Lots still to get through, so as usual I’m going to dive right in. While I’ll try to have this make sense in a standalone mode, it would be preferable for you to have read Chapter 8.1 and last week’s Chapter 8.2 before continuing.

The Digital Age, Fourth Period 00s-2010s

Most of the decade that followed the beginning of the Millennium just seemed to coast on by without being particularly noticeable or significant. Everything seemed more personal in scope and less international and collective, or at least that is my impression in hindsight.

At the same time, I’m very well aware that this is a false impression that has been created by the epic buildup to the Sydney Olympics, which I wrote about in the previous post.

The goodwill and happy vibe that resulted from “The greatest Games of all time” endured until September 11, 2001 – exactly 22 years ago as I write this – diminishing the importance attached to all troubles and letting people just coast along.

Even the troubled election of George W. Bush (hanging Chads, etc) in late 2000 fitted this narrative, with his strong domestic agenda.

Beginning: Internet Awakening

One of the major challenges in constructing a series like this is trying to pick ‘mile markers’ for the end-points. In many respects, a strict chronology means the start of a period exactly matches the end of the previous one.

You can achieve a starker contrast by shifting those end points to a logical map rather than a strictly chronological one, and that’s something that’s been done throughout this series. But it frequently begs the question – move the dividing line forward or back?

Frequently, you need a string of different logical dates, which creates a fuzziness about the end/beginning points. So it is, this time around, but it’s worse than usual because one of the defining elements of the era is also somewhat fuzzy in its history, with no clear dividing line separating before from after.

Internet beginnings and early growth

While its roots trace back to the 1960s, it’s a certainty that the internet really began sometime in the 1990s. The starting point that I prefer the 1995 decommissioning of the NSFNet in the US, which removed the last impediment to full commercialization of the internet – an event so obscure that most readers will never have heard of it. But you might prefer the 1993 invention of the search engine with web crawler, before which all website indexes had to be manually curated.

By the end of the decade, the internet was doubling in size every year, while the number of users was increasing by 20-50% each year (Wikipedia, The Internet).

Here’s the thing with geometric expansions like this – the greater share of whatever you are measuring will always have ‘just happened’, only the precise numbers will change.

Consider the following sequence, which increases by 33% each year, starting (for convenience) with a value of 3:

2000 = 3
2001 = 4
2002 = 5.333
2003 = 7.110
2004 = 9.481
2005 = 12.641

growth, year-on-year:

2001 = 4 — 3 = 1 → 1 / 4 = +25%
2002 = 5.333 — 4 = 1.333 → 1.333 / 5.333 = +24.995%
2003 = 7.110 — 5.333 = 1.777 → 1.777 / 7.110 = +24.993%
2004 = 9.481 — 7.110 = 2.371 → 2.371 / 9.481 = +25.008%
2005 = 12.641 — 9.481 = 3.16 → 3.16 / 12.641 = +24.998%

The only reason these aren’t all +25% is because of rounding errors. So 25% of the total growth has always happened in the last 12 months, it doesn’t matter where you draw the line (those mathematically inclined will realize that this is the case with geometric expansion series, by definition).

Search Engines

But in this series, I’ve never been overly concerned with the existence of something compared to the ability to do something with it. You can create the greatest web page in the history of the world; it won’t mean a thing if no-one can find it to read it.

Early search algorithms were simple and unreliable (I can remember articles in computer magazines testing them and finding. that to be close to comprehensive, you needed to use at least two and preferably three. That led to Copernic (named for Copernicus) – a metasearch engine that aggregated dozens of search results. You can date it’s roots to 1996.

That was what eventually set Google apart – the algorithms that it used to rank results in an effort to bring the most relevant results to the top of the list. They have only gotten better at this in the years since, despite the best efforts of others to ‘game the system’.

Opinion: Google page ranking cheats

My take on such nonsense as ‘buying back-links’ and other google-ranking trickery: Yes, you might get a massive boost from trickery, but when it becomes apparent that you are gaming the system, you will be penalized – and such long-term pain is quite likely to exceed the short-term gain.

So I don’t go in for such – heck, I barely make a stab at SEO, preferring to put my efforts into better content, in the belief that it will pay off in the long run.

Or, to put it another way, you are only as good as your reputation – and that’s far more easily harmed than regenerated. The optimum approach is to avoid reputational harm as much as you possibly can, in the first place.

Web-based applications

Until potential customers can find your products, the internet is a plaything. The more effortlessly consumer and provider can find each other, the more significant the internet becomes. As someone once wrote (a deliberate rephrasing of the statement concerning the Bill Clinton presidency from 1992), “It’s all about the applications, stupid.”

And it’s the 2000s when web-based applications come into their own. Again, there were precursors, but the real development started during this decade, in two forms.

First, Cloud Computing – Amazon Web Services, in 2002, permitted developers to use Amazon’s hardware to build applications; in 2006, Google Docs was released in Beta Version. This was the ultimate in ‘smaller devices – using someone else’s hardware, so that all you needed was enough computing power to interface with that hardware.

Second, the first technologies to use the internet as a communications backbone rather than an end in itself – you had milestones in chat room development in 1971, 1973, 1980, and 1988. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) peaked in 2003, and has been declining since, overtaken by Social Media (and especially Twitter – which is now in decline itself).

Third, in the same vein, Peer-to-peer networked applications were one of the hot topics through the 2000s – most famously, because of Napster, which dates from May 1999. By popularizing the MP3 and MP4 digital file formats, modern-day streaming services are the legacy of these applications.

And, finally, E-Commerce. This started in 1994, and the first product for sale over the internet was Sting’s album Ten Summoner’s Tales.

Wine, chocolate, flowers, Pizza, and internet banking soon followed (see Wikipedia, Online Shopping). It is worth remembering that the creators of the 1995 film, The Net, had to actually explain (and demonstrate in the movie) online shopping for goods and services, in sequences that look incredibly clunky to those used to such services in the world of the 2020s. (I strongly recommend this movie for those trying to get a ‘feel’ for the state of the art around 1995-2000).

The 2000s were when online shopping hit its stride – Amazon may have started in 1994, and gone public in 1997, and started selling books and videos in 1998, but it was in the DVD era that it really exploded, largely because the products weighed less, reducing postage costs.

The 2000s were all about the Internet going from a toy with better things ‘on the near horizon’ to ubiquitously connecting everything and everyone – an astonishing rate of adoption. It took 25 years for mobile phones to achieve that level of market penetration, for example.

Mobile Telephones

That was because mobile phones got started earlier, and because the constraint was always the construction of a dedicated wireless network and other infrastructure.

While early examples were suitcases and bricks, the size problem was solved by the mid-90s.

In the year 2000, there were about 35 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people in the developed world, and maybe 11 per 100 people in the developing world. By 2010, those numbers were 113 and 68, respectively. That was the year that numbers appeared to reach saturation in the developed world (only to start rising again in 2011-12), while the developing world would reach (by my estimates) 100 units per 100 people around 2017.

Shortly before the start of the decade, therefore, mobile phones were still expensive toys for wealthy and pretentious people – but the explosive growth in subscriptions from 1999 to 2000 signaled that for the decade to follow, that would no longer be the case.

Early adopters were mostly professionals (who could afford the devices) but by mid-decade, regular servicemen like electricians and plumbers were signing up as a business necessity.

Such rapid change means that the GM needs to “fingerprint” his representation of individual years within the period with an appropriate level of market penetration, and appropriate public attitude toward, mobile phones.

Beginning: 9/11: Shockwaves & Awe

So domesticity was the big ticket in 2000, and looked to be the focus for at least the first half of the decade.

Other people had other ideas.

At the time, it was common for Australian TV to affiliate itself with an American network; our ‘late night” TV was their morning shows. (This continues to some extent, even now).

Since these were preceded by the graveyard shift, to which the networks relegated the shows they didn’t understand the appeal of, like Sci-Fi, it was common for gamers and the like to at least get to see the start of the shows – and make up their minds on whether or not to stay tuned based on the promised content (sometimes yes, sometimes no).

The introduction to this days’ show talked about a “terrible accident” as a 747 had struck one of the World Trade Towers. I was still getting my head around that when a second plane struck. No-one on-screen said so, but it was immediately clear that this was a terrorist attack, and the most shocking one that the world had ever seen.

I had been doing prep for one of my RPG campaigns, I forget which, but all thoughts of that vanished as I watched the events from half-a-world away. There seemed an inevitability to the third strike, as though a sword of Damocles had finally fallen. At that point, I could bear inaction no longer, and started trying to encapsulate what I was seeing and feeling in music.

That was my personal experience of 9/11. That night, the world changed. Some of the outcomes were predictable – a massive increase in security at airports, a pointed investigation into the obvious failure of intelligence and new tools and resources for the agencies, and a hot war against anyone who was deemed to have been involved. Someone had poked the bear and was about to feel the Wrath Of God.

The next few days were confused. I couldn’t understand the increasing focus on Iraq when the culprits had been traced to Afghanistan, and to locations within that country that would experience relatively few civilian casualties. Eventually, I realized that Al Quida didn’t represent enough of an outlet for the “righteous anger” of some in the US – I couldn’t blame them for that, but this made it clear to me that unless calmer heads prevailed, and quickly, there would be consequences.

Sadly, no calmer heads emerged.

Consequences

Of course, these consequences and responses were not restricted to the United States. Security at airports everywhere was immediately ramped up, for example.

Domestic issues immediately became nothing more than an arena for consequences of the international relations arena to play out. Even sacred cows like personal liberty and human rights, long held to be sacrosanct, were set aside in the resulting paranoia.

The problem with doing the previously-unthinkable is that it weakens the commitment to everything else once held inviolable. Breaking rules can be habit forming, needing only sufficient motivation or perceived benefit to doing so. This was the slippery slope upon which the US – and to a lesser extent, the rest of the world – now embarked.

I see a direct connection between these developments in response to 9/11 and events like the attempted coup of January 6, 2021, the former normalizing radicalism sufficiently to permit the latter to be contemplated.

Middle: Mega-corp Services Proliferate

But the world kept turning, and a new normal soon established itself. And that new normal was the rise of four additional Mega-corporations, to join Microsoft: Apple, Amazon, Google, and Napster.

I’ve already touched on several of these and why & how they became significant. Ultimately, these were Utility and/or Service providers who simply happened to provide a capabilities that everyone wanted. As the sole suppliers of those services to that standard, they were all-but immune to the anti-monopoly laws that had broken up large corporate entities before they got to anywhere near the size of these “new” entities.

Like most overnight successes, these weren’t – they had taken years or even decades laying groundwork for their ultimate dominance.

Nor were any of them as ubiquitous as they seemed at them time; there were alternatives to all of them, or would be before long.

Nevertheless, the second half of the decade revolves largely around those mega-corporations and the products and services they offer.

End: Personal Tech

So much so that those products and services are also central to understanding the social patterns that obtained by the end of the decade.

All of those products and services can be characterized as belonging to a singular conceptual theme: Personal, or personalized, tech. Let me demonstrate by listing some – a few obvious ones and some less obvious examples.

• iPad / Tablet: This was all about portability, about being able to take your computer, and everything it provided, anywhere you went.
• Napster / iPod: The ultimate mix-tape, fueled by the most personal of choices, the music that you listen to. Leave out any tracks you don’t like or want, and curate only your personal selection – then take it with you everywhere you want. Approve or not, there’s’ no arguing with the outcome.
• Google Search: In seeking ways of making the search results more relevant to you, Google was also able to target you with advertising relevant to you – and that translates directly into increased sales for the providers of those products and services. That was the theory, and Google translated that into becoming the biggest corporation in the world. In 2010, it was worth about 400 Billion USD; at the high point in 2021, that had risen to 2,000 Billion USD, or 2 Trillion dollars. It’s value declined sharply through 2022 (down to about 1½ Trillion), but has been recovering in 2023. If the trend continues, it will fully recover in 2024.
• Amazon: This one’s a little less obvious, but a key part of the sales strategy at Amazon is to use the shopping of others to present the individual with additional products and services that are customized to their profile, or rather, to Amazon’s best guess as to your personal profile. Everything you buy on the site, everything that you put into your wishlist, anything you even look at – in theory, they all weight the selection of products to be offered, on the premise that getting you to buy anything is better (for Amazon) than you not doing so.
• GPS: The Global Positioning System became fully operational in 1993, following twenty years of development and ‘installation’ by the US Department of Defense. Initially intended to be a purely military application, civilian use was permitted by Reagan after the Korean Airlines Flight 007 disaster. Its civilian accuracy was downgraded in the early 1990s using technology intended to prevent other militaries using the system contrary to perceived US interests, which has led multiple nations toward developing their own Sat-Nav systems. This policy was discontinued by Clinton in May 2000. In 2004, linking GPS to mobile phones for civilian purposes was successfully tested; the facility for using GPS to locate survivors of a disaster having been mandated in 2002. GPS is all about taking you to where you want to go. Most early problems with Commercial Sat-Nav systems can be laid at the feet of completely artificial human traffic-control inventions like one-way streets; since these are all exceptions to the default assumption (two-way travel on a road), they all have to be manually coded within the navigational software – without slowing it down so much as to make it useless. In 2007, Toyota introduced Map On Demand, a technology for distributing updated maps automatically, and the popularity and scope of Sat-Nav systems has been increasing ever since. I even have an App that tracks the bus that I’m waiting for, continually revising its ETA at my stop.
• iPhone / Smartphone: January 9, 2007, saw Steve Jobs introduce the first generation iPhone. Although there had been mobile computing telephony devices like the Blackberry previously, the iPhone was the device that made the Smartphone popular. Rivals developed their own, and the iPhone now accounts for just 15.6% of the global market share (as of 2022) – but that is still enough for more than 2.2 billion of them to have been sold by Apple since that auspicious 2007 date. Because of their premium pricing, I’ve always regarded the iPhone as a luxury version of the smartphone. Because they can do so much more than a “standard” mobile phone, I’m inclined to treat these as a separate product category in their own right.

End: The GFC

The 2007-2008 financial crisis, known to most of the world as the GFC, marks the beginning of the end of the decade, insofar as all the other trends had made their debut and would encounter no significant development – just more of the same.

Most of us lived through it, and most of us have only a vague idea of what happened and why. Wikipedia lists three causes culminating in a “Perfect Storm”: Predatory lending targeting low-income home-buyers, excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions, and the bursting of the United States housing bubble (Wikipedia, 2007-2008 Financial Crisis) but I would add the subsequent international banking crisis, and prepend the US policy settings for affordable housing that enabled those predatory lending practices in the first place.

Affordable US Housing

The story starts here, with government policies in the US designed to promote the construction of housing that would be affordable by those on less than the median income. There is often assumed to be a greater risk to the financing of such housing purchases, which is used to justify higher interest rates – but those can elevate such housing out of reach of those intended to benefit from it.

