Economics

Saturday, November 11, 2006 12:54 AM

Everybody hates economics, but it seems to me that if a War in the 'verse had taken so long and been so devistating, it would have included some form of economic dimension. THis is what im going to say in my next section, part 5, of Blackout. Tell me what you think!!

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Hillside’s history found its roots long before the war, of course; a little guava growing community set into the vast, lush and fertile jungle, pickers converging from across the world: students enjoying holiday backpacking adventures and even travellers from further afar picking up the easy work, taking a well deserved rest, meeting the locals and finally hitting the road once more when the season finally passed and the towns became quiet though the long sticky months.

The war quickly changed that. New Melbourne was not on the border, and thus was not afflicted by its politics. Be it independence or unification, the layover worlds of Persephone, Beaumonde and New Melbourne itself would always serve as a point of arrival and departure; to refuel, trade and regroup, for both sides of the argument. No fighting ever took place here, no militia massed, no cyaden gas shells rained, no klaxons in the night, and while individual pockets heralded there causes of liberational and dissent, New Melbourne was not where this war was to be fought.

In the end, it cost six years and millions of lives. Worlds and infastructure lay in ruin a system over, industry – the same industry for which the war was fought – completely crippled; land destroyed, workers either dead, refugee or bound-by-law, with no money left to buy crops. And so became the Wolfe plan.
In the core, investment portfolios were established for vast tracts of land on the border, value severely depreciated after the fall of the browncoats; entire continents snatched up in the blink of an eye for next to nothing by the corporations. Of course, the core itself had suffered immensely; food and resource shortages, rationing; the only companies which still turned considerable profit those whom both resided within the core and produced such good via primary industry; and the arms manufacturers. Blue Sun, conveniently the latter, purchased more land on more worlds than it knew what to do with, until, in the end, it control the land that grew most of the core’s food, mined much of its minerals, and produced its raw goods. Overnight, the value, prestige and power of Blue Sun doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

Of course, there was the flipside. The Wolfe Plans purpose was multifaceted, primarily aimed and injecting funds into the stymied primary industry sector, reinvigorating economic growth on the border. Having jobs and livelihoods once more, seeing there homes, towns and cities piece by piece reconstructed with money from the core, businesses reopen and entire societies – stalled in the face of six brutal years of war – reconnecting, had a stabilising effect on these worlds. Of course, less overtly, the Wolfe plan effectively ended mercantilism within the system, centralising power in the hands of the Alliance, ensuring that nothing like this could ever happen again; after all, the core now owned the border, and through collective pressure the core could force individual worlds into economic recession if they felt any particular planet was getting out of shape.

With control centralised, resources assured and growth booming in the core, the next inevitable economic process begun: specialisation.

Specialisation is an economic organization principle which holds that, at a system-level, economics will be far more collectively productive if each subsets of that system, in this case planets and moons, begin to specialise there production capacities.
The border had little room to resist; the core owner the lands they pulled copper from, and planted seed.
Regina became a mining capital, destroying its value-adding sector.
Hera produced nothing but beef, wiping out the corn plantations known system wide.
And New Melbourne became the fishing capital of the system, where one could come to gut stu

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