Worldbuilding Realism Consultation Thread Mk. 4

[Ochenea]

So how do I worldbuild a modern tech economy? How do I make a realistic stat for gdp, and how do I figure out employment by sector?

[Radimostan]

What sorts of factors increase the odds of a revolution producing liberal democracy?

(...)

Developed middle class coupled with lack of trust in the government (which may be caused by an economic crisis or other events that would greatly endanger the bottom line of the wider population).

[Albynau]

So how do I worldbuild a modern tech economy? How do I make a realistic stat for gdp, and how do I figure out employment by sector?

Simplest way to start is to find a real country that closely matches yours and adjust as necessary.

[The Islands of Versilia]

Salutations!

I’d like to ask for some help on linguistic matters. I’m currently attempting to theorise and imagine a sort of “vampire nation” of Indo-European origin, either situated in/around the Carpathian basin or elsewhere in European Eurasia. I plan to go off the Indo-European words "*tewtéh₂" and "*nékʷts", the former meaning “tribe, people” and the latter being a genitive form for the word meaning “night”.

My linguistic ineptitude has made it difficult in trying to imagine the evolution of the combination into a nation’s name and how it would sound in the modern day.

Any help would be great.

[Ochenea]

Does anyone have any ideas on how to come up with a realistic number of square kilometers used in agricultural production? I do not want to just copy another nation.

[Taihei Tengoku]

Does anyone have any ideas on how to come up with a realistic number of square kilometers used in agricultural production? I do not want to just copy another nation.

It's some function of total arable land vs land values and population density. The best bet is to take a country with a similar natural and human geography and scale from there, or combine multiple estimates

[Gallia-]

Does anyone have any ideas on how to come up with a realistic number of square kilometers used in agricultural production? I do not want to just copy another nation.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: No, because agricultural output is heavily tied to crops, technology (not just machines), and level of education (to a point, you don't need a PhD or whatever, but rather the ability to work on machines locally, as well as their associated electronics etc.) available to the agrarian labor pool. It's why straight slapping tractors and crop dusters at the problem, like the DPRK tried to do, doesn't really improve agricultural yields. It's also why Stearman biplanes are the apex of the crop duster and no one was using jet turbines or turbojets in dusters except the Polish.

If your farmers can't work the machines you give them, like their jet engine crop dusters, or you don't have enough fertilizer chemicals available from your refineries, or you're growing water/chemical/land inefficient crops to support a population, then you aren't going to be maximizing acre-calorie yields anytime soon no matter how many combine harvesters and mega biplanes you throw at the issue. It also depends on the type of crop as well. Corn is about 3x more efficient per acre-calorie than soybeans, for example, and has been the most efficient acre-calorie crop for decades. It's why the Soviets were obsessed with it and wanted to grow corn instead of wheat, it would have gone a good way to solving their food production issues, well for a while anyway.

It's a very complex question and the easiest way to do it is to look at someone who resembles your NS's economic-social conditions IRL, and just copy them, and that is generally fine, because a lot of things go into the production of agriculture. Despite memes, for example, the DPRK actually has a fairly heavily mechanized agriculture program, its main issue is that it doesn't trade with anyone. For most of Western Europe it is generally assumed that if they stop trading they will starve, or at least need to go on starvation diets, like the UK did in WW2. This is not so true for France, Sweden, Finland, Germany, or Ukraine, for obvious reasons: they have plenty of wet land that can be relatively easily cultivated thanks to the geographical bounty of "rain" from either the North Sea/English Channel (France) or the Baltic Sea (Sweden, Germany, Finland), or the Black Sea (Ukraine), but for most people in Europe they live in mountainous climates with no real land to grow food and or there is simply not a lot of rain, or both, as is the case in Britain, Norway, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and bunches of others.

A bit bizarrely but probably explainable is that general food availability per capita has declined slightly in terms of kcals/capita for people since the 1970s (food production has been increasing though), and somewhat concerning, despite its massive agricultural bounty, the United States actually sits on the lower end of positive food self-sufficiency (relative to places like France). This probably goes a long way to why the USDA is so obsessed with increasing food production and genegineering super strains of mega corns and stuff like C4 rice to survive the looming extinction of C3 grasses and agricultural plants (in about 100,000 to a million years or so).

OTOH as long as the population growth isn't outstripping the general investment in food production and crop yield output, as it has since the 1970s, there isn't really a reason to not be able to have self sufficiency ratios >1.0 provided you have the geography for it. SSR is defined as 2,500 kcals/capita/day by the "FAO" whatever that is. Obviously if you adjust the kcal requirement down (which is probably necessary given moderns' sedentary lifestyles) you can expand the SSR higher, but AFAIK the USDA (the only authoritative source on agriculture in the world) uses 2,000 kcals/day/capita.

