Governors all over Russia!

And Germany, of course, but I’ll only show the one picture. Burgundy’s looks rather more impressive anyway, his provinces are much smaller so the little men are closer together. He’s building judges over the whole of northern Germany, simultaneously.

There Will Be War: Big Picture

It may perhaps be worth recapping a little bit of diplomatic history at this point. The fifty-year Cold War between the Holy Roman Empire (Italy, Bohemia, Germany, Arabia, and briefly England before its final collapse) and the Roman Commonwealth (Georgia, Russia, Byzantium, Brittany, Serbia until its attempted betrayal and resulting annexation, England before it switched sides, and Norway as an associated neutral) ended, not in the Great War everyone was expecting, but in the collapse of one bloc, much like 1989 in OTL. The trigger was Bohemia attempting to switch sides, getting cold feet, and ending up annoying both leading powers (Georgia and Italy) sufficiently for them to find common ground in punishing Bohemia. The upshot was that Italy gave African lands to Arabia, Arabia gave over parts of the Levant to Georgia, and Germany and Italy recouped their losses at Bohemia’s expense. Further, the HRE was disbanded and all the world joined the Roman Commonwealth, which was redrafted from a military alliance into something more like the United Nations. It now contains a clause limiting war gains to 5-10 provinces, enforced presumably – nobody has tested this yet – by the Hegemon declaring war on any offender and all the rest of the RC joining in.

This, of course, did not solve the actual security concerns that had led to the formation of the two blocs in the first place. This was demonstrated by

• Skirmishes on the Russian-Bohemian border when Russia had rebel troubles and Bohemia (now with a new player, and renamed to Prussia, so I shall refer to it as Prussia from now on) tried to take advantage.
• Norway and Brittany attempting to inherit and/or cause to defect each other’s vassals. Due to a NAP lasting until 1330, this has not yet caused a war, although Brittany has promised retaliation when their hands are unbound. Neither side got any actual advantage from this; we each managed to take over three counties from the other, of roughly equal value. Since this makes the borders rather ugly, we decided to hand back our gains and start over.
• Norwegian assassins striking into Germany and Prussia to remove inconvenient heirs, clearing the way for Ynglings to inherit. Stiff diplomatic protests and retaliation in kind followed, not to mention the ethnic cleansing of Skåne. I have now decided that in the interests of not pissing off the entire world at once, I will not use this method to inherit any counties in Prussia.
• Prussia, Germany, and Brittany ganging up on Byzantium to move the border south a bit. Budgetary and logistical contraints forced a WP.
• Byzantium, Russia, and Georgia signing a defensive alliance, the Samoyeds Pact, thus recreating the original Roman Commonwealth. Note the parallel to the United Nations and NATO. The war alliance that won the Second World War no longer served its defensive purpose, since it contained both the opposed states. It was therefore converted to a debating society, and a new organisation set up to manage actual military defense.
• Which instantly called into being its opposition, the Warsaw Pact. Or in this case, a military alliance between Germany and Brittany. Note that all of these are members of the Roman Commonwealth; they just don’t trust that organisation to safeguard their security, so they sign proper alliance pacts with nations who can.
• And finally, the ongoing war between Norway and Germany. We had been clashing (in chat) over my assassins (the targets were Billungs, carillon’s dynasty) and his ethnic cleansing. Relations were not improved by my excomming carillon when I was briefly PC. He got out of that (by event?), but in the ensuing disloyalty I managed to snipe the Duke of Sjælland. In spite of our NAP, carillon decided that this was intolerable provocation, and declared war, accepting another excommunication as the price for punishing me. Ulmont decided that Germany could handle Norway alone, and chose not to eat an excommunication just to help. But I definitely saw blood in his eye when he longingly mentioned the date 1330. (When our NAP expires.) The war began quite successfully for me; 15k German invaders were met in Finnveden by 20k Swedish levies and comprehensively smashed; roughly 1000 escaped. It remains to be seen whether I can follow up this success; the manpower statistics show Norway and Germany roughly even in current manpower, with Germany superior in long-term manpower. But then there are the logistics; we will both have difficulty invading the other. We may end up with me in possession of Skåne and him taking Sjælland back. My war aim, though, is the recovery of at least the northern half of Denmark.