Overcoming that problem often requires government support, and that support has taken many forms in many different countries around the world. Ultimately, most of them seem to be founded on the idea of the government sponsoring or co-owning the mortgage, effectively guaranteeing it against failure (or, at least, softening the blow). The most common alternative is some sort of home-buyer’s grant, especially those focused on first buyers, and the construction of low-cost rental accommodations.

The last were especially popular in the 60s and 70s, and contributed markedly to the deterioration of some urban centers as lack of adequate maintenance transformed them into slum tenements. Whenever demand for low-cost housing outstrips supply, the risk is that cheaply-built substandard dwellings will be erected to satisfy that demand; urban decay inevitably follows, with all the attendant social problems.

Correcting these problems can be difficult and expensive, and it’s easy for it to lead to gentrification, which drives out the original residents in favor of a wealthier elite – shifting the problem to somewhere else and pretending that it’s a solution rather than a temporary band-aid.

Subsidizing the construction and purchase of well-built dwellings is the alternative – but said purchase demands affordable loans. The provision of such loans either has to be direct government policy or the result of government policies that are sufficient to persuade commercial entities that there is enough profit involved to be worth the perceived risk.

In my experience, there are two types of low-income tenant / purchaser – those who, when presented with an affordable option, will move heaven and earth to meet their commitments, and those who equate the lowered price with lowered value, and who can hardly be bothered. The first group are generally as safe as houses, given a stable economic foundation; the latter are as reliable as the weather on a changeable day. Ninety percent or more will belong in the first category; but it only takes a few bad apples…. Telling one from the other is always the difficult part.

Anyway, to avoid these problems, in the 1990s, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) initiated policies that financed property purchases through the government sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Evidence from a securities fraud investigation against six former executives of these entities suggests that in 2008, they held 13 million subsidized loans worth a total of more than 2 trillion dollars.

Several governments, both Democratic and Republican, had sought to limit the amount of government funds that were tied up in such loans by creating policies that encouraged the private sector to do more of the heavy lifting. In particular, various credit controls that were designed to prevent risky and questionable loans to low-income households that had been emplaced as a consequence of the Great Depression were successively watered down or removed entirely.

Predatory Lending

These policy changes permitted, even encouraged the pursuit of subprime lending. This is the provision of loans to those who may have difficulty keeping up the repayment schedule. They are generally characterized by higher interest rates, poor quality collateral, and less favorable terms in order to compensate for higher credit risk, as described above. Burt with perceived government backing, and terms that permit some flexibility in repayment schedules, they can be lucrative.

Some of the protections set up post-Depression included limits to how much risk any given institution could carry. This was designed to protect everyone involved – but a spot of creative accounting on the part of the banks issuing these loans and a weakening of the financial oversight regulations combined to undermine the protection.

Here’s how it worked, as I understand it: You’re a bank, you’ve issued (say) 50 million dollars worth of these loans, in the knowledge that in a stable economy, 10% of them will fail (costing 5,000,000 dollars), but 90% of them will eventually be paid off, earning maybe 20% interest along the way – so a net profit of 5,000,000 dollars.

Packing all of these into a bundle, you can sell this as an asset worth maybe 53,000,000 dollars to someone else, generating an instant 3M profit (instead of an eventual 5M profit), and wiping all those loans off your books – so you can issue another $50 million worth. Rinse and repeat.

These packages were ‘mortgage-backed securities’ and they were being tossed around the various financial institutions like confetti because they were so profitable. Each seller was advantaged by minimizing the risk of defaults and promoting the notion that these were good economic risks to take. The sellers of these ‘securities’ also made greater profits if they exaggerated the value of the properties to assume the ‘best-case’ outcomes of selling them. After all, property always increases in value in the long run, doesn’t it?

The problem is that if there is any sort of economic instability, you can quickly have 95% defaults instead of 10%, and when you repossess the properties, you’re likely to get maybe 10 cents on the dollar (or less) compared to that ‘best case’ valuation. Until the train-wreck, though, the policy appears to be working, especially if you are only looking at the headline numbers.

In the years leading up to the Wall Street Crash, subprime loans were being issued to low-income working-class people to use for speculation on the stock market, but the packages weren’t sold as ‘speculative’, they were safe as houses, and the booming stock market would ‘always’ pay more than the cost of the loan, wouldn’t it? People mortgaged their homes and personal possessions because it was easy money…. These loans amplified and expanded on what would have been a financial crisis by creating a housing crisis and property valuation crisis and banking crisis on top of the original troubles.

Guess what happened in 2007-8 when things went pear-shaped? The sub-prime loans acted as an amplifier, adding a housing crisis and property valuation crisis and banking crisis on top of the original troubles.

This has had an effect on modern-day US politics, too. Republicans were largely and broadly condemned for the GFC, because theirs had been the hands behind the ultimate deregulation, the removal of the financial guard rails. This helped get Obama elected President, and began the drift to a new political paradigm by the right-wing party – if you don’t have a policy, just an intention, you can never be blamed when something goes pear-shaped. It’s never your fault, it’s just an accident that things worked out that way. And sure, “Mexico will pay for the wall. I intend to make them.”.

My advice (for whatever it may be worth): Don’t elect a wish-list. Make people tell you exactly how they are going to achieve their promises and the things that they want to get done. And use your GMing hat to look for ways things might go pear-shaped.

It doesn’t matter what they promise if they are incompetent to implement it, or if you can’t trust them to keep their promises – at least, that’s how I see it.

The Housing Bubble

Every time property gets purchased, it gets inflated in value. There are lots of reasons for this, some good and some bad. Some increase is inevitable because of inflation, for one thing.

Mostly, it’s because there is no rigorous process for valuing a property. It’s all guesstimates and semi-educated guesswork. “Someplace down the road sold for X, but this property isn’t quite the same, so we’ll add Y and take off Z…”

As soon as a property goes up in value, so do all the properties around it, even a block or two away. And these increases can both stack and amplify each other, chains of property value inflation rippling up and down a neighborhood.

Mortgages and interest rates normally act as a brake on these price impacts, slowing the growth of housing bubbles and even occasionally letting some of the hot air out of the prices. After all, if you can’t afford a property because its price has been over-inflated, it won’t sell, and sooner or later the value will be cut back until it does sell.

Now apply the sub-prime mortgage securities situation described earlier to this valuation mechanism. Properties that shouldn’t sell get purchased (by people who shouldn’t be able to afford them). And the place across the road, and another down the street, and another around the corner. And all thee purchases are at inflated values. The result, inevitably, is a runaway housing bubble that is inevitably going to burst at some inconvenient time.

Financial Risk: Trading Sub-Prime Mortgage Securities

It gets worse. Even if the government is no longer keeping proper track of the debt levels and insecurity, you would expect the people buying these bundles of debts (and thinking they are an asset) would do some sort of due diligence to make sure that they really are worth what they are paying for them, right?

But the numbers they would get to see on which to base such an assessment are the very numbers subject to the hyper-inflating housing bundle. So it would look like you were buying property valued at maybe 80 million for your 53 million (to continue and extend the example). That’s 17 million in paper-profits right there – even if things go belly-up, you can sell that property and more than recoup your losses. You can’t lose, right?

Incestuous financing In The Banking Industry

We’re still not at the bottom. Many of the banks that were issuing these risky loans were also investing in credit default swaps and derivatives – essentially bets on the financial soundness of the loans.

A credit default swap is essentially a promise that, in return for a fee, should a particular loan go bad, another bank will cover the loss. Since the expectation was that relatively few defaults would be recorded, this was largely seen as being paid for doing nothing (by the bank offering the money) and a sure-fire insurance policy (by the bank offering the potentially shaky loan).

Derivatives are contracts that derive their value from the performance of an underlying entity. In essence, those buying the derivatives are investing their money directly in the underlying entity; if all goes well, they get an asset of greater value that they can liquidate or on-sell. It’s quite common for assets of this type to be reinvested at the end of the term – why wouldn’t you, it’s already proven able to earn you money and to be safe.

Nothing wrong with that if the underlying entity or operation is sound. Government bonds are essentially a form of Derivative. Put them into this economic climate, however, and they simply increased the stakes that everyone had invested in sub-prime mortgages.

It really was one house of cards built on another, built in turn on a third, which was itself built on an earthquake simulator.

The Enron Failure

It’s just possible that everyone involved should have had a better sense of the dangers involved after the Enron crisis in 2001, the last time deregulation and a lack of oversight combined with people who were being too clever by half.

The story of that scandal is really beyond the scope of this article (and outside the time available to finish it) so I’ll simply drop a link – Wikipedia, Enron scandal – and recommend people watch or read Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room:

• (limited availability)
• Streamed
• Book (last resort?) including Kindle

— I will get a small commission from Amazon.

Lehman Brothers Collapse

Far from reading any tea-leaves, or listening to any cautionary tales, the financial services sector seemed to have drunk the cool-aid. Lehman Brothers were the font-line example, but it could have been any of several institutions – they all borrowed money from other institutions to fund more sub-prime mortgages.

It was like a pyramid scheme in which each one was reinvesting their proceeds in the pyramid when they all should have known better.

Lehman brothers were so exposed that a 3-4% decline in the value of their assets would entirely eliminate the assets that underwrote their entire operation.

During the boom, this insane level of risk earned them and their stockholders monstrous profits, for obvious reasons, but once you start down that path, you are committed; any reduction in the practices that got you into that position completely decimate public confidence in your operation.

There were attempts to rescue them, of course. In August 2007, they bit the bullet and closed their subprime lending division, BNC Mortgage, eliminated 1200 staff positions in 23 locations, took a $25 million after tax charge, and wrote off a $27-million loss in Goodwill.

Unlike others, they didn’t repackage their subprime loans and on-sell them; they wanted the whole profit, and just because they were no longer issuing them doesn’t mean that they had eliminated any of the sub-prime loans that they had already issued – and that was what ultimately was their undoing.

They were simply lent too much money to survive when the bottom fell out of the overinflated housing market. Instead, the rot spread as a multitude of lenders had to write off the loans to Lehman Brothers, carrying them perilously close to the edge of their own financial cliffs.

Government Bailouts

The bankruptcy [of Lehman Bros] triggered a 4.5% one-day drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, then the largest decline since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

It signaled a limit to the government’s ability to manage the crisis and prompted a general financial panic. Money market mutual funds, a key source of credit, saw mass withdrawal demands to avoid losses, and the inter-bank lending market tightened, threatening [other] banks with imminent failure.

The government and the Federal Reserve system responded with several emergency measures to contain the panic.

— Wikipedia, Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers

There was a real risk of the entire financial system collapsing, so deep ran the rot

After the onset of the crisis, governments deployed massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other palliative monetary and fiscal policies to prevent a collapse of the global financial system.

In the US., the October 3, $800 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 failed to slow the economic free-fall.

— Wikipedia, 2007-2008 Financial Crisis

International Scope

One question not answered so far in this summary of events is why the GFC was so global in scope. Everything so far points to a US Domestic Crisis; however serious, the rest of the world should have been insulated from it, or so the casual reader might think.

There are two problems with this perspective. The first is that it completely ignores how interconnected the finances and economies of countries are in the modern world; and the US is still the focal point of the global economy.

(China could have claimed the crown in more recent years, but didn’t want the responsibility and international scrutiny that goes along with it, and definitely didn’t want the increased transparency that would have been required. So they managed their economy to keep it just a little smaller than that of the US).

The other critical factor is that banks the world over like to invest in profitable enterprises, and like to loan money to people with the apparent ability to pay it back. Combining the two left them hip-deep in the septic tank of the American problems – they simply didn’t know it until the balloon went up.

On top of all that, there’s an additional consequence of the size of the US economy – it results from a lot of people all over the world doing business with the US. People like me, for example. That makes me, and people like me, elements of both the US and my local economy – if financial trouble in the US means that buying products costs me more, that means I have less money to spend locally. There’s an inherent spread of such economic woes beyond the shores of the United States.

Credit where it’s due

When Obama won the Presidential Elections of 2008, Bush went out of his way to ease the transition to the new Administration, inviting the President-elect and members of his team to important summits and meetings such as the G-20.

Bush allegedly told Obama that the GFC was going to be his to manage, and rather than derail attempts to resolve the crisis with an abrupt shift of policies on Inauguration Day, the two worked together crafting and implementing government responses. Much as President Obama gets credit for resolving the crisis, the outgoing President Bush deserves at least some of that credit.

Plenty Of Blame

There’s also plenty of blame to be apportioned. The Republicans may have pulled the final trigger, but the banking and finance sectors had been hard at work in the Clinton administration, persuading those with the authority that they could be trusted, and the whole country would benefit, from the ongoing easing of restrictions.

I vaguely remember it being suggested in one documentary or another that the erosion of protections began with Truman. I’m not sure I entirely believe it, but Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, or Ford? Could easily have been any of them if it wasn’t Truman.

Greed doesn’t like to be regulated.

Surviving The Storm: An Australian Perspective

Unlike most of the world, Australia did not experience a recession as a consequence of the GFC.

This was a consequence of generous stimulus payments designed to boost the economy, paid to the lowest income earners, including pensioners and the unemployed. Because they have so little, the theory went, they would pump virtually all of it directly into the economy.

The government pumped 11.8 Billion Australian dollars into the economy. They say the proof of the pudding is in the eating – it worked. It was neither too little nor too much (though pundits suggested both at the time); while there was a minor recession in the non-mining sector, overall, the economy grew at 0.4% in the fourth quarter of 2011 and 1.3% in the first quarter of 2012. (Wikipedia, Economy Of Australia – Global Financial Crisis).

The upshot: I think that I can offer a more Olympian perspective on the entire GFC, simply because I don’t have any vested interest axe to grind.

The Rise Of Obama

On November 10, Obama traveled to the White House and met with President Bush to discuss transition issues while First Lady Laura Bush took his wife Michelle on a tour of the mansion.

NBC News reported that Obama advanced his economic agenda with Bush, asking him to attempt to pass a stimulus package in a lame duck session of Congress before the inauguration.

He also urged Bush to accelerate the disbursement of $25 billion in funds to bail out the automobile industry and expressed concern about additional Americans losing their homes as mortgage rates increase again.

— Wikipedia, Presidential Transition of Barack Obama

In February, mere weeks after the inauguration, the Democrats put forward the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 in response to the ongoing crisis, which

included a substantial payroll tax credit, saw economic indicators reverse and stabilize less than a month after its February 17 enactment.

— Wikipedia, 2007-2008 Financial Crisis

It’s highly doubtful if the new President would have been able to have all his ducks in a row this quickly if not for the assistance and cooperation of the outgoing President.

I should point out that, in part, President Bush’s treatment of Obama was a response to the events of 9/11; Bush had learned the hard way that these things can come out of nowhere at any time, and he wanted the country to be as ready to respond to an emergency on the evening of Inauguration Day as he could make it.