[Ideal Britain]

What would happen if polygyny was legalised in Britain?

[Taihei Tengoku]

What would happen if polygyny was legalised in Britain?

You'll never get a girlfriend.

[Ideal Britain]

What would happen if polygyny was legalised in Britain?

You'll never get a girlfriend.

I have a girlfriend.

[Spirit of Hope]

What would happen if polygyny was legalised in Britain?

You would have some people getting married to multiple people, and probably some social backlash from conservative groups. It's not like the UK is a highly religious nation, and the social norm is monogamy.

[Taihei Tengoku]

You'll never get a girlfriend.

I have a girlfriend.

Not for long you won't

[Ideal Britain]

I have a girlfriend.

Not for long you won't

Well seeing as you thought I didn't have one (and supposedly never will) I'm not sure you know much about this topic.

[Ideal Britain]

What would be the effects on The UK if the North of England became independent?

[The Akasha Colony]

Not for long you won't

Well seeing as you thought I didn't have one (and supposedly never will) I'm not sure you know much about this topic.

Seeing as how we were just discussing soldier maturity in the other thread, a few extra years might help you understand exactly what TT was getting at. Even if it might reduce the number of "best" years before you evidently become worthless as a soldier.

What would be the effects on The UK if the North of England became independent?

Sounds like it wouldn't be very united anymore.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

What would be the effects on The UK if the North of England became independent?

You should worry about the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish dumping your dumpster fire reich and taking all the oil, atom bombs, sheep and good beer with them instead. Also terrorists occupying Sellafield and starts distributing plutonium to the highest bidder.

[Taihei Tengoku]

Not for long you won't

Well seeing as you thought I didn't have one (and supposedly never will) I'm not sure you know much about this topic.

The point of polygyny is to give the most successful men all the women. Unless you're at the very top (which most people aren't) you most likely will not get one. Society needs an outlet for all the spare men--in Islam it is jihad. In Asia it is League of Legends confinement chambers. In Canada it's incel terrorism, so probably not a great idea for Britain either.

[Gallia-]

In Igbo and Minahasan societies it was ritualized village warfare. o:

Perhaps he's trying to return to tradition?

[The New California Republic]

What would be the effects on The UK if the North of England became independent?

Depends where you are drawing the line. I don't see it happening though.

[Ideal Britain]

The point of polygyny is to give the most successful men all the women. Unless you're at the very top (which most people aren't) you most likely will not get one.

1. If the top 5% percent of men each have 4 wives (not the case as some choose monogamy anyway) that's still less than half the women. 70% are still "available".

2. Most men, ever those who are currently not in sexual/romantic relationships (whether marriage or otherwise) do not use it as an excuse to be indiscriminately violent.
Also most people, men or women, would regard a communist-style distribution of women like means of production to be sexist.

[Gallia-]

The point of polygyny is to give the most successful men all the women. Unless you're at the very top (which most people aren't) you most likely will not get one.

1. If the top 5% percent of men each have 4 wives (not the case as some choose monogamy anyway) that's still less than half the women. 70% are still "available".

Most women never marry in developed economies. In a polygamous society, also, there's going to be more than 4 wives per man. Perhaps you would have hundreds of wives, if you're powerful enough. Traditionally, higher status would afford you more wives, which would probably be annual income in a society which bases value on net worth or something, and women wouldn't marry monogamously unless they thought they had no chance to get laid by Richard Branson or whatever.

2. Most men, ever those who are currently not in sexual/romantic relationships (whether marriage or otherwise) do not use it as an excuse to be indiscriminately violent.

Biology disagrees. For whatever reason, unmarried and divorced males are not only more violent, but more aggressive in general, especially against themselves.

Also most people, men or women, would regard a communist-style distribution of women like means of production to be sexist.

A "communist-style distribution of women" is called "monogamy".

Acknowledging differences between sexes is also sexist. It implies that males and females are varying useful depending on the social-economic climate. But this is...obvious.

Anyway it's well known that women want rich husbands. It's almost like there's a biological draw to it. Perhaps forcing them to marry would make those perceptions match reality. Or perhaps reality has shifted so far down in terms of actual living standards for most Westerners that the lack of marriage, and lack of birth rates, is a way to correct for this. Fewer people means fewer resources need to be expended relative to output and thus incomes might rise. It's certainly easier to have large amounts of the population die and not be replaced than to be doing the work needed to fix the wage growth gap that has developed since the 1960's in most Western countries. The latter would require new technologies, new modes of thinking, and a reassertion of certain things that have fallen out of favor in the past 50-60 years, like breeding and basic emotional regulation.