Borrowing versus taxing

As we all know, I’m not an economist, but I do occasionally apply my formidable brainpower to thinking about issues outside my field. So today I’m thinking about government spending and loans versus taxes. We sometimes hear that borrowing money is “stealing from our children” or “moving consumption from the future to the present”, which puzzles me. Unless someone has been making breakthroughs in fundamental physics and/or dark-energy engineering and selfishly keeping it to themselves, we cannot literally move any loaves of bread from 2020 to now; what we can do is make notes on paper, or shuffle electrons around. Being a simple-minded physicist, I always get confused when I try to think about economics in terms of dollars; it’s a lot easier to ignore the little pieces of paper and look at the actual movement of loaves of bread. So in these terms, what is the difference between taxing and borrowing?

Let’s suppose the government wants to give a loaf of bread to a welfare recipient, in this year 2009. Clearly this loaf has to come from somewhere: Either it is extracted by taxation from the population as a whole, or it is borrowed and will be repaid later, with interest. Let’s have four economic entities: Welfare recipient, government workers, taxpayers, and me. For simplicity we’ll ignore that I and the government workers are also taxpayers.

Now then; suppose the loaf of bread is extracted by taxation. Some extra must go to feed the government workers doing this unpleasant task; let’s call this proportion ‘x’. Additionally there is some deadweight loss, where people who might, in the absence of taxation, have gone to work and made some bread decide, instead, to stay at home and do something that’s not taxed, like play with their children. Call this ‘y’. So, in real terms we have a transfer of goods like so:

Year	Welfare recipient	Government workers	Taxpayers	Me
2009	+1	+x	-(1+x+y)	0

All very straightforward, but observe that this is negative-sum – nobody ends up getting that y which the taxpayers lost. That’s why it’s called “deadweight”. Now for the case of the loan. The government decides not to make itself unpopular by increasing taxes this year; instead it’ll put out some thirty-year bonds. These are in effect promises to return lots of bread in 2039 in exchange for one loaf now. I, having more bread than I need at the moment, kindly step in and take this bond. Then, in 2039, the government (I hope) pays me back, with interest – 2 loaves, let’s say. So now the transfers look like this:

Year	Welfare recipient	Government workers	Taxpayers	Me
2009	+(1-x)	+x		-1
2039	0	+2x	-(2+2x+y’)	+2

Notice that the 2039 payouts become more complicated. To find those 2 loaves I’m owed, the government has to tax (or borrow some more, but we’ll ignore that option, it doesn’t add anything to the discussion) 2 + 2x loaves out of the population, because it still needs to pay the people who check tax forms and arrest cheaters. The deadweight losses are different, y’ rather than y, because the tax rate is now higher – but on the other hand, one hopes, it’s being levied on a much larger economy. As a percentage of their actual wealth, that (2+2x+y’) may in fact be rather smaller than the 2009 (1+x+y). Perhaps not, though; it depends on the interest rate of that thirty-year bond, which is based partly on my estimate of how much the economy will grow in 30 years – if I think I can do better by lending my loaf of bread to a venture capitalist, I won’t take the government bond. Of course, predicting GDP growth 30 years in advance is not a trivial task either. At any rate, though, it’s now clear how borrowing transfers money from the future: It doesn’t, rather it transfers some money today and creates the promise of another, compensating transfer later on.

Promises, of course, can be broken; governments do sometimes default on bonds. Assuming it doesn’t, though, we can think a bit about whether the rhetoric of stealing from our children is reasonable. First, it’s clear that the borrowing option imposes a larger tax burden, in terms of loaves of bread, on the 2039 taxpayers than the taxation option imposes on the 2009 taxpayers. (Going back to dollars, it is of course possible that the debt will inflate away and when I get my payout, I’ll actually be left with two crumbs rather than two loaves. To guard against this possibility I’ve also got some of my savings in gold. But let’s assume for the moment that they are inflation-protected bonds.) However, it is not immediately clear that it is a larger tax burden as a percentage of the number of loaves they’re producing. If I am a good estimator of growth rates, it will be, though, because I want to be paid something for not having that loaf of bread for the next 30 years.

Still, this argument can be made for any form of saving. Suppose I had socked away my loaf of bread into the stock market; then the transfer would look like this:

Year	Welfare recipient	Government workers	Taxpayers	Me
2009	0	0	1	-1
2039	0	0	-2	+2

Do I end up with more goods, as a percentage of GDP, than before? Who knows? But what we don’t have is the deadweight losses and the transfer to government bureaucrats.

So: With taxes, we have to pay (1+x+y) right now. With borrowing, a slightly different set of taxpayers, presumably including some children of ours, pays (2+2x+y’) in 2039. But wait; what am I going to do with my 2039 loaves of bread? Well, at least some of it will be passed on to – my children, right. The net effect of borrowing is to redistribute the wealth of 2039; some to government bureaucrats, some to the lenders of 2009 and their children. But whoever finally ends up with those 2039 loaves of bread, we have created an obligation for the 2039 taxpayers which some fraction of them did not get to vote on.

So, I’ve actually convinced myself that the rhetoric is not without foundation: Do I want to be taxed to pay for whatever programs were being funded by borrowing in the late seventies? No. Consequently I should not put anyone else in that position. But against that: I’m ok with being taxed to pay for WWII. So in the end, it depends on how worthy you think the goal is, just like any other government spending. You could put “build a bridge” or “invade Iraq” in place of my “welfare recipient”, and the transfers remain the same.

It does seem that if you want to use 2009 resources for Worthy Cause X, it would be more honest to just do so, even if the pill can be made easier to swallow by saying “but don’t worry, in exchange for your loaf of bread now, we’ll make people work a bit extra in 2039 to give you two loaves.”

The Great Game: Trade Wars

Well, it was the wool, you see. We pretty much had the corner on the market in smokes. And they couldn’t get sugar to grow properly in New Norway, so the Spaniards had that all to themselves. But wool, well, everybody’s got sheep, right? So that’s where we were competing directly, like. Of course, the dons had a bit of an advantage, what with having their sheep in Iberia. So you might think we’d resort to tricks like burning down warehouses, that kind of thing. Not a bit of it! See, two can play at that game. We burn down theirs, they burn down ours, that’s fair, right? And nobody could make a profit off that. Ynglings would have done it, sure – well, the old guys, anyway, the ones who fought in the Reformation. Burn down a house as soon as look at it, some of them. But my boss, Herr Richter, he just wants to make a profit. So, subtle does it! Once, he paid some Jews to move into a couple old apartments, close to the Spanish quarter. Then he sent me off to the taverns to spend a bit of time drinking and talking over all that old drinking-the-blood-of-Christians stuff. Of course, it’s not very difficult to set off a nice murderous riot against Jews! And in your basic riot, of course, nobody is surprised if a bit of stuff disappears, you know? It’s a bit unusual for a whole warehouse full of wool to run off, I give you that, but it’s been known to happen. It was all untraceable stuff like that – we didn’t even keep the wool, we sent it off to be sold in Alexandria.

Of course, you can’t do stuff like that too often. Hey, dagoes are pretty dim, but by the third time they lose a warehouse full of wool, well, even a polak would get that hint! In fact, tell you the truth, that’s why we don’t trade in Venice anymore. Seems one of the Italians there was a bit sharper than the next guy, and had connections at court. Well, at the time there were more Italians in Novgorod than Norwegians in Venice, so the King, he just up and chucks the wogs out. Ynglings, y’know – getting an apology from them is like pulling teeth. I guess he felt kind of stupid when the Italians grabbed Kutch and kicked us out of there too! It’s tough at the top, as they say. I suppose he’ll be swallowing his pride and paying the wog King some money. I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that! It’s not often you see an Yngling bend the knee.

But I digress. I was talking about the wool trade. Well, tricks and all, we’re just about holding our own now. The Spaniards have begun subsidising their traders with the profits of their gold mines, though. I don’t know how long we can hang on against that. Oh, sure, they say there’s a big war coming, but they’ve been saying that for as long as I’ve been alive. Besides, even if we did win a war, how’s it going to change things? You can’t stop the outlanders from selling stuff to each other, not unless you was to conquer the whole world, and even the Ynglings don’t dream of that. Not yet, anyway.

————————————————————-

Another peaceful session, apart from the collapse of China, that is; then again, who cares about them? I got into a brisk little trade war with Spain, which isn’t settled yet; he insists that the monopoly of Aleppo is rightfully his. I also managed to annoy Formula down in Italy badly enough that he banned me, to which I retaliated with a counter-ban instead of soft words and some money. At the time his trade in my COTs was bigger than vice-versa. Alas, I did not foresee his conquest of the rich Kutch COT. o Still, Norway’s trade income increased by about 50% this session, putting me behind, but in sight of, the big boys. Here’s a snapshot of the Aleppo situation :

Note that the actual owner of the COT doesn’t have a single merchant in it. Economic imperialism at its finest!

Here’s my current domestic situation :

I’m moving towards plutocracy, since as the Ynglings become more numerous, there just isn’t enough land to support them as a traditional land-owning aristocracy. (And anyway, I need the trade efficiency; diplomacy is really not a consideration for this game, there’s no AI countries to speak of.) Likewise I’m going towards free subjects for the morale and production efficiency, not to mention literacy in Vicky. This also reflects the increasing numbers of the Ynglings : The more Ynglings there are, the freer the average subject of the Kingdom gets, since the Ynglings are contributing more to the average! (Admittedly I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here – there aren’t enough Ynglings yet to have such a large effect as this slider shows.) You’ll note that, on the other hand, I’m extremely narrowminded; this reflects the increasing arrogance and intolerance of the Ynglings, and even of the second-class subjects (those Norwegians and Finns who are not Ynglings) towards their foreign subjects. You’ll note that my narrator above is not very politically correct; a truly minor example of the sort of attitude that’s coming to permeate Norwegian society.

Finally, a look at the colonies :

Poof go the Shawnee, with the usual dose of rape and pillage – if anything, they’re even worse off than the Iroquis. Although it doesn’t show on the map, my colonies have expanded quite a bit in numbers, and I’m now the leading manufacturer of tobacco. Bwah-hah-hah, I beat them with cancer sticks!

There Will Be War: Ask and you shall Receive, pt III

August 27th, 1294
Gora Dzhimara
Alania Province, Georgia

Ask blinked, more slowly than he was used to. The wine the monks had given him had been laced with something; marijuana, perhaps? Whatever it was, he ought to see if it could be imported to Norway; he felt calm and relaxed, and the sight of the stone – coffin? tomb? – chamber the monks were urging him into bothered him only distantly. It was about half filled with scented water, and large enough for two men to float in, three if they were good friends. He lowered himself into the water – blood temperature, and salted so he floated effortlessly – and the monks closed the stone lid with a scraping thud.

It was very quiet. Even the sound of his own breathing was absorbed by the velvety darkness. After a while he realised what had been bothering him: Where had these primitives come up with the idea of a sensory deprivation chamber? It was a good one, too, within the limits of the technology. He worried at the problem for a moment, then set it aside and blanked his mind as instructed. If the monks knew what they were talking about, he’d have answers to his questions shortly.

He drifted for a while, half asleep. Some time later – days? hours? – he became aware that he was not alone, that a presence – the Angel? – had been floating in the chamber with him for a long time, and that he had known of its presence, but not been aware of the knowing. The feeling was dreamlike, but unmistakable: Something was in the chamber with him – something that made no sound, projected no menace, and yet was an unfathomable threat merely by its existence. His breath caught, and there was a quite unintentional quaver in his voice when he asked his first question.

“Who are you?”

No words came back out of the darkness; but a flood of images sprang into his mind, memories, thoughts, associations long buried. Skiing across the Jotunheim, a rifle on his back. Swimming, a fiord somewhere, icy water and hot sun. Women – Jorunn, Gunhild, a dozen stril girls whose names he had forgotten. Commanders, teachers, officers who had impressed him. Soldiers he had commanded, in the Rockies hunting for tribesmen, on the Russian border, smuggling weapons in the Spanish colonies. He almost cried out with the feeling of thoughts not under his own control; the images flitted madly, one, another, gone before he could think or assimilate them. Cold sweat sprang out all over him, and he understood the purpose of the tank; here indeed was a reply that could drive a man to madness from sheer overload. The tank helped, freeing all his mind to work on the images. Gradually he mastered them, and a single thought/feeling came to to fore, and dominated. The Yngling stands on a mountain, broad-shouldered, legs apart, hands on hips. He is master of all he sees. No law, no outside will binds him. He is truly free, and men will follow him merely for the privilege of serving their superior. Nothing can stand before him, and between him and his naked will there is no more than a wolf has. He is outlaw, rebel, vigilante. He is Yngling.

Ask gasped with the effort; something was wrong. He could feel his mind buzzing in turmoil, and mentally apologised to the Georgians who had warned him this was dangerous. There was something alien here, a form of communication fundamentally mismatched to the human mind. Whatever it was, the Angel was surely no Yngling, and certainly not the cliched Overmann of uptime power-porn; but somewhere in that image lay the closest match between truth, and what could be ripped out of Ask’s memories. For all his work to get here, the answers he got might well be useless. Nonetheless, any answer was better than none. He pressed on, bracing himself for the flood.

“How did you come here?”

The return chamber of the Quantum Device. Quiet technicians punching buttons, countdowns flashing. Dovre Mountain disintegrating, a malignant radioactive mushroom punching to the top of the atmosphere. A tsunami washing over an Indonesian coastline. A man washed away. A child crying.

Accident, disaster, frustration; Ask knew all about that. An accident triggered by the Quantum Device? The old timeline should have been destroyed, but – here was Ask. Just how good had the Secret Hird’s theoretical physicists been, anyway? The best scientists disliked working in secret. Perhaps, just perhaps, it wasn’t impossible.

“Where are you from?”

A cloudless sky, a pitiless sun. Blackness, scattered with stars. An old diagram from a school book, Sun-Mercury-Venus-Earth-Mars-Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune.

Not China. Or it might be lying – but no, if the Chinese had had the means to fake this, the Long War would have been long over. Which left – perhaps something worse. Ask considered, grimly. There were enemies and enemies; better human rule, even if Communist, than… not. Still, the Angel didn’t actually seem hostile. Surely it might have taken over the world by now if it wanted to, not that the Seljuk Empire wasn’t a fine starter-set for that ambition. But the overtones were grief more than triumph, regret more than anger.

Distantly, he could feel himself shaking with the strain of the communion, and knew it for a bad sign. Already he was numb, dissociated from his body. It could not take much more of this to kill him from brute overwork overloading his heart and brain. He would have one more question, at most, before the stroke or heart attack finished him, and even that would be a gamble. Coldly, he gambled. His kin knew where he was; if he died, they would send another.

“What do you want?”

A long pause, then: Boots of the Ynglinga Hird trampling through the streets of Beijing. Heroic bronzes toppling; others going up in their place. Guerrillas hiding in the Rockies. Farmers on the Polish plains, working as they had for generations. The technicians tending the Quantum Device again, and the countdown – but it was reversed, the numbers flashing upwards. Vegard dying with the Russian bullet in his lung – and the blood went back into his mouth, he rose, his gun was back in his hand, and when time went forward again Ask was just a little quicker with his own shot and the Russian went down.

Slowly, Ask translated into words; the strain was a little less now, as he and the Angel became more familiar with each other. Survive until victory; correct a mistake. The words, “What mistake?”, trembled on his lips – but no. He could take no more; another flood would finish him. He had the information he needed, now, and now right to gamble further merely to fill in the details. He had to survive, to return to Norway and warn his kin. He had to get home.

There Will Be War: Ask and you shall Receive, pt II

May 12th, 1294
Glory-of-the-Heavens Monastery
Derbent province, Georgia

The abbot’s office, unlike the others Ask had visited, was plain, almost shabby, except for the large golden crucifix on the wall and the well-worn praying mat beneath it. The abbot himself was a little man, thin in an ascetic fashion, with piercing gray eyes; he said nothing as Ask was shown in, rising to extend his hand and sizing up his guest. There was the usual brief awkwardness when Ask took his hand and shook it rather than kissing it, but this abbot did not make an issue of the matter. Others had had him thrown out for that.

It seemed that Ask had guessed right; out here in the sticks you might find abbots who were Christians first and politicians later, unlike the greasy, wealthy examples closer to the major cities. That wasn’t all good, of course; a genuine Christian would be all the more opposed to the Yngling agenda if he knew what it was about. And bribery was right out – but then, that was why Ask had been trying the major cities first; on the subject of the Angel, the abbots and officials, so clearly corruptible in all other ways, were remarkably honest. Scared, perhaps? The ones who had tried to warn him off had not seemed to be lying; they might actually believe their own propaganda.

Still, although a truly faithful man was likely immune to bribes of gold, he might succumb to flattery – not personal, but of his faith. That was an angle the city abbots were clearly immune to; Ask hadn’t even bothered to try. Hence this carefully-selected monastery; prestigious enough to have some clout, poor enough not to be considered a plum post to be intrigued and bribed for.

“I understand,” the abbot began, “that you wish to speak to the Angel.”

“That is true.”

“Why?”

“What sort of Christian would hear of a true messenger of the God, on this Earth, and not wish to speak to it for himself, to be strengthened in his faith?”

“Communion with the Angel is dangerous. Men have had their minds broken by the glory.”

Again with the danger! Surely these men couldn’t all be liars good enough to fool uptime training. They must really believe their warnings. Then again, the Angel clearly wasn’t anything of the sort, whatever the Georgians believed; perhaps the ‘broken minds’ were merely those who were unable to reconcile its revelations with their preconceptions. Indeed, a sufficiently orthodox mind might interpret mere honesty as madness. Oh well, on with the pablum:

“In the search for salvation, risk to one’s mere mind is taken lightly; it is the soul that matters.”

The fool was eating it up; and however faithful, he couldn’t have gotten his position without some thought for politics. To convert a powerful emissary from a far-off land to the correct faith – how much prestige might there be in that? And, honest Christian that he was, the abbot was likely genuinely concerned for Ask’s soul. He would not lightly turn down someone he might save from hellfire.

“That is true. Still, not everyone can benefit from the Angel’s words. Come, let us pray together.”

Ask sighed internally, but smiled and nodded, following the abbot to the prayer mat and kneeling. He had never been any good at the meditation exercises at school, the ones that were supposed to bring you conscious control of adrenaline and endorphins, but for lack of anything better to occupy his mind, he went into the initial blanking anyway.

An interminable time later, the abbot rose, smiling and refreshed; Ask followed suit, doing his best not to look like a man contemplating murder from boredom.

“You bring me good tidings, my son; my prayers were answered. It is rare that I feel the presence of the God so closely. It has been made clear to me: You shall visit the Angel, and hear truth.”

To be continued.

Thought for the day

The willow bends.
The oak has the courage of its convictions.

Review: Forgiving Solomon Long

It is rare that a book is bad enough to move me to actual contempt and disgust. I am an extremely fast reader, half a book per day in the usual course of things, two books daily if I work at it; consequently I can swallow most written material by the simple expedient of gulping it down very fast and promptly forgetting about it. But this piece of pretentious babble filled me with sufficient nausea that I had to give up on it; a rare occurrence.

The premise of the book is not too unreasonable: A mafia kingpin hires an out-of-town assassin to do some killings, enforcing his rule against an incipient rebellion by the local businessmen and church leaders, who prefer to pay their taxes to exactly one government. The blurb hints that the hitman will eventually repent of his life, and from the first few chapters it seems likely that this will be because of some epiphany given by conversation with the priest of the piece. It will very likely be one of those ambiguous, was-it-or-wasn’t-it a divine intervention, instant conversions, which everyone can interpret to suit their own religious tastes; a morality play for the modern agnostic, who cannot bear to be hit over the head with actual gods, but demands a genteel wave of the hand in that direction, preferably with a soupcon of Fraud Freud. (Indeed, the hitman has – quel surprise – an ambiguous relationship with his mother.) Give me a frothing fundie snake-handler any day. But the utter predictability of this is not the reason I threw the book at the wall in disgust.

No, the contempt comes when the author, whose name I suppress on the grounds that his crime is more heinous than Herostratus’s (I can get right behind burning temples), rips off King Lear. The mafia boss decides to retire, leaving control of daily affairs to his sons in proportion to their ability to declare their love for him in words. The very dialogue is a near word-for-word translation to modern English of the same scene in Shakespeare’s play! This is probably intended as an artsy, intellectual hommage; it comes off as a rather desperate attempt to be bloody clever. (I do not use the word ‘clever’ as a compliment; theologians are clever. Engineers and scientists are smart.) I have no objection to updating old stories to modern conditions; Poul Anderson (may his potatoes bounce nevermore) rewrote Norse sagas into modern novels, and did it very well. But Shakespeare! King Lear! And utterly no originality, no attempt to update the characters by exploring their reasons for doing as they do! It might be interesting to hear why Goneril and Regan suddenly refuse their father, but there is no nod in this direction; we get no more explanation for their actions than Shakespeare gives. It’s like a high-schooler’s attempt to show that he is erudite; well done, child, indeed thou art familiar with the single most-quoted author of the western canon. Now stop ripping him off and write something original, dignabbit.

I will admit to having committed something similar myself, at one time: I wrote an analysis of Macbeth, or perhaps it was Julius Caesar, I don’t recall, showing how Shakespeare was subtly flattering King James VI and I; and I wrote it in blank verse, doing my best to imitate Shakespeare’s style. Got me a good grade, too. But that should clue you in: This was literally high school! And ye gods, even at my most stylistically imitative I had at least got some content that wasn’t down to the Bard! As for pasing such a scribble off as literature and extracting genuine, hard-earned money for it, gah. The mind boggles.