The economic relief was unfortunately temporary, as secondary effects sparked a recession – now known to Americans as the “Great Recession”.

In 2010, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in the US as a response to the crisis to “promote the financial stability of the United States”. The Basel III capital and liquidity standards were also adopted by countries around the world.

— Same Source

With these measures, the economy finally turned the corner.

I still have one, maybe two, chapters left to go in this penultimate part of the series. But I think that next week I’ll take a break from it to present something a little different.

As usual in this series, I’ve decided to just push on from where we left off, without the preambles and without a synopsis. You should read Chapter 8.1 before starting this continuation of the article to get the most out of it. But you can dive right in if you want to – at your own risk.

One word of warning: I was in the IT industry in the period in question, and know an awful lot about it as a result. That creates a tendency to waffle on (which I have tried to fight against) and to disappear down (tangentially-relevant) rabbit holes (which I have actively tried to resist). That can have two outcomes: either I have skirted over something superficially that deserved greater attention on behalf of those less-informed, or I have delved too deeply into things that seem relevant to me, but which may not be so important in the eyes of others. It’s even possible to fail in both ways at the same time. If there’s anything that’s unclear, use this as a starting point and guideline for your own research.

The Digital Age, Third Period 90s–00s

The final decade of any century is always going to be a compound of conclusions and precursors signposting the beginning of the new. This is doubted and even tripled when we’re talking about the end of a millennium. This was doubly true here in Australia and in Sydney as we ramped up not only for Y2K (like everyone else) but to host the Sydney Olympics; the city was obsessed with going the extra mile to make those games a spectacular success.

Sidebar: The Best Games In History

The reasons for this are an illustrative case study in how many influences can come together to create an irresistible trend. In this series, we’re primarily concerned with influences on the economy, and I’ll touch on that again at the end of this sidebar.

First, there was the inevitable desire to show our city and our nation off to the world. The economic benefits in terms of tourism were expected to last long beyond the games and even beyond the interval to the 2004 games, and in fact this was the outcome. It took COVID to bring them to an end, and now that most countries have reopened, there is undoubtedly a lingering residuum. But there was an increased emphasis on this because Australians are well aware of the tyranny of distance – we are a long way from anywhere else, especially from the US, Canada, and Europe, and needed to sell the nation as being worth that extra effort and expense.

Second, there was a dollop of inter-city rivalry. Melbourne had hosted the Olympics twice, and while Sydney-siders had supported those games wholeheartedly, we wanted to seriously up the ante. Such friendly rivalries are a common element in Australian Society – there are those who think that Australians approach everything as though it were a friendly game, and there’s an element of truth in that.

Third, the preceding games had not been the greatest success. We were acutely aware that then-president of the IOC had failed to deliver his usual pronouncement of ‘the best games in History’ over those games, and that earning that accolade would only enhance the perception of the city and of the event. What’s more, everyone overseas knew that Australia felt that way – so there was an expectation. (The thing with expectations is that you either fail to live up to the hype, and are viewed as diminished as a consequence, or you achieve or even better expectations, and gain added reputational luster as a result. The higher the expectation, the easier it is to fall flat. But if expectations are already going to be sky-high and you pull it off, the world is your oyster. We wanted to ensure that the hype, however elevated it was, would be seen as understatement afterwards – which demanded our going the extra mile to make visitors feel welcome. We did, and it worked).

Fourth, this would be either the culminating sporting event of the century, of the millennium even, or the launchpad for those of the century and millennium to come. Either way, there was extra pressure to get it ‘better than right’.

Fifth, there was widespread community support for the Games. Making the event a success was a point of pride for almost everyone in the city – to the point where some of the volunteers and officials took time off work (at their own expense) to attend the two prior games and learn what to do, and what not to do. And they were so successful that they were actively recruited, to pass those lessons on, by a number of subsequent games and comparable events.

Sixth, Australia had developed an international reputation for hosting big events “better than anyone else”, starting with the Formula 1 in Adelaide. The number of timers teams, drivers, and officials reported that ‘the Australian temporary facilities are better than those of many of the permanent tracks that we go to’ started that perception and it’s been built on every year since.

Seventh, Australians as a group tend to be perceived – more accurately than not – as sports-mad. We regularly punch above our weight in sporting events, and pride ourselves on always making an opposition earn their victories, no matter how great the mismatch may be on paper. We successfully translated that into a perception of the games as a whole being a sporting event in which other host cities, past and future, were our rivals.

And, finally, there were the other economic and social benefits. These were estimated to be in the Billions of Australian dollars pre-game and more billions in the course of the actual event. Afterwards, not only were there the anticipated tourism benefits but the games infrastructure was designed and intended to be economically and socially productive. Other games had made such claims, and failed to deliver, and those lessons were harshly scrutinized as our plans moved forward. The result: the stadium is still in regular use, the Olympic Village is now a residential suburb, there was a marque event designed to step into the Olympic aftermath to keep a positive view of the location active (which it successfully did for many years), and the games turned a significant profit for the state and the country as a whole.

One example of how this was achieved can be considered indicative: There was collaboration with Tourism providers to produce integrated tour packages that either culminated in, or kicked off with, attendance at the Games. Australia may have been a once-in-a-lifetime destination due to the distance involved, there was a lot of work done to maximize the bang that people got for their buck, on the assumption (and I think it was calculated at the time) that every happy tourist would generate 2-point-something more in future years – and that would mean more work, and more money, for everyone.

So there were eight factors contributing to set the standard for our hosting. Some of them were more significant early on, to be largely supplanted and left behind as a culture of excellence took hold. But they were all pushing in the same direction. Other events have done their best to emulate the success, and achieved it at least somewhat, but there were factors – like the fourth item on my list – that they could not replicate.

In economics, there are often four factors pulling one way and three pulling in the other, creating an unstable tension with an overall (and temporary) trend that can be reversed by a quite small change or event. When the dice eventually all line up, the result is a tsunami of events, all but unstoppable; the most you can hope for is to cushion the impact. More often than not, these events are negative in nature; positive examples require a lot of hard work on every front. But sometimes you can aim for the stars, and hit the mark.

The end of one era is the beginning of another

Getting back to the main point, the timing means that everything that happens in the last decade of a century or a millennium is viewed either as a culmination – “everything has been leading to this” – or as the harbinger of the future. There is considerable truth to the concept that – rightly or wrongly – anything that can’t be characterized as the first is automatically assumed to be the second, which shapes policies – sometimes, when it shouldn’t.

There is therefore an inherent turbulence built into social and economic systems and perceptions at the start of a new millennium or century – but this is often masked and temporarily delayed from public perception by a sense of having made the milestone. Everyone relaxes afterwards, at least for a while, and feels secure – when perhaps they shouldn’t. The seeds of the First World War were undoubtedly laid by the Empires of the 19th century, and by their relationships and treaties. Intended to create peace and respect between the dominant powers of their day, no-one foresaw that they would lead instead to war on an unprecedented scale.

We have the benefit of hindsight, and so can see – looking back – the significance of the milestones marked off in the critical decade, whereas they were largely unappreciated or underappreciated or misinterpreted at the time. The lesson some people – including scholars – fail to incorporate into their perceptions and theses is that the same is true of EVERY time period you study. Seeing the forest for the trees is always a challenge, often not possible until you look back from some remove. At the time, critical events are just ‘stuff that happens’.

Beginning: Invasion Of The PCs

The ‘stuff that was just happening’ at the beginning of the ultimate decade of the 20th century was the tsunami of adoption of the Personal Computer. No-one, and I mean no-one foresaw how big this movement would be, or what impact it would have.

Office Computing

Computers had been in the big businesses for a while, but they cost so much – to purchase, to install, and to operate – that they were completely out of reach for even moderate-sized businesses. To change that, all three of these elements had to change.

The PC, in any of its incarnations, solved the first problem, purchase price, to at least some extent. The IBM-product, and its clones, solved it better than the Apple Mac, and the price difference became a leading cause of tribal contention at the time – were Macs worth the extra expense? Those in the Pro-Apple tribe said yes, those in the IBM-tribe said no, and there was a very narrow group caught in the middle that said “yes – for now.” The latter were shouted down by everyone but were proven right in the end.

Both solved the installation problem almost completely – to the point where such problems were viewed as unusual exceptions when they arose. You didn’t need a dedicated computer room to house these devices, you didn’t need expensive air-conditioning systems, etc – you simply plugged them into a wall socket or power-board and sat them on a desk. Job done. Very occasionally, a domestic power supply would not be stable enough for reliable operations, but these were so rare that they were viewed as a failure on the part of the electrical supplier. In effect, the definition of ‘reliable power’ was rewritten to meet the needs of the newly-ubiquitous technology.

Nevertheless, the occasional such problem arose regularly throughout the decade, slowly becoming less and less frequent as electricity providers caught up.

At the start, the IBM product had no GUI (Graphical User Interface – i.e. mouse and pointer). It was a text-based system that was perceived as less user-friendly than the Mac. GUIs are inherently easier to learn, more intuitive. Windows 95 changed that – at least partially – and Windows 98 took the best selling point of the Mac and welded it to the best of the IBM product to create a world-beater. Apple responded with better color and high-resolution graphics, but the writing was largely on the wall.

But Windows had already taken the business world by storm long before Windows 95. There are three major legs of business application: what became known as desktop publishing, database entry and retrieval, and spreadsheets. The Macs had an undoubted edge in the desktop publishing arena – WYSIWYG (‘What you see is what you get’, in other words what you saw onscreen looked like the eventual printed page). Microsoft and the IBM-clones had the edge in the other two, and there was a lot of debate about which was more important, most of which missed the point; it wasn’t that the spreadsheets and databases themselves were more important, it was what you could do with an application built on top of these, using them as a ‘back-end’. Point-of-sale systems, inventory management systems, accounting systems, etc. What was more, these applications could then output information to template ‘forms’ in the word processors to produce invoices and sales records and what-have-you, integrating everything into one unified suite of products. As the potential for these integrated systems emerged, customer after customer was won over – especially since the price was so much better. WYSIWYG was nice, but not critical to operations; everything else permitted better management of resources and potentially greater profitability.

Cautionary Tales

Before moving on, let me address one of the biggest mistakes that people made at the time, and continued to make right through the 2000s. Computerizing an operation did not make for less work for staff, or less expense, but that was always the #1 reason offered for doing so. Unscrupulous salespeople took full advantage of this misperception, promising the earth, then washing their hands when it didn’t materialize.

Computerizing an operation permits better management of the operation, if you structure the implementation to give you essential information in a timely manner. Interpreting that information is always up to management, the computer can’t do it for you. You pay for this control by requiring (generally) more work from staff, and possibly even additional staff.

You can’t control the cost of implementation; what you can control is getting value for money. Toe-in-the water implementations are doomed to inevitable failure; the more whole-hog that you go, the greater the bang that you get for the buck, and the more likely the implementation is to be a success.

In the mid-90s, I saw an estimate that 80% of computer implementations were disasters waiting to happen, and half of the rest had already been disasters that had been survived and learned from. Only one-in-ten computerizations had been successful, and half of those (or more) were down to blind luck. Bear these facts in mind when dealing with any business operation in such a time period.

Back to the topic at hand – the invasion of the PCs into office spaces. I’ve covered two of the three problems that needed to be overcome, showing that one was only partially solved by Mac but fully solved by the IBM-clone; that both solved the second successfully; which brings me to the third, ease of operation. And, in fact, I’ve touched on a lot of aspects of this third problem, along the way. It’s worth remembering that prior to the PC, staff needed specialist training to operate computer equipment, often very expensive training. The new desktop computers did away with that need almost completely – or so it might seem at first glance.

At first, the Macintoshes and Apple-IIs were comparable to, if not better than, the IBM-PC in the user-interface stakes. The problem was that there was so little software available for business applications on the Apples. The IBMs may have had a menu-based system, with keyboard shortcuts that needed to be memorized, but they had the software ready-to-go. And they had training available for using those applications, providing an instant productivity boost in terms of using the new system. Apples looked prettier (on-screen, at least) but had none of this infrastructure to make them business-friendly. They were selling raw beef and expecting the customer to do the cooking – which is fine at home, but not what you expect at a four-star restaurant.

An example of benefits

GMs running games in this era need to understand what made a computerized workflow successful, but this is really hard to pin down unless you were there at the time, because glossy promises in glossier promotional materials that promise the earth, coupled with a certain rose-tinted hindsight, obscure the truth. So here’s a practical, if fictional, example.

The computer gets brought in to manage sales and inventory for a small general store (I’ll be using a “corner store’ in the Australian sense of the term, but it should be pretty close to similar retail operations the world over). This store has been operating at a profit for a number of years but the profit margins are shrinking and the customers are starting to dry up. Instead of relying on general impressions of what’s selling when, a year’s worth of actual sales being recorded permits the owner to determine that some products sell better in certain seasons (which he already knew) but that there are a couple of spikes in demand because of holidays and the like. As a result, he is able to reduce the inventory that he is carrying of those products, stocking more of them when demand is about to increase; instead of $100,000 in stock, he now only has to keep $80,000 worth for most of the year, but at key points, he needs to carry $110,000 worth – explaining why he experiences difficulty in paying his bills at such times of year.

That gives him $20,000 for most of the year to invest in products in greater demand – he uses half of it for that purpose, puts half of what’s left towards those difficult bills, and intends to use the remaining $5000 for promotional activities – sales and discounts and so on. Using the computer’s sales, he can determine week-to-week which promotions work (overall revenues go up) and which don’t. So he grows his entire business by 10%. His staff are somewhat disgruntled, because they have to work harder, but their jobs are actually more secure because they know how the new system works – except for those that don’t take the time to understand it. But he can now afford to give them a 2-4% pay rise, and still take more than half the extra earnings as profits. What’s more, he’s able to better cope with local changes in buying habits – stocking products that the nearby supermarket doesn’t, for example, with a small overlap of products that might be needed unexpectedly or when the supermarket is closed.

History shows that this won’t be enough in the long term to fight off the supermarkets, but this store won’t be amongst the early casualties.

Home Computing

Here’s a simple thought experiment: If the average small business has two-to-four employees plus the owner, what’s the more important market: the domestic computer, or the business computer package? The latter costs twice as much, maybe even three times as much, but we’re talking about 3-5 times as many home systems for every business installation. So the home systems market is the more important, right?

Wrong. People are strongly resistant to learning to do things two different ways. If you’re workplace is using a windows installation, you are twice as likely (or more) to prefer a windows installation at home, too. And businesses like to encourage this, because it means that any experience or additional familiarity you acquire through using your home system makes you more productive with the business systems and vice-versa, so they start including ‘familiarity with’ in their job vacancy requirements. And salesmen cotton on quickly, and start discounting lower-end home systems, because if four of a business’ staff already have familiarity with System X, it makes it more likely that the business will buy System X.

On top of that, there are all those employees of businesses who had not computerized – and at the start of the decade, that was the majority. If you can capture that market segment, too…

Computers had already started infiltrating the domestic market for entertainment purposes, but the rise of the business PC massively accelerated the process, and overwhelmingly, it was an IBM-clone that became the baseline home system..

Bulletin Boards to Early Networks

So you have a shiny new computer at home. It’s just going to sit there until YOU do something with it.

A computer is a tool, you have to use it for something. There are a number of application areas that emerged at much the same time as PCs started infiltrating homes in a big way – games, art, writing/publishing, personal finances, well-being, automation, and communications. To these were soon added music and video. All of these were primitive to start with, and developed at different paces. Initially, a lot of development went into the computer games sector, because it made the best and fastest returns. In most of the other areas, you had one or perhaps two programs (if any), while you might have fifty or a hundred different games.

At different times in the history of the PC, other applications came to the fore to (temporarily) dominate the landscape – the desktop publishing craze of the mid-90s, for example. No-one really expected communications to emerge from the pack as one of the most important to users day-to-day lives. E-mail grew and grew in importance, slowly gaining ground and not relinquishing it until the late 2010s. But it started far simpler, as bulletin boards.

Describing these for anyone who hasn’t used one is phenomenally difficult, because any explanation takes far longer to describe the limitations than the subject is worth. A smaller, simpler Reddit is probably the closest brief description that can be made, but it only tells half the story. Early examples had no subject differentiation, for example – everything went into one vast list of threads that had to be manually selected. There was no search function. There was no internet – you had to dial a specific number to get access to the bulletin board hosted at that number. To go to a different one, you had to hang up and dial a different number, establishing a new connection. You discovered new sites through word-of-mouth recommendations from other users.

Over the course of the decade, the bulletin boards evolved into the internet, and spun off into chat rooms (which evolved into social media) and connections began to be extruded into all sorts of other areas – when it became possible to email a fax machine, for example. And then along came the search engine and internet protocols so that one window could be used to “browse” from one site to another, all on related topics. Online trade was still in its infancy by the end of the decade, with people just barely beginning to grasp the potential.

The history of this development is one milestone after another at lightning-fast pace, and WAY beyond the scope of this series. But some awareness of ‘the state of the art’ is necessary to properly simulate any point in history properly, and it’s generally better described, from a modern perspective, by listing all the things that you couldn’t do – with the knowledge that within two years, the list would have changed.

Microsoft: The first Mega-corp

The success of Windows made Microsoft the first in the modern generation of mega-corporations, a term unashamedly stolen from Cyberpunk. They didn’t just lead the industry, they were dominant. And they used this power to do some unsavory things in the corporate sense.

Serious attempts were made to apply anti-monopoly legislation against them, but these generally fell foul of the fact that this was the product that everyone wanted. There were times when regulators were able to restrict and restrain the monolith – the browser wars come to mind, for example – but these were drops in the ocean. Even today, the monopolistic powers of the mega-corps like Google are at best restrained by legislative authority.

History shows us that these powers will persist until some fundamental shift in the technological foundation creates an opportunity for a new player to supplant the existing power base; the smartphone brought apple back into prominence, but Google’s Chrome has become even more ubiquitous. To the extent that anyone can be said to have won the Browser Wars, Google has perhaps the best claim to the ‘trophy’.

Here’s a very common potted business history: Someone writes an app that adds useful functionality to the then-current generation of Windows. It starts selling like hot cakes. Microsoft do one of three things: (1) decide it’s a flash in the pan, and not worth the effort of doing anything about; (2) buy the rights to the killer-app and bundle it into the next generation of Windows; or (3) develop their own version or buy the rights to a rival product and enhance it, then bundle that with the next generation of Windows (if not sooner, through an update). In two out of three cases, a prosperous entity within the IT universe vanishes – and the next version of Windows becomes that little bit more profitable, having something to sell and market to existing customers.

Middle: Skirting Eco-disaster

Who remembers the hole in the Ozone layer? This was an eco-disaster in the making in the mid-80s and led to a banning of CFCs and other chemicals known to cause Ozone depletion in 1987.

The ban came into effect in 1989. Ozone levels stabilized by the mid-1990s and began to recover in the 2000s.

— Wikipedia, Ozone Depletion

Recovery is projected to continue over the next century, and the ozone hole was expected to reach pre-1980 levels by around 2075. In 2019, NASA reported that the ozone hole was the smallest ever since it was first discovered in 1982.

— Same source

When considering the “Ozone Hole” (actually a misnomer), it has to be remembered that when the ban was instituted, no-one knew how quickly or completely the damage would be repaired. As the populated nation most closely affected, Australia paid particular attention to the situation for the next couple of years, until other policy priorities began to distract the government of the day.

This is perhaps the most widely-recognized environmental disaster that was narrowly avoided in this era. It is far from the only one. Another one to assume prominence in Australia was Soil Erosion.

In the US, Acid Rain was perhaps a bigger concern, threatening their Aquaculture-based industries. This led to the 1990 Clean Air Act. How close to disaster was this? You can judge by the 1992 closure of all eastern seaboard fishing grounds because there had been insufficient recover of stock.

The 1990s saw increased awareness of the hazards of oil spills, soil and water contamination, toxic waste dumping, and chemical accidents.

And then there’s Asbestos…

Asbestos

The use of asbestos in new construction projects has been banned for health and safety reasons in many developed countries or regions, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and New Zealand.

A notable exception is the United States, where asbestos continues to be used in construction such as cement asbestos pipes.

The 5th Circuit Court prevented the EPA from banning asbestos in 1991 because EPA research showed the ban would cost between US$450 and 800 million while only saving around 200 lives in a 13-year time-frame, and that the EPA did not provide adequate evidence for the safety of alternative products.

— Wikipedia, Asbestos

Before the ban, asbestos was widely used in the construction industry in thousands of materials. Some are judged to be more dangerous than others due to the amount of asbestos and the material’s friable nature.

Sprayed coatings, pipe insulation, and Asbestos Insulating Board (AIB) are thought to be the most dangerous due to their high content of asbestos and friable nature. Many older buildings built before the late 1990s contain asbestos.

— Same source

The Australian Experience
Asbestos and the diseases that it causes were far more prominent in Australia even that in countries that took strong action with respect to the construction material. We had as many asbestos-related fatalities here as did the UK, despite having only 1/3 the population, and there was ongoing litigation on behalf of miners throughout the 80s that kept the issue returning to the front pages.

Western Australia’s center of blue asbestos mining was Wittenoom. The mine was run by CSR Limited (a company that had been the Colonial Sugar Refinery).

— Wikipedia, Asbestos and the law

The 1990 single Blue Sky Mine by environmentally and socially-aware rock group Midnight Oil exemplified the anger and resentment that was felt – not so much over the issue itself, but with the way those deemed responsible sought to dodge culpability.

James Hardie Industries

The main manufacturer of asbestos products was James Hardie, which set up a minor fund for its workers, then transferred operations to the Netherlands where it would be out of reach of the workers when the fund expired.

— Wikipedia, Asbestos and the law

Just to finish the story: In 2001, James Hardy separated two of its subsidiaries from the parent company to create the Medical Research and Compensation Foundation (MRCF), essentially an inadequately-funded dumping ground for the company’s asbestos liabilities.

Then CEO of James Hardie, Peter McDonald, made public announcements emphasizing that the MRCF had sufficient funds to meet all future claims and that James Hardie would not give it any further substantial funds.

…The net assets of the MRCF were $293 million, mostly in real estate and loans, and exceeded the ‘best estimate’ of $286 million in liabilities which had been estimated in an actuarial report commissioned by James Hardie.

— Wikipedia, James Hardie Industries

The 2004 Jackson report (see below) later found that

…this ‘best estimate’ was ‘wildly optimistic’ and the estimates of future liabilities was ‘far too low’.

— Same source

James Hardy then moved all of their operations to the Netherlands in an attempt to isolate the rest of the company from these liabilities.

Such tactics created outrage here, and cemented public opinion firmly against what had been one of the most successful and respected companies in the country. But the story kept getting worse:

Shortly after the move, an actuarial report found that James Hardie asbestos liabilities were likely to reach $574 million.

The MRCF sought extra funding from James Hardie and was offered $18 million in assets, an offer the MRCF rejected.

The estimate of asbestos liabilities was promptly revised to $752 million in 2002 and then $1.58 billion in 2003.

— Same source

James Hardy was dragged to the negotiating table kicking and screaming by the findings of the Jackson Report cited above, but eventually promised to set up a compensation fund – then stalled and delayed for another two years.

It was not until November 2006, after the federal government had created ‘black hole’ tax legislation, which made the contributions of James Hardie into the voluntary fund tax deductible, and had granted the voluntary fund tax-exempt status, that James Hardie finalized the compensation deal.

— Same source

The saga continues!
But the story still wasn’t over.

In February 2007 every member of the 2001 board and some members of senior management were charged by the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) with a range of breaches of the Corporations Act 2001 including breach of director’s duties by failing to act with care and diligence.

ASIC also undertook investigations into possible criminal charges against the company’s executives but in September 2008 the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions decided there was insufficient evidence and charges were not pursued.

In 2009, the Supreme Court of New South Wales found that directors had misled the stock exchange in relation to James Hardie’s ability to fund claims. They were also banned from serving as board members for five years. Former chief executive Peter Macdonald was banned for 15 years and fined $350,000 for his role in forming the MRCF and publicizing it.

— Same source

The former directors other than MacDonald appealed, but the ruling against seven of them was upheld.

Circling back to relevance
At the start of the decade, there was a general perception that Asbestos claims were related to the mining of the raw material and the preparation of products that used it, that it was stable and safe to use.

Asbestos cement, genericized as fibro, fibrolite (short for “fibrous (or fibre) cement sheet”) or AC sheet, is a building material in which asbestos fibres are used to reinforce thin rigid cement sheets.

— Wikipedia, Asbestos Cement

Since WWII, this product had been massively popular for quick and easy construction of homes and other structures. While it was used world-wide to some extent because of its resilience and affordability, it became a ubiquitous construction material in Australia and New Zealand through this period. I spent most of my youth living in Fibro-based houses. And, so long as it remained intact, those who saw no danger were correct.

Damage or demolitions, which tore and shattered the sheets and other forms created using the material, however, released dangerous levels of asbestos fiber into the air and onto surfaces which could then be absorbed by workmen simply by touching contaminated surfaces.

Over the course of the decade, as this came to light, asbestos removal (abatement) and remediation measures became mandatory, and often expensive. Mitigating the exposures involved tents to confine the dust, high-quality masks and environmental suits for the workforce. At one point, continual wetting of the sources was thought to be necessary. The water itself that was used had to be captured and cleaned, because otherwise you were simply spreading the fibers around.

Home renovations were a big thing in the Australia of the 90s and have stayed that way, led by TV shows such as Our House (not to be confused with movies or the US TV series). Our House (Australian) ran from 1993 to 2001, and arguably it would have continued if not for the untimely death of host and former Skyhooks front-man, ‘Shirley’ Strachan.

It was far from the only one, though – “Better Homes And Gardens” (A TV series modeled on the Australian version of the American Magazine) has been running for twenty-eight seasons and a game-show-styled renovations reality program, “The Block” has appeared onscreen for a total of 19 seasons – two in 2003-2004, and the rest after a 6-year break. (The 19th season is currently airing).

So Asbestos abatement is a particularly big deal here, but is important elsewhere, too.

Bottom line: Environmental considerations will crop up frequently and unexpectedly throughout the decade, but especially the latter half. That was when the general public started becoming aware of Climate Change.

Middle: Rise Of The Smaller Device

Smaller computing devices had been around for years, but exploded in popularity in the 90s.

Laptops

Laptops – if you can call them that – had been around for as long as the computer. They weren’t really portable until the Epson HX-20 of 1981, but this had an LCD screen and not the full “portable PC” experience. Displays reached 640×480 (VGA) resolution by 1988 (Compaq SLT/286), and color screens started becoming a common upgrade in 1991 (Wikipedia, Laptop). So these were the first generations of what would be recognized as a modern laptop.

PDAs

Parallel to these developments was the rise of the PDA – the first example of which was the Psion Organizer of 1984, but didn’t really take off until the Psion Model 3 of 1991. And then they seemed to explode for the rest of the decade.

If, as is arguably the case, the Laptop evolved into the iPad, it was a merger between the iPad and the PDA that became the iPhone – the beginnings of the now ubiquitous Smartphone. It can also be argued that e-book readers are also a development of PDAs, with some technology from the iPad incorporated (bigger screens, for example).

Pagers

Before all of these was the Pager. These were first developed in the 50s and 60s, became popular in the 1980s, and were ubiquitous amongst certain professions and tiers of management throughout the 1990s. For a lot of the 2000s, they were still preferred over more capable devices by some government groups because they were perceived as more resilient services in the event of natural or man-made emergencies. They were also widely used in restaurants and medical facilities like hospitals.

In Japan, more than ten million pagers were active in 1996 (Wikipedia, Pager). It’s a measure of the decline of the technology that on 1 October 2019, the last Japanese provider of pager services ceased operating. Everywhere, they are now being phased out, a technology that has reached its sunset.

But in the 1990s, they are a ubiquitous presence. Some people had – and routinely used – more than one.

Understanding what is popular at any given point in the era, what it can be used for, and its limitations and fallibilities, is essential to properly depicting the era (does everyone remember Nelson and his Apple Newton from an early episode of The Simpsons?).

End: Hope Fails

Although it had been possible for most of the decade to balance good news against the occasional piece of bad, there were a couple of historical developments that could not be dismissed so easily. Four developments in particular would create tensions – some of which would only be inflamed by subsequent decades.

The end of Glasnost and Rise of Yeltsin

Much of the following paraphrases content from the Wikipedia page for Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Russian word from which Glasnost derives has long been used to mean “openness” and “transparency”. In the mid-1980s, it was popularized by Mikhail Gorbachev as a political slogan for increased government transparency in the Soviet Union within the framework of perestroika and the word entered the English language with that definition, especially in relation to the Soviet Union and Russian Federation.

Under Gorbachev the ice not only thawed, it seemed to shatter; every time he had a summit with a western leader, there was a positive outcome for both Soviet Citizens and those in the West.

To those who knew what to watch for, Gorbachev was straddling a fine line between hardliners and even more progressive elements, and in time this led to an attempted coup in August of 1991. In less than three weeks, the coup leaders had realized that they lacked sufficient popular support to continue, and had stood down. Boris Yeltsin emerged as a popular figure for standing up against the coup, giving a memorable speech atop a tank.