[The Akasha Colony]

1. If the top 5% percent of men each have 4 wives (not the case as some choose monogamy anyway) that's still less than half the women. 70% are still "available".

The male-female population imbalance in China and India is much lower than this (~1:1.12) but is already causing social problems as that still means there are tens of millions of men who are simply not going to be able to find a wife and start a family.

2. Most men, ever those who are currently not in sexual/romantic relationships (whether marriage or otherwise) do not use it as an excuse to be indiscriminately violent.

That's because most single men in countries with normal population distributions are single by choice and have a reasonable chance of finding a female partner. In countries with population imbalances, this is not the case as there are literally not enough women to go around so there are no easy alternatives. This tends to result in depression, higher suicide rates, and human trafficking as men turn to the black market to get wives imported from other countries.

Also most people, men or women, would regard a communist-style distribution of women like means of production to be sexist.

Most people would also find the notion of polygyny sexist as well, as it gives males but not females the right to have multiple partners.

No one's proposing some kind of government-run distribution of female partners, anyway. It's a simple matter of women choosing to marry the most successful men. Why would you settle for less if you had the choice?

Again, countries with population imbalances give a clear example of who suffers the most from a shortage of partners: lower-class laborers, those in more rural areas, and generally those that don't have a lot to "offer" to a potential mate. There are whole villages in China that have virtually no women of marriageable age left because they've all moved to the cities to pursue wealthier, more educated husbands. Because why would you settle for some poor farmer in a remote village when you could marry some white-collar professional in Shanghai? The government is by no means forcing this migration of women, it's simple supply and demand: due to high demand, the limited supply of women can choose the best partner they think they can find.

[Gallia-]

Monogamy is the only serious marriage method.

1) It's fairly rare. Most societies historically are polygamous.
2) Only successful societies adopt it.
3) It selects for males who can stick to a relationship for a long time.

The last one probably explains 2. If you stick to a marriage without breaking, you can stick to a missile problem without breaking. Well, at least that's how it used to be.

Because why would you settle for some poor farmer in a remote village when you could marry some white-collar professional in Shanghai? The government is by no means forcing this migration of women, it's simple supply and demand: due to high demand, the limited supply of women can choose the best partner they think they can find.

Yeah a really big chad move by the Shanghai software men would be to take these rural women on dates and give them a bus ticket back to their village at the end lmao. That said they're probably being trafficked into prostitution rather than leaving the village for marriage though. Same thing happens in Eastern Europe where all the women "move" to Netherlands to be under the control of a Antilles or Polish pimp.

[Ideal Britain]

1. If the top 5% percent of men each have 4 wives (not the case as some choose monogamy anyway) that's still less than half the women. 70% are still "available".

Most women never marry in developed economies. In a polygamous society, also, there's going to be more than 4 wives per man. Perhaps you would have hundreds of wives, if you're powerful enough. Traditionally, higher status would afford you more wives, which would probably be annual income in a society which bases value on net worth or something, and women wouldn't marry monogamously unless they thought they had no chance to get laid by Richard Branson or whatever.

2. Most men, ever those who are currently not in sexual/romantic relationships (whether marriage or otherwise) do not use it as an excuse to be indiscriminately violent.

Biology disagrees. For whatever reason, unmarried and divorced males are not only more violent, but more aggressive in general, especially against themselves.

Also most people, men or women, would regard a communist-style distribution of women like means of production to be sexist.

A "communist-style distribution of women" is called "monogamy".

Acknowledging differences between sexes is also sexist. It implies that males and females are varying useful depending on the social-economic climate. But this is...obvious.

Anyway it's well known that women want rich husbands. It's almost like there's a biological draw to it. Perhaps forcing them to marry would make those perceptions match reality. Or perhaps reality has shifted so far down in terms of actual living standards for most Westerners that the lack of marriage, and lack of birth rates, is a way to correct for this. Fewer people means fewer resources need to be expended relative to output and thus incomes might rise. It's certainly easier to have large amounts of the population die and not be replaced than to be doing the work needed to fix the wage growth gap that has developed since the 1960's in most Western countries. The latter would require new technologies, new modes of thinking, and a reassertion of certain things that have fallen out of favor in the past 50-60 years, like breeding and basic emotional regulation.

1. I never said being unmarried doesn't increase likelihood of violence.
You're study is about recidivism anyway.
And I mean that most men don't respond in that way.
2. Studies showing power and wealth is the only major factor in women choosing husbands?
3. One gender could never be more useful than the other because without one the other would die out.
3. Also why don't you just shut incel sites down?

[The Akasha Colony]

3. Also why don't you just shut incel sites down?

Child pornography is illegal in nearly every country in the world and law enforcement in most developed nations actively hunt such websites down.

They still aren't that hard to find.