Gorbachev pledged to reform the Soviet Communist Party but faced aggressive criticism from Yeltsin for having appointed many of the coup members to their positions of authority in the first place. His attempts at compromising between the two factions were now held as a mistake, and his authority was lost; he had been pushed off that fine line by the conservative hard-liners, and was lost. Just two days after his return, he resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party and called on the Central Committee to dissolve.

After the coup, the Supreme Soviet indefinitely suspended all Communist Party activity, effectively ending communist rule in the Soviet Union, and the collapse followed at breakneck speed. Many celebrated a final victory in the Cold War (who should have known better), but most considered the resulting instability as a greater threat than a Soviet Union under Gorbachev would have been. Yeltsin, now wielding greater authority than Gorbachev, stated that he would veto any idea of a unified state, instead favoring a confederation with little central authority. The referendum in Ukraine on 1 December with a 90% turnout for secession from the Union was a fatal blow; Gorbachev had expected Ukrainians to reject independence.

Without Gorbachev’s knowledge, Yeltsin met with Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian president Stanislav Shushkevich in Belovezha Forest, near Brest, Belarus, on 8 December and signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as its successor. Gorbachev was furious but impotent to preserve the Soviet Union, as one state after another ratified the new political structure. Forced to accept the fait accompli, Gorbachev announced that he would resign when the CIS became a reality.

Gorbachev reached a deal with Yeltsin that called for Gorbachev to formally announce his resignation as Soviet president and Commander-in-Chief on 25 December, before vacating the Kremlin by 29 December. On the 26th, the Soviet of the Republics, the upper house of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, formally voted the country out of existence.

Few people knew what to expect from Yeltsin and this new political entity, the CIS. And unpredictability always lends itself to uncertainty and doubt. The question that needed to be answered was how sincere Yeltsin was in his past proposed reforms, and how much of a political opportunist had he been?

The fall of Yeltsin & the Rise of Putin

As it happened, Yeltsin was sincere, but fell victim to the perpetual enemy of the idealist – wishful thinking. His policies were insufficiently robust and had too great a tendency to assume that things would always work out the way he thought they would. Or at least, that’s how many people came to see him after the fact.

On at least two occasions, he survived attempts to impeach him, signaling the renewed presence of hardliners within the government ranks. In 1998, the Prosecutor General of Russia, Yuri Skuratov, opened a bribery investigation against Mabetex a Swiss construction firm that held many contracts with the Russian Government, accusing its Chief Executive Officer Behgjet Pacolli of bribing Yeltsin and his family. Swiss authorities issued an international arrest warrant for Pavel Borodin, the official who managed the Kremlin’s property empire. Stating that bribery was a common business practice in Russia, Pacolli confirmed in early December 1999 that he had guaranteed five credit cards for Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, and two daughters, Tatyana and Yelena. Yeltsin resigned a few weeks later on 31 December 1999, appointing Vladimir Putin as his successor.

By some estimates, his approval ratings when leaving office were as low as 2%. Polling also suggests that a majority of the Russian population were pleased by Yeltsin’s resignation.

— Paraphrased from the Wikipedia page for Boris Yeltsin.

Yeltsin had become seen as a reasonably amiable drunkard by many in the West. Few recognized the empowerment of the Oligarchs for the potential threat that it became. There was considerable angst over an every-man-for-himself attitude amongst the military and ex-military, in particular the potential for the black market sale of nuclear weapons. This plot element features strongly in a number of Hollywood movies of the time. But Yeltsin had only sown the seeds; they would flower under Putin.

A former intelligence officer who was generally prepared to play the long game,

Following Yeltsin’s resignation, Putin became acting president and, in less than four months, was elected to his first term as president. He was subsequently reelected in 2004. Due to constitutional limitations of two consecutive presidential terms, Putin served as prime minister again from 2008 to 2012 under Dmitry Medvedev. He returned to the presidency in 2012, following an election marked by allegations of fraud and protests, and was reelected in 2018. In April 2021, after a referendum, he signed into law constitutional amendments that included one allowing him to run for reelection twice more, potentially extending his presidency to 2036.

— Wikipedia, Vladimir Putin.

At first, Putin’s ascension seemed a good thing, bringing stability to an unstable situation. But rather than bringing the oligarchs into line, he encouraged them, indebted each of them to himself, then played one off against the others. At the same time, he blatantly rewrote the rules, as described above. He has now become obsessed with the notion of recreating the Soviet Union (by force since there is no other way); step one was to have been the annexation of Ukraine. Part of that obsession is that 2036 time limit – there must be some reason why he can’t simply rewrite the rules again. So he’s bet the farm on a Ukrainian Assimilation – and appears to be losing.

But the seeds of the current whirlwind were sown way back then, I think.

AIDS and the Death of Free Love

Flower Power was all the idealism and hope of a generation in one package, and nothing was more symbolic of it than the free love movement. Made possible by the contraceptive pill, a hedonist expression of women’s liberation, it was starry-eyed idealism at its most extreme. It’s more than a little ironic that Flower Power withered and before the sub-movement that it engendered, but the impact of the Vietnam War was too great a cross for it to bear. The irony stems from the horror that vision of the actual fighting and the atrocities of war actually made peace seem all that much more desirable. The world might have been a very different place if the flower power movement post-dated that conflict.

But the legacy remained – sexual liberation – and its descendant movements remain with us today in the struggle for LGBT rights and recognition.

The 1990s came close to killing what remained, however, as a new disease arose which seemed to target the promiscuous, and especially the gay community: AIDS, caused by HIV. It’s not my intention to delve too deeply into this story; what I am more concerned with is the sense of despair that it engendered. At first, it was thought to be a disease that only afflicted gay men, but slowly it seemed to spread to those addicted to intravenous narcotics, and then to the general public.

There was something close to a public panic, fueled by suspicion and paranoia, and which gave rise to massive levels of disinformation. I remember someone asking me if you could get it from giving someone a haircut, or shaking their hand. It didn’t quite reach the level where “breathing the same air” was suspicious and to be avoided, but any other form of contact was deemed “dangerous” by some.

We’ve learned a lot, and a lot better, since those days, and AIDS is no longer a death sentence. In fact, there are indications that a full cure is not far away – the legacy of the bucket-loads of money that were eventually targeted at the disease. But, at the time, there was mortal fear in being anywhere near a potential victim, and any number of people who had done nothing wrong were made outcasts by the more fearful and intolerant elements of society.

The imminence of Y2K

Finally, we have Y2K, sometimes described as the Armageddon That Never Came (or other, equally-colorful terms). The “Millennium Bug” is now considered a non-event by the general public, in the same chicken-little vein of predictions of Armageddon by Planetary Alignment or the 2012 panic, or any number of other similar events.

Unfortunately, there is a qualitative difference – the Y2K problem was very real, and the potential for disaster if nothing was done about it may have been worst-case but were otherwise equally real. To me, it’s ironic that the ‘non-event’ was used to cast aspersions on the credibility of Climate Change – ironic, because the reason that Y2K wasn’t a disaster is that a lot of people put in a lot of very hard and sometimes tedious work making sure that it wasn’t a disaster, and that – a lot of very hard and sometimes tedious work – is exactly what is required to mitigate Climate Change.

But for those who claim that it was a non-event, consider the following list of actual events and consequences, from the same source cited above:

• Before 2000:
  • Late 1998: Commonwealth Edison reported a computer upgrade intended to prevent the Y2K glitch caused them to send the village of Oswego, Illinois an erroneous electric bill for $7 million.
  • 1 January 1999: taxi meters in Singapore stopped working, while in Sweden, incorrect taxi fares were given.
  • Midnight, 1 January 1999: at three airports in Sweden, computers that police used to generate temporary passports stopped working.
  • February 8, 1999: while testing Y2K compliance in a computer system monitoring nuclear core rods at Peach Bottom Nuclear Generating Station, instead of resetting the time on the external computer meant to simulate the date rollover a technician accidentally changed the time on the operation systems computer. This computer had not yet been upgraded, and the date change caused all the computers at the station to crash. It took approximately seven hours to restore all normal functions, during which time workers had to use obsolete manual equipment to monitor plant operations.
  • November 1999: approximately 500 residents in Philadelphia received jury duty summonses for dates in 1900.
  • December 1999: in the United Kingdom, a software upgrade intended to make computers Y2K compliant prevented social services in Bedfordshire from finding if anyone in their care was over 100 years old, since computers failed to recognize the dates of birth being searched.
  • Late December 1999: Telecom Italia (now Gruppo TIM), Italy’s largest telecom company, sent a bill for January and February 1900. The company stated this was a one-time error and that it had recently ensured its systems would be compatible with the year rollover.
  • 28 December 1999: 10,000 card swipe machines issued by HSBC and manufactured by Racal stopped processing credit and debit card transactions. This was limited to machines in the United Kingdom, and was the result of the machines being designed to ensure transactions had been completed within four business days; from 28 to 31 December they interpreted the future dates to be in the year 1900. Stores with these machines relied on paper transactions until they started working again on 1 January.
  • 31 December, at 7:00 pm EST, Virginia, USA: as a direct result of a patch intended to prevent the Y2K glitch, computers at a ground control station in Fort Belvoir, Virginia crashed and ceased processing information from five spy satellites, including three KH-11 satellites. The military implemented a contingency plan within 3 hours by diverting their feeds and manually decoding the scrambled information, from which they were able produce a limited dataset. All normal functionality was restored at 11:45 pm on 2 January 2000
• 1 January, 2000:
  • Australia: bus ticket validation machines in two states failed to operate.
  • Japan: machines in 13 train stations stopped dispensing tickets for a short time.
  • Japan: the Shika Nuclear Power Plant in Ishikawa reported that radiation monitoring equipment failed at a few seconds after midnight. Officials said there was no risk to the public, and no excess radiation was found at the plant.
  • Japan: at 12:02AM, the telecommunications carrier Osaka Media Port found date management mistakes in their network. A spokesman said they had resolved the issue by 02:43 and did not interfere with operations.
  • Japan: NTT Mobile Communications Network (NTT Docomo), Japan’s largest cellular operator, reported that some models of mobile telephones were deleting new messages received, rather than the older messages, as the memory filled up.
  • South Korea: at midnight, 902 Ondol heating systems and water heating failed at an apartment building near Seoul; the Ondol systems were down for 19 hours and would only work when manually controlled, while the water heating took 24 hours to restart.
  • South Korea: two hospitals in Gyeonggi Province reported malfunctions with equipment measuring bone marrow and patient intake forms, with one accidentally registering a newborn as having been born in 1900, four people in the city of Daegu received medical bills with dates in 1900, and a court in Suwon sent out notifications containing a trial date for 4 January 1900.
  • South Korea: a video store in Gwangju accidentally generated a late fee of approximately 8 million won (approximately $7,000 US dollars) because the store’s computer determined a tape rental to be 100 years overdue. South Korean authorities stated the computer was a model anticipated to be incompatible with the year rollover, and had not undergone the software upgrades necessary to make it compliant.
  • Hong Kong: police breathalyzers failed at midnight.
  • China: In Jiangsu, taxi meters failed at midnight.
  • Egypt: three dialysis machines briefly failed.
  • Greece, approximately 30,000 cash registers, amounting to around 10% of the country’s total, printed receipts with dates in 1900.
  • Denmark, the first baby born on 1 January was recorded as being 100 years old.
  • France: the national weather forecasting service, Meteo-France, said a Y2K bug made the date on a webpage show a map with Saturday’s weather forecast as “01/01/19100”. Additionally, the government reported that a Y2K glitch rendered one of their Syracuse satellite systems incapable of recognizing onboard malfunctions.
  • Germany: at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the payroll system interpreted the new year to be 1900 and determined the ages of employees’ children by the last two digits of their years of birth, causing it to wrongly withhold government childcare subsidies in paychecks. To reinstate the subsidies, accountants had to reset the operating system’s year to 1999.
  • Germany: a bank accidentally transferred 12 million Deutsche Marks (equivalent to $6.2 million) to a customer and presented a statement with the date 30 December 1899. The bank quickly fixed the incorrect transfer.
  • Italy, courthouse computers in Venice and Naples showed an upcoming release date for some prisoners as 10 January 1900, while other inmates wrongly showed up as having 100 additional years on their sentences.
  • Norway, a day care center for kindergartners in Oslo offered a spot to a 105 year old woman because the citizen’s registry only showed the last two digits of citizens’ years of birth.
  • Spain: a worker received a notice for an industrial tribunal in Murcia which listed the event date as 3 February 1900.
  • Sweden: the main hospital in Uppsala, a hospital in Lund, and two regional hospitals in Karlstad and Linkoping reported that machines used for reading electrocardiogram information failed to operate, although the hospitals stated it had no effect on patient health.
  • UK: In Sheffield, a Y2K bug that was not discovered and fixed until 24 May caused computers to miscalculate the ages of pregnant mothers, which led to 154 patients receiving incorrect risk assessments for having a child with Down syndrome. As a direct result two abortions were carried out, and four babies with Down syndrome were also born to mothers who had been told they were in the low-risk group.
  • Brazil: at the Port of Santos, computers which had been upgraded in July 1999 to be Y2K compliant could not read three-year customs registrations generated in their previous system once the year rolled over. Santos said this affected registrations from before June 1999 that companies had not updated, which Santos estimated was approximately 20,000, and that when the problem became apparent on 10 January they were able to fix individual registrations, “in a matter of minutes”. A computer at Viracopos International Airport in Sao Paulo state also experienced this glitch, which temporarily halted cargo unloading.
  • Jamaica, in the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation, 8 computerized traffic lights at major intersections stopped working. Officials stated these lights were part of a set of 35 traffic lights known to be Y2K non-compliant, and that all 35 were already slated for replacement.
  • USA: the US Naval Observatory, which runs the master clock that keeps the country’s official time, gave the date on its website as 1 Jan 19100.
  • USA: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives could not register new firearms dealers for 5 days because their computers failed to recognize dates on applications.
  • USA: 150 Delaware Lottery racino slot machines stopped working.
  • USA: In New York, a video store accidentally generated a $91,250 late fee because the store computer determined a tape rental was 100 years overdue.
  • USA: In Tennessee, the Y-12 National Security Complex stated that a Y2K glitch caused an unspecified malfunction in a system for determining the weight and composition of nuclear substances at a nuclear weapons plant, although the United States Department of Energy stated they were still able to keep track of all material. It was resolved within three hours, no one at the plant was injured, and the plant continued carrying out its normal functions.
  • USA: In Chicago, for one day the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank could not transfer $700,000 from tax revenue; the problem was fixed the following day. Additionally, another bank in Chicago could not handle electronic Medicare payments until January 6, during which time the bank had to rely on sending processed claims on diskettes.
  • USA: In New Mexico, the New Mexico Motor Vehicle Division was temporarily unable to issue new driver’s licenses.
  • USA: The campaign website for United States presidential candidate Al Gore gave the date as 3 January 19100 for a short time.
  • USA: Godiva Chocolatier reported that cash registers in its American outlets failed to operate. They first became aware of and determined the source of the problem on 2 January, and immediately began distributing a patch. A spokesman reported they that restored all functionality to most of the affected registers by the end of that day and had fixed the rest by noon on 3 January.
  • USA: The credit card companies MasterCard and Visa reported that, as a direct result of the Y2K glitch, for weeks after the year rollover a small percentage of customers were being charged multiple times for transactions.
  • USA: Microsoft reported that, after the year rolled over, Hotmail e-mails sent in October 1999 or earlier showed up as having been sent in 2099, although this did not affect the e-mail’s contents or the ability to send and receive e-mails. [To me, this sounds like an error in the Y2K patch.]

….and there are about as many problems again that took effect after January 1. Some of the problems involved February 29 – the rule is that there’s no leap year if the year ends in 00 except if the year ends in 000, when there is one. And there were a number that took place on 31 Dec, 2000, or Jan 1, 2001, also often leap-year related. And there have even been a couple of significant errors come to light in the years since – the destruction of NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft has been blamed on a time tagging error, for example.

In most cases, these are minor errors, though my heart goes out to the UK mothers who had abortions because of a miscalculation of the risk of Downs Syndrome. But there are enough of them, and serious enough here and there – the Japanese nuclear power plant, for example – to show what could have happened.

Y2K was NOT a non-event. But we survived it, and rolled into the new millennium.

Wow, I can’t believe how much space and time it took to get through all that! There’s absolutely no time to take this article further. So, next week: the 2000s and (hopefully) beyond!

A word of advice: Each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article. In this case, though, that “previous part” is actually the one before last, and a three-chapter set of quite lengthy posts. You might have to skim – just bear in mind that if anything is puzzling but not explained, it’s probably because it has already been explained earlier in the series.

Welcome & General Introduction

I’m still not clear on how this article will turn out. MY thinking has gelled considerably over the situation encountered last week, but my magic eight-ball is still very cloudy and unreliable.

What’s clear is that this post is going to encompass just one or two of the bullet points planned for the end-of-series, and that will actually comprise at least three major sub-sections.

How to fit three into two has been the structural problem I’ve been wrestling with for the last couple of weeks. Hopefully everything makes sense. And what it shows is that there is virtually no chance of getting this entire article in one hit – whether it will be in two or three chapters (or possibly more?) remains to be seen.

A disclaimer: I am not an economist and I’m not trying to turn anyone else into an economist. An awful lot of this content will be simplified, possibly even oversimplified. Bear that in mind as you read.

A second disclaimer: I’m Australian with a working understanding, however imperfect and incomplete, of how the US Economy works, and an even more marginal understanding of how the UK economy works (especially in the post-Brexit era). Most of my readers are from the US, and number two are Brits. Canadians and Australians fight over third place on pretty even terms, so those are the contexts in which what I write will be interpreted. And that means that the imperfection can become an issue.

Any commentary that I make comes from my personal perspective. That’s important to remember. Now, sometimes an outside perspective helps see something that’s not obvious to those who are enmeshed in a system, and sometimes it can mean that you aren’t as clued-in as you should be. So I’ll apologize in advance for any errors or offense.

I’ll repeat these disclaimers at the top of each part in this series.

Related articles

This series joins the many other articles on world-building that have been offered here through the years. Part one contained an extremely abbreviated list of these. There are far too many to list here individually; instead check out

the Campaign Creation page of the Blogdex,

especially the sections on

• Divine Power, Religion, & Theology
• Magic, Sorcery, & The Arcane
• Money & Wealth
• Cities & Architecture
• Politics
• Societies & Nations, and
• Organizations, and
• Races.

Where We’re At – repeated from Part 3

Along the way, a number of important principles have been established.

1. Society drives economics – which is perfectly obvious when you think about it, because social patterns and structures define who can earn wealth, the nature of that wealth, and what they can spend it on – and those, by definition, are the fundamentals of an economy.
2. Economics pressure Societies to evolve – economic activity encourages some social behaviors and inhibits others, producing the trends that cause societies to evolve. Again, perfectly obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious at first glance – largely because the changes in society obscure and alter the driving forces and consequences of (1).
3. Existing economic and social trends develop in the context of new developments – this point is a little more subtle and obscure. Another way of looking at it is that the existing social patterns define the initial impact that new developments can have on society, and the results tend to be definitive of the new era.
4. New developments drive new patterns in both economic and social behavior but it takes time for the dominoes to fall – Just because some consequences get a head start, and are more readily assimilated into the society in general, that does not make them the most profound influences; those may take time to develop, but can be so transformative that they define a new social / political / economic / historic era.
5. Each society and its economic infrastructure contains the foundations of the next significant era – this is an obvious consequence of the previous point. But spelling it out like this defines two or perhaps three phases of development, all contained within the envelope of a given social era:
   • There’s the initial phase, in which some arbitrary dividing line demarks transition from one social era to another. Economic development and social change is driven exclusively by existing trends.
   • There’s the secondary phase, in which new conditions derive from the driving social forces that define the era begin to infiltrate and manifest within the scope permitted by the results of the initial phase.
   • Each of the trends in the secondary phase can have an immediate impact or a delayed impact. The first become a part of the unique set of conditions that define the current era, while the second become the seeds of the next social era. There is always a continuity, and you can never really analyze a particular period in history without understanding the foundations that were laid in the preceding era.

The general principles contained within these bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be repeating them in the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in the series.

Introducing The Digital Age

It’s actually been quite difficult to conceptually unify the events of the last 50 years. It’s as though the historic period was filled with movements containing beginnings, actuality, and either endings or transitions, but these distinct narrative threads have overlapped continually with others, occasionally producing unexpected synergies and compounded problems.

It was only when I realized that this, in itself, was a connecting thematic thread that was characteristic of the period that things started to fall into place, with the question of “why?”.Suddenly, there seemed to be an inevitability to the pattern I had observed, responses being shaped by the intervention of technology and by the social environment engendered by the technology of the period.

What had been just one element of the last fifty years, computers and computer applications, emerged as the driving force behind many of the changes. By this time, I had identified many other themes to the age, and redacted them when they didn’t exist for the whole period. With the new touchstone, several coalesced into unexpected forms, and I was left with five, plus that touchstone. As formal layout of the article proceeded, a seventh theme became apparent.

These themes are inconsistent through the period, and they often transit to a different focus or manifestation as the period progresses.

Theme 1: Outcome-targeted Change

There was a time when a unified, internally consistent perspective of what the world could be formed a central ideology that framed the policies offered by political parties. As the digital age progresses, this central ideology is eroded in one of two ways.

The first is an obsession with gaining power for it’s own sake; this mandates humiliation and repudiation of the opposition to perpetually demonstrate their perceived unfitness for office. In the US, the Republican Party has fallen down this rabbit hole.

The alternative is the proposition of specific policies that are not reflective of the general ideology, but are exceptions aimed at a specific policy outcome in the affected field. “We still believe in doing X, but in this specific case, we need to do Y in order to achieve Z. Once we have done so, we will have to reexamine our priorities and policies, and its likely that some compromise between X and Y will be necessary, achieving most of the benefits of X but maintaining Z.”

I’ve heard this statement, or variations on it, at least a dozen times over the last twenty or so years. It’s a common feature in US and Australian Politics, and I suspect that it will also be the case through the Parliaments of Europe, though I don’t know enough about their domestic politics to confirm this suspicion.

Theme 1a: Eco-warriors Through The Modern Age

A secondary manifestation of this theme is in the context in which those who would term themselves “Eco-warriors” manifest their behavior.

In the early 70s, the focus was on industrial pollution in cities, groundwater contamination by manufacturing, and logging. The EPA cleaned up the first two, and compromises were reached by loggers to enable them to get back to work – under scrutiny and oversight.

In the 80s, the focus shifted to the preservation of endangered species. More accurately, about the protection of such species from industrial threats. Scandals rocked some of the biggest groups of organized Eco-warriors over the next 20 years – ranging from the destruction of the Rainbow Warrior to accusations of profiteering leveled at the WWF..

The 90s saw governments expanding their environmental protections but only in specific areas: Asbestos, and the Ozone layer. As the impacts of past regulatory changes began to accumulate, the skies began to clear, water became safer to drink, and for the most part, the environmental portfolio consisted of attempts to cut protections in the name of business efficiency, and mostly forgotten by the general public.

Millennium Blues

The new Millennium brought with it new challenges – the deforestation in the Amazon region and the first warnings about Global Warming. By the end of the first decade, in-principle commitments had been reached with a number of Nations around the world to limit atmospheric carbon – eventually. Initial targets were so low that it was possible to finagle the books to meet them, something the Australian Government of the time was rightly criticized for both internally and externally, for example. With some sort of action being taken, a lot of the heat went out of the Eco-warrior movement, which began to be seen as more fringe.

In the decade leading up to the Pandemic, action was more driven by consumers and corporate profit, especially when it became clear that renewable sources were becoming cheaper than traditional power-generation mechanisms. But the decade of neglect and desultory inaction began to catch up with reality as signs began to emerge that global warming was proceeding at a faster rate than expected.

Last year, some places had thirty extra inches of snow, or so I’ve heard. The record-breaking heat wave though the south and Midwest is unprecedented. The hurricanes striking the Atlantic Coast have increased in frequency if not in severity – but the latter caveat might be an artifact of the broad brush of the Fujita Scale; if hurricanes were measured as “F4.7” instead of rounding down to F4, an increase in intensity might also become apparent. Then there’s the Canadian bushfires, and a year or two back, the Californian wildfires. And, of course, there’s one hitting California as I write this.

Closer to home. A season of unprecedented Bushfires here in Australia was followed by two once-in-a-century floods – thirty days apart! A few communities were hit by both. And we’re expecting a record year for Bushfires, in both severity and threat; our authorities last week admitted that they had been able to do only 20% of their planned remediation. As of last night, even though it’s still officially winter here, there were 60 fires burning out of control!

The more such events stack up, the less likely it is that ‘coincidence’ or ‘it’s just a bad run’ or other dismissals is an adequate explanation. I’ve been a skeptic in the past, waiting for the clear and unequivable evidence, while advocating for measured climate change action ‘just in case’. To be clear, I considered it undeniable that the climates of the world were changing, heating up; only the cause remained unproven to me – it was still a crisis that needed urgent attention.

And that brought the fringes-of-society Eco-warriors out of the woodwork, with ever more extreme acts of vandalism to get media attention, all in the name of accelerating progress not just toward net zero, but an actual reduction in carbon levels. These acts would be unthinkable by anyone from the mainstream, and are strongly condemned – and actually annoy people sufficiently that climate action is becoming less popular within the community.

For those who don’t think that a relatively small change in this space can have huge impacts, think of the atmospheric carbon, and the additional energy that it captures and pumps into the environment, as catalysts, accelerating and intensifying the energy transfers and atmospheric consequences that manifest as weather.

And yet, just today, I saw a post on Quora in which a denialist tried to rally support for his delusions.

Theme 2: Limited resources

This era begins with the Oil Crisis of 1973. While that subject will get appropriate scrutiny in a later section, this section is more concerned with the long-term impacts. The US had peaked in Domestic Oil Production in 1960, when it became cheaper to buy Oil from the Arabian Gulf than to find and exploit it locally. As a result, they had been growing more dependent on foreign oil for about a decade.

If they had any insecurity about the reliability of supply, the US Domestic Reserve, a stockpile of reserves aimed at meeting critical needs in the event of an emergency, quelled them. And so, the lemmings marched toward the edge of the cliff, unaware of the doom they faced. No, that’s probably being a little unfair and a little over-the-top melodramatic.

I have to point out that the Crisis was experienced in many different countries around the world.

The initial nations targeted were Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, though the embargo also later extended to Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa.

— Wikipedia, 1973 Oil Crisis

The reality was that the embargo itself had minimal effect on the supply of oil; but the resulting panic and perceived threat drove the price of crude oil through the roof, and caused many nations to start hoarding oil against the possibility of more serious restrictions of supply, which (supply-and-demand) drove that price even higher. This meant that even nations which were not explicitly targeted, like Australia, were impacted.

Impacts

The direct impact was profound.

The crisis reduced the demand for large cars [globally]. Japanese imports, primarily the Toyota Corona, the Toyota Corolla, the Datsun B210, the Datsun 510, the Honda Civic, the Mitsubishi Galant (a captive import from Chrysler sold as the Dodge Colt), the Subaru DL, and later the Honda Accord, all had four cylinder engines that were more fuel efficient than the typical American V8 and six cylinder engines. Japanese imports became mass-market leaders with unibody construction and front-wheel drive, which became de facto standards.

From Europe, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Volkswagen Fastback, the Renault 8, the Renault LeCar, and the Fiat Brava were successful. Detroit responded with the Ford Pinto, the Ford Maverick, the Chevrolet Vega, the Chevrolet Nova, the Plymouth Valiant and the Plymouth Volare. American Motors sold its homegrown Gremlin, Hornet and Pacer models.

— Same Source

But I think there was an indirect impact that went even deeper than changing global consumer habits. Although there had been years of warnings that oil was a limited resource that would eventually run out, starting in the 1800s (refer Wikipedia, Reserves-to-production ratio). As the linked article states, there had been many false claims that the world’s oil was soon to run out caused by simplistic interpretations and assumptions that, time and again, have proven false. Inevitably, these follow or accompany any oil supply crisis, and there had never been one on the scale of the 1973 Oil Crisis.

I think that people looked around them at the material objects in their life and realized that everything they owned was constructed from raw materials, and that there was a finite quantity of those raw materials on earth. The notion that, sooner or later, something critical would run out, became embedded in a lot of official thinking thereafter.

Limits to Services

And then the concept was broadened to services delivery – there are only so many doctors, and they can only see so many patients; if that isn’t enough to cope with the normal population of an area, you need to provide more doctors. Or Social Workers, or Psychologists, or Plumbers, or whatever.

Previously, there was the presumption that shortages would lead to higher prices, which would make the employment sector more appealing to new recruits, which would produce more of whatever shortage was being discussed. The “free market” would self-correct, in other words. But that presumption rests on its own assumptions, and those become invalid when government policies change. For example, if regulations increase the qualifications needed to become a doctor, for what seems like perfectly valid reasons (even if those are a knee-jerk reaction to some failure of medical fidelity on the part of a single bad apple), there will be fewer doctors who graduate as a result.

Baby Boomers

These assumptions also become invalid when population growth rates change. In 1964, the baby boom of the 60s came to an end.

The term “baby boom” is often used to refer specifically to the post–World War II (1946–1964) baby boom in the United States and Europe [and Australia, New Zealand, and several other nations].

Although the answer of when it happened can vary, most people agree that the baby boom occurred around 1946 and 1964. This generation of “baby boomers” was the result of a strong postwar economy, in which Americans felt confident they would be able to support a larger number of children. Boomers also influenced the economy as a core marketing demographic for products tied to their age group, from toys to records.

— Wikipedia, Baby Boom

Worker Shortages

In the 1970s, people started realizing what the end of the baby boom would mean for the future. In essence, an aging population would increase the demand for certain services, while the declining birth rate meant that there would be fewer people to provide those services, either practically (fewer doctors) or economically (fewer incomes).

This realization leads directly to the demand for increased productivity by workers that has featured so heavily in pay-scale negotiations over the last 25 years or so, at least here in Australia (and, I believe, in all other nations who also experienced the baby boom). The intensity of those demands has changed over the years, but there have to be limits to how productive (in economic terms) a single individual can be.

I came in on the tail end of the Baby Boom, being born in 1963. I’m currently 60, and almost half-a-year beyond that mark. The vast bulk of Baby Boomers are now in the 60s and 70s. Ten years from now, that will be 70s and 80s. Governments the world over are taking this seriously, and it has already led to economic changes.

More than half the Baby Boomers have already retired, and are now principally living off whatever they had set aside along the way. That means that investment capital is being withdrawn from superannuation accounts and spent, instead of staying put and providing sustainable cash reserves. Within the next 8 years, this process will conclude, and Superannuation companies will have a lot less cash to spread around. That will have an effect on stock markets – fewer customers, lower demand – and supply-and-demand ordains that share prices will erode at least somewhat as a result. Increasingly, superannuation providers will become economically more shaky over the next ten years or so, more prone to problems they could previously resisted. Some will undoubtedly fail.

Worker Shortages have been making headlines in the post-pandemic economy. My take on this situation is ‘get used to it’ – this is only the beginning.

Most seriously impacted will be any business that is manpower-intensive, which is the reason why there is so much interest in automation at the moment. Technology has reduced the need for employees in many fields over the last 50 years, and AI promises to continue that trend. But seasonal workers from outside the country are a very real necessity now and into the future. This isn’t just happening in Australia; it’s a near-global trend (for proof, just look at what happened to the Florida economy after the Governor’s recent anti-immigrant legislation).

Right now, the primary impact is on unskilled labor (which is actually not all that unskilled, these days). But in the future, it could apply to doctors and nurses and electricians and other qualified professionals.

Theme 3: Myopic Expectations

Every now and then, a policy seems to be announced, by whoever is in office at the time, that relies on the magical powers of wishful thinking to have the desired impact. There are two logical fallacies involved:

• “We have to do something. THIS is something. — but will it have the desired effect? Or is busy-work, or a band-aid, or an effort to at least look like you are doing something?
• “If we do this, and the this happens, and the that happens, then everything will be great for everybody. We’ve consulted the best experts and they assure us that everyone in the industry who matters wants this.”

Not all offerings are this blatant, or this unrealistic. And some are even worse, I’m sorry to say. The more common problem, as referenced in the section title, is that each department head in a government starts to develop myopia when it comes to matters outside their particular jurisdiction. That becomes a problem when a policy decision directly affects matters outside your portfolio, or is impacted by them.

The worst example that comes to mind – and there have been many in recent years – is the Robodebt scandal here in Australia.

• Take an unproven, ideologically-inspired, assumption: People on welfare are always trying to cheat the system.
• Advance a test that has inherent flaws: Compare the income reported to the welfare authority to the total income listed on the individual’s tax return, averaged to match the fortnightly reporting periods.
• Devise a scheme to identify those mismatches and recover the money that these individuals have “stolen” from the taxpayer.
• Ignore multiple pieces of advice that say that the scheme is not legal, and legislation will be needed.
• Get no outside audits of how much can be recovered, or how rife under-reporting actually is. In particular, ignore the fact that those on welfare are required to estimate their income if they don’t know the exact amount on the date the form is lodged each fortnight.
• Institute your scheme in such a way that any mismatch automatically generates a penalty notice and applies that penalty.
• Permit those accused to challenge the penalty notice by producing proof income from up to ten years prior, even though the law only requires these to be kept for 7 years – a requirement that a significant percentage of the population ignore..
• Get totally shocked when the whole thing blows up in your face.

I hope that no reader will ever be able to match that comedy of errors and willful myopia. But I know better – I could point at the ‘social war’ underway between Disney and the Florida Government, for example, where the score is currently 4-1 in favor of Disney – with the whole contest being a petty, childish, own goal by DeSantos..

Theme 4: Everything’s The Same, Until It’s Not

This is something that I noticed with regard to the advances in technology, and in particular digital technology. No matter how profound the social change that such technology (including applications) will have eventually, there is a general perception that nothing will change as a result.

For a time, this expectation is proven true – it generally takes time for any significant social change to permeate an entire culture, even now. But in the longer term, if you look at what the technology enables you to do that you could not do before, or what those who develop such technologies could create based on such a platform, the eventual impact can be forecast.

The same is true of everything else that ends up being a critical element of economic change – it generally takes time to manifest.

Theme 5: Permanent Opposition

I could just as easily have entitled this section “Blind Polarization”. Ideological positions are becoming, or have become, entrenched and unyielding, with levels of obsessive belief that have hitherto been applied to cults. It has obviously happened in the US; it is happening here. The practical manifestation is an inability to compromise – ‘whatever it is, I’m against it”.

I could go into the whole history of the situation, starting with Newt Gingrich, but I don’t know that there’s any value to it. Suffice it to say that this trait goes from almost non-existent in 1973 to almost-universal in 2023, and it’s almost completely a trait of the right wing of politics.

This is not purely an American problem; variations have been exported to the UK, to Australia, and to many other nations, in part because it appears successful as a stratagem in the USA. The problem is that I can’t see it being overturned until it causes some irreparable damage to one of the political parties espousing it, sufficient to persuade the remainder to forswear the philosophy. Or something less likely happens, of course! A charismatic leader promoting cooperation and mutual benefits, perhaps – but probably not.

Theme 6: Digital Revolutions Change Everything – and Nothing

I’ve touched on this already, in discussing Trend 4. Every revolution in the digital world starts by creating something that does exactly what the existing technology does (hence things stay the same) but with added new potentials. As those potentials are slowly translated into actual capabilities and people learn to exploit them, an inevitable cumulative effect begins that ultimately reshapes the technological and/or social landscape.

Contemplate for a moment the shape of those digital revolutions. When our period opens, computing is restricted to mainframes that are horribly expensive and require extensive customer programming to be useful. These are at their best in handling large datasets – a census, a bank, an insurance firm, and so on. It is sometimes said that the electronic fuel injection systems of a ‘modern’ car (from 25 years ago) packed more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft did.

For the record, that’s both true and misleading. NASA insisted on reliability, first and foremost, and that policy remains in effect to this day. One of the prices of that reliability is simplification and minimization, especially in terms of interface. So Apollo had the equivalent of programmable calculators, the Space Shuttle had the equivalent of 286s and Apple-IIs, and so on. Modern digital processors are now in the Pentium era – unless they are being privately built, in which case a different balance point between modernity and simplicity may have been chosen.

The home computer revolutionized the office space. Off-the-shelf hardware. Off-the-shelf software.

The mobile phone started off as not much more than a substitute for the nearest phone booth, but quickly became more portable and more convenient. Things eventually reached the point where they contained the potential to completely eliminate the land-line phone connection, so ubiquitous where they.

The Graphical User Interface, or GUI, made computers easy to use by laypeople. Very people can’t get the hang of one simply by moving a mouse around and observing what the pointer does on-screen.

The internet and the world-wide-web enabled distributed processing, and using remote hardware to execute complex processes remotely. To a certain extent, computing no longer was about the hardware that you were using and its limitations; it was about the hardware that you could access, and how easily you could do things with it.

The smartphone initially didn’t do much more than add a GUI to the telephone; it didn’t initially do much more than provide exactly the same service already being delivered by mobile phones – with added convenience. These days, they are less about making phone calls and more about sharing data – replacing identification and bank cards and even music libraries.

Social Media killed the email almost as surely as the email killed traditional snail-mail. These days, email is primarily a link distribution method, not a primary communications channel. But, more importantly, it meant that people were cross-connecting their beliefs and ideas, while excluding those who did not share in those philosophies, creating the echo chambers that continue to spread both information and misinformation to this day. But social media started off as nothing more than a chat room, a limited-scope multi-person email of limited scope.

Streaming started off as sharing a youTube video, and then became a catch-up service and now direct existential threat to cable TV.

AI is now threatening, or promising, to provide artificial simulations of creativity itself, while replacing menial human-to-human connectivity – phone an automated switchboard, and instead of a limited number of options for you to choose from (none of which sometimes seem to fit), you will be able to have a conversation with the AI which will then determine how to route you call, and may well be able to initiate solutions to routine matters without human intervention.

There could be others. For example, tracing popular music from the LP to the CD to the MP3 to Napster to ITunes to Streaming services. That’s an entire industry that’s gone from cultural co-dominance to near-irrelevance over the term of the age – but the general principle is clear without it.

Theme 7: Wastelands, Again and Again and Again

Originally, this theme referred only to economic wastelands, but while writing it I became aware that environmental regulation and a criminal law and a whole bunch of other things also followed the same pattern.

There is a certain extent to which this is an outgrowth of Theme 5. One political party cleans up the economic mess caused by some sort of financial disaster or potential disaster, the other lot eventually regain power and remove or disrupt the regulatory frameworks and safety mechanisms to enable those financially active in the space to make more money, and eventually the point is reached where the cycle can repeat itself.

To be honest, though, this is something of an oversimplification. Each financial crisis is different, with different causes – when you dig into the finer details. It isn’t those finer details that I want to focus on, however, it’s the fact that these keep happening,. usually 7-9 years apart.

There are those who dismiss the pattern as simply the tail end of an in-built boom-and=-bust cycle, but while some examples fit that criterion – the dot-com bubble for example – others do not.

A structure of Contexts

These seven themes don’t exist in isolation. They operate in a context of events, frequently in combination with one or more of the other themes that is also manifesting through those contextual events, and there is always a historical element to the resulting narrative, too.

What remains in dissecting this era is largely an identification of the those contextual threads – what was happening, and sometimes, why.

I was not expecting the clarity of structure that I eventually discovered within the era. Cued by the rolling repetition of those economic disruptions every decade or so, and starting of course with one of the most important, I first started by subdividing the era roughly by decade. I was then able to identify one or more significant event or sequence of events at the start, middle, and end of each subdivision. I was helped in assembling the resulting structure by the inherent flexibility in defining end points; what was more important was that the resulting structure be definitive of the subdivision of time concerned.

Most of the time, I could actually be guided by perceptions of the time subdivision in question. In trying to make the event bundles definitive of those perceptions, I found that the critical events fell into place fairly naturally and inevitably. The chronology may not always be exact – there can be some overlap, thematic elements at the beginning of a new period overlapping with thematic elements of the ending of the old. That’s why these periods all form part of a single broader era, instead of being relatively short eras in their own right.

My intent was to discuss each as succinctly as possible, so that the resulting structure could be more easily apprehended by the readers, but some of them are so significant or profound that it seemed inevitable that there would be too much text in between at times. So I’ve made the last-minute decision to present the structure as a table of contents of sorts.

Anatomy Of The Digital Era

• First Period 70s-80s
  • Beginning: Oil Crisis
  • Middle: Mainframe Politics
  • End: Fall Of The Wall
• Second Period 80s-90s
  • Beginning: Hope and Hostility
  • Trickle-down Reaganomics
  • Middle: Eighties Angst
  • Middle: Hope In The Face Of Despair
  • End: Digital Development
• Third Period 90s–00s
  • Beginning: Invasion Of The PCs
  • Middle: Skirting Eco-disaster
  • Middle: Rise Of The Smaller Device
  • End: Hope Fails
• Fourth Period 00s-2010s
  • Beginning: Internet Awakening
  • Middle: Megacorps Proliferate
  • End: Personal Tech
  • 9/11: Shockwaves & Awe
  • End: The GFC
• Fifth Period 2010s-2020
  • Beginning: Social Media
  • Middle: The New Entrepreneurs
  • Climate Change: A Decade Of Lip Service
  • End: Stirrings Of Alarm
• Pandemic Interruptus
  • Medical Economic Impact
  • Public Impact
  • Economic Disruption
  • Economic Stimulus
  • Reopening in a Blended Economy
  • The Fall Of Trump
  • The Age Of Biden?
  • The Corner Is Turned
  • General Reopening
• Post-Pandemic Economics
  • Supply Chains: Rebuilding Trade
  • Workforce Decentralization
  • Restricted Oil
  • Ukraine Invasion
  • Paying The Piper
  • Playing Chicken With The World
  • Climate In Meltdown
  • An Imminent Pivot

This comprises my road map for the rest of this article, and any subsequent parts if I need to break it into two or more (as I expect to be necessary).

There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get busy….

The Digital Age, First Period 70s-80s

The 1970s were full of whistling in the dark pretense that anything had changed since the 1960s, even while they shaped and re-shaped consumer spending habits, with attendant knock-on effects that would so dominate the 80s. There was a manic edge to the popular culture celebrations of the 60s, a harder edge – like comparing Woodstock to the Rolling Stones concert disaster at Altamont Speedway, or comparing a poppy folk song (If You’re Going To San Francisco) to anything from the disco era. There was a loss of innocence, much of it these days laid at the feet of the Vietnam War. And yet, the Korean conflict, by and large, had not had the same effect; was this purely because of the newfound global reach of mass media, the televising of horrific images? In retrospect, I think there was another factor at play, the psychological consequence of the events that I have chosen to demark the beginning of the new era.

Beginning: Oil Crisis

When analyzed from the perspective of actual gasoline supply, the 1973 oil crisis was pretty much a non-event. In October of that year,

members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC)*, led by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, proclaimed an oil embargo targeted at nations that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The initial nations targeted were Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, though the embargo also later extended to Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa.

— Wikipedia, 1973 Oil Crisis

* Not to be confused with OPEC, who were blamed for the policy by a number of media outlets.

Cheap prices and declining domestic production in the US had led to an increase in the dependence on foreign oil, though most of it was actually purchased from Canada and Venezuela, and not from the Middle East as was popularly perceived. The US did purchase 638,500 barrels of oil a day, but that is a relatively small fraction of US consumption at the time (17 million barrels a day). Nor were any of those embargoed barrels of oil actually withheld from the US. Actual enforcement of the embargo was less significant than the public perception that a significant amount of oil was being withheld.

What did happen was that the price of oil skyrocketed, from under $10/a barrel to over $40. This was, of course, passed on to consumers in the form of higher gasoline and energy prices. Because the cost was so much greater, many gas stations could not afford to fill their reservoirs, and at the same time, public panic caused demand to spike. Inevitably, some suppliers ran out and with each such event, the public panic grew. In an effort to get the escalating situation under control, many levels of government imposed quotas and rationing.

Impact

Of course, as shown in the previous part of this series, oil prices are directly inflationary in nature. In fact, they compound with each other to be inflationary to an extent far greater than might be expected.

The side effects of the oil crisis caused the price of everything else to go up, and created wage demands to compensate – but things are never that simple; simply putting wages up by that extent would only have increased inflation until the increase was completely eaten away, creating the need for yet another wage rise.

One alternative is for prices to fall as inflation is curbed – but that never seems to happen, with good reason – that would reduce the numeric profit levels of a business, which would undermine confidence and share value. That can be enough to kill even an extremely successful business, and it’s simply too hard to manage such situations. Instead, measured wage increases are offered once inflation falls to manageable levels that restore financial purchasing power while retaining economic stability – at least until the next crisis.
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The increase in oil prices created an impact splash that hit many more countries than on the embargo list. Although not directly targeted, the oil crisis had just as big an impact here in Australia, for example, as in the US.

Consequences

There were a number of direct consequences. Large vehicles with high gas consumption were immediately seen as vulnerable to the petrol price, and potentially unusable should supply be restricted. The number of small, efficient cars sold immediately assumed an upwards trajectory, eventually leading to the demise of many domestic manufacturers. There was an immediate governmental re-prioritization of domestic oil exploration and production, and ‘dependence on foreign oil’ became a catch-phrase employed by all sides of politics everywhere, and by the media that reported on politics. The perceived reality was that this was an area of politics with direct relevance to the ordinary worker.

This, in turn, embedded the concept that there was only so much oil out there in the global zeitgeist. Experts had been warning of this reality for decades, but the message had mostly fallen on deaf ears; suddenly, it had a new cache, because the oil-price shock could be highlighted as a taste of what was to come.

Once the concept of limited resources takes hold, it produces a fundamental shift in perceptions. Everything is measured in terms of consumption of limited resources – productive hours, money, raw materials, you name it. In some cases, this simply locked into place shifts in public attitude that were already taking place; in others, they began the process of popularizing new concepts like sustainability and closed-cycle recycling. Everything from environmental awareness to power distribution would be affected – if not directly, then indirectly.

Middle: Mainframe Politics

Digital products were restricted, at the time, to governments and large-scale corporations, where there were gains to be made from the more efficient use of computer-based billing and analysis. The director of IBM, Thomas Watson, is alleged to have said in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers”.

Changes in technology which increased capability and vastly cut costs had already invalidated that prediction, but it remained a conceptual perception. Because computers at the time were difficult to program, stories filled the popular zeitgeist of ‘silly’ computer errors, like bills for one cent, all oriented around the literal-minded inflexibility of computers.

But clever programming did exist, and permitted analysis of ever-more complex combinations of hypothetical situations, and these were used increasingly to guide the formulation of public policies.

Sometimes, these policies were effective, but more often they failed because people are rationalizing, not rational, creatures; it might be in the collective best interest to behave in a certain way, but people will gravitate towards actions that better their personal best interests even at the expense of the collective welfare.

Conflicts between human nature (especially a cynical interpretation of same) and the logic of collective welfare take hold as undercurrents in a lot of fiction of the era. On some occasions, the logic is shown to be faulty, because it does not take human nature into account; on others, it is human nature that is at fault, as flaws within humanity are given an opportunity to prosper.

You see this even today, as policies that have some justifiable validity are manipulated beyond any acceptable standard. Billionaires who pay only a couple of hundred dollars of tax a year, for example, create the impression that the system is geared toward their benefit, when the reality is that they are better able to take advantage of situations to minimize their taxes.

End: Fall Of The Wall

Yes, I know that this didn’t actually happen until 1989, almost the end of the period that follows. What happened, historically, was that as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, new trends began to supplant those carried over from the preceding era; Glasnost and the fall of the wall marked the end of the cold-war that was so strongly a feature of the 1950s and 60s, for example.

There was a slow retreat from the themes exemplified by the 1970s over the ensuring decade, and the fall of Berlin Wall is the singular event that punctuates the end of that period. The 1980s is a blend of the philosophies of that era and the legacy attitudes of the 1970s.

I made this same point in a different way when discussing the impact of digital technology; it takes time for social movements to transform potential into actuality, just as it takes time for digital potentials to be manifested into concrete technological and social changes.

The 1970s were largely spent pretending that the social and political foundations of the 1960s were still completely applicable, despite gathering evidence following the oil crisis that this was not true; it was the ending of the cold war that made that fiction impossible to sustain. And the crescendo of that global thawing was the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Digital Age, Second Period 80s-90s

“Greed,” according to a popular mantra of the 80s, “is good.” Well, no, it’s actually not – but the 80s were when people stopped fooling themselves that corporate behavior had any remaining vestiges of the altruism that was present at the end of the time of the robber barons. Being altruistic was an ice-cold marketing decision, nothing more or less. There are three movies that I consider definitive of the economic culture of the time.

The first is, of course, Wall Street, from whence the quotation springs. Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, offers the line. This character, and those who have bought into the social environment that accompanies it, seduces the main character (played by Charlie Sheen) into sharing his worldview. The story, in its totality, is a fall-and-redemption narrative, as Sheen uses the weapons of Gekko’s philosophy against his mentor, falling on his metaphoric sword to bring down the seductive but evil Gekko. The conflict between human values and corporate profits remains an exemplar of the era’s business philosophy.

Movie #2 didn’t seem to be as big at the box office; it’s something that I stumbled across on TV one afternoon, and became an instant favorite. Other People’s Money tells the story of “Larry The Liquidator”, a more comic-book version of Gordon Gekko who specializes in buying companies, stripping them of their assets, and then liquidating whatever remains once there is insufficient capacity to meet obligations – for example, pensions. When the targets are moribund and unprofitable, this can be seen as burying the corporate dead; but that’s never enough to satisfy, so the Liquidator turns his attention to companies that are productive and profitable, because they can be worth still more to him dead than alive.

Third on my list of movies is Working Class Man, starring Michael Keaton, released through most of the world as “Gung Ho,” about the takeover of an American Car Plant by a Japanese corporation. Although promoted as a comedy film at the time, it was repackaged here as a drama after the success of Batman, enjoying a successful second life. At the time of that second life, the buzzword throughout the white-collar sector was “Japanese Management Practices”, and the movie is all about the cultural clash between such management practices and the more casual, laid-back philosophy of the western worker.

I consider these three to be required viewing for any GM running a game set in the 1980s, or any setting that is an outgrowth of those political and economic philosophies – Cyberpunk, for example.

That’s the 80s in a (rather large) nutshell – corporate greed with no pretense. What is good for the stockholder is good for the company, and vice-versa; customers and workforce are nothing more than necessary evils to be exploited to the fullest extent of law.

When this attitude was last in vogue, rebellions arose and brought forth the labor unions. This time around, a few cases of union corruption enabled a concurrent war against workers rights that has eventually culminated in such protections being at something close to an all-time low. “At Will” employment statutes in many US states mean that an employee can be fired because the boss doesn’t like the color of the worker’s socks. Sold to the public as preserving a worker’s right to move from one job to another where pay and conditions were better, the actual effect on the ground has been significantly different.

In this period, those laws remain a future development. The contemporary reality was an emphasis, especially in the mass media, on the inconvenience promulgated on the public by workers striking for what they perceived as good reason (and which sometimes was and sometimes wasn’t). No-one seems to have wondered whether or not the media in question (or their owners) had a vested interest in the issue.

These attitudes took time to manifest and deepen; the beginning of this period more strongly resembles the 1970s than it does this heartlessly grim picture, the middle of the 80s is somewhere in between as these social attitudes are taking root, and by the end of the period, they are entrenched (and viewed by some as the unchangeable new foundations of economic reality).

Beginning: Hope and Hostility

The first recorded aircraft hijack took place on February 21, 1931, in Arequipa, Peru (Wikipedia, Aircraft Hijacking). A sprinkling of other events took place through the years that followed, slowly growing in frequency. Between 1958 and 1967, there were 40 hijackings world-wide, while the FAA claims more than 100 attempted hijackings in the 1960s. (same source). The 1967 termination date is significant, because in the five year period starting in 1968, there were 326 attempted hijackings, a more than 6-fold increase.

The 1980s saw a profound shift in nature of these incidents – organized terrorists destroying aircraft to draw attention or threatening to do same in order to obtain specific political ends. The majority of incidents prior to this development were attempts to reroute aircraft to a destination desired by the hijackers; aircraft screening of passengers and greater international cooperation, by 1980, had reduced the incidence of such attempts to significantly less than the 1968 level.

A number of the new wave of attacks seemed linked to middle-eastern groups, a reaction to the greater involvement in political events there. Another legacy of the 1973 oil-price shock, and a second event in 1979 that was actually more serious, was to highlight that this part of the world could not be taken for granted. Western ‘adventures’ into the politics of the region can be traced back to the crusades, it was nothing new; but there seemed to be a rising intensity on all sides, and the existence and politics of Israel was a polarizing factor that only made these interventions and adventures worse in the eyes of many directly affected.

Many have characterized these interventions as being all about oil; this assignation of motive is misdirected at best, and wholly incorrect at worst. Some were legitimately well-intentioned, others were for political advantage, and some were in furtherance of half-baked plans for the imposition of stability.

It wasn’t just the Western powers, either – witness the disastrous Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

Regardless of the motivations, these all provoked reactions from those residing in the region. Because it was perceived that they were relatively weak in comparison, methods needed to be employed that had greater indirect and supplementary impact than direct impact – and thus the middle east became inextricably associated with Terrorism in the zeitgeist of the time.

Afghanistan: An illustrative microcosm of mistakes

In April 1978, the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in a bloody coup d’etat against then-President Mohammed Daoud Khan, in what is called the Saur Revolution. The PDPA declared the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, with its first leader named as People’s Democratic Party General Secretary Nur Muhammad Taraki. This would trigger a series of events that would dramatically turn Afghanistan from a poor and secluded (albeit peaceful) country to a hotbed of international terrorism.

The PDPA initiated various social, symbolic, and land distribution reforms that provoked strong opposition, while also brutally oppressing political dissidents. This caused unrest and quickly expanded into a state of civil war by 1979, waged by guerrilla mujaheddin (and smaller Maoist guerrillas) against regime forces countrywide.

It quickly turned into a proxy war as the Pakistani government provided these rebels with covert training centers, the United States supported them through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the Soviet Union sent thousands of military advisers to support the PDPA regime.

Meanwhile, there was increasingly hostile friction between the competing factions of the PDPA – the dominant Khalq and the more moderate Parcham.

— Wikipedia, Afghanistan – Contemporary History – Democratic Republic and Soviet war

An assassination led to the Soviet invasion which led to the rise of a more feudal social structure of warlords, which led to a coalition government that collapsed into dysfunction, which led to another civil war, and so on. The occasional intervention on one side or another was disastrous. Eventually, the Taliban emerged as a movement and forcibly installed itself as rulers of the country. Some of the warlords survived within the new regime as terrorist groups, notably Al Quida. Subversive acts of retaliation against those who had used the nation to fight their proxy wars followed with the tacit approval of the regime.

Afghanistan is a pointed example, but not the only one. Iran & Iraq tell similar stories in broad, for example. As a result, random incidents of middle-eastern terrorism sprinkle the 1980s at regular intervals.

Trickle-down Reaganomics

From January 20, 1981, to Jan 20, 1989, Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. The economic policies of the sub-era are definitively those of his administration.

These policies are characterized as supply-side economics, trickle-down economics, or “voodoo economics” by opponents, while Reagan and his advocates preferred to call [them] free-market economics.

The pillars of Reagan’s economic policy included increasing defense spending, balancing the federal budget and slowing the growth of government spending, reducing the federal income tax and capital gains tax, reducing government regulation, and tightening the money supply in order to reduce inflation.

The results of Reaganomics are still debated. Supporters point to the end of stagflation, stronger GDP growth, and an entrepreneurial revolution in the decades that followed. Critics point to the widening income gap, what they described as an atmosphere of greed, reduced economic mobility, and the national debt tripling in eight years which ultimately reversed the post-World War II trend of a shrinking national debt as percentage of GDP.


— Wikipedia, Reaganomics

Ultimately, the espoused principle was reducing the tax burden on the wealthy on the presumption that this would encourage more investment, which would then permit business expansion, which would enable the employment of more people, which would spread the largess downward through the economy.

In terms of stimulating a somewhat moribund economy, this worked, but it reckoned without the businesses that were the recipients of the investment diverting the moneys received to shareholders as increased profits.

Inflationary consequences meant that the working class continued to get squeezed as a result, though some benefits did work their way downwards as intended, slowing the rate of deterioration in real wages.



Image by Wikipedia Commons user Soibangla based on data released by the US Bureau Of Labor Statistics. The chart is considered ineligible for copyright and therefore in the public domain because it consists entirely of information that is common property and contains no original authorship.

While there are those who simply claim that Reaganomics didn’t work, I consider that to be an oversimplification – it worked just fine for those in the upper economic brackets. It was, nevertheless, a flawed policy simply because the economic benefits were not shared with the rest of the society of the time.

Thatcherism

If the US had Ronald Reagan, the UK had Margaret Thatcher. Reagan and Thatcher had been elected within a year of each other; while some called that a remarkable coincidence, to me it always seemed indicative of a general trend in politics and society of the era.

There were a number of similarities between the two. Both were strongly anti-government, anti-Keynesian, advocates of tax reductions and private sector economic prosperity.

In terms of the general thrust of their policies, both leaders tried to shift the center of the political spectrum sharply to the Right. Reagan set about undoing a half-century of legislation which had built up the public sector while opening up America to expansion led by the private sector. Mrs. Thatcher busied herself with doing the same in Britain. Both leaders believed that government itself was partly the cause of their mutual economic problems, including high inflation and slow economic growth, the answer being less government. In contrast, all previous leaders since the 1930s had assumed that if things went wrong, the remedy would be government intervention or more government.

— Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Origins, Similarities and Differences by Christopher Deeds.

The Christian Science Monitor puts it even more forcefully:

Both have slowed down welfarism and curbed the power of the trade unions.

Both have stressed enterprise and the marketplace.

Both have turned away from nationalization and have sold off as much nationalized industry as the private sector would accept.

Both have reduced government regulation of private enterprise, stimulated competition and, by so doing, stimulated productivity.

But the United States, after six years in office of Ronald Reagan, and Great Britain, after seven years of Margaret Thatcher, are in startlingly different condition. The United States has an annual budget deficit running at nearly $200 billion and an adverse trade balance of nearly as much. Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain has a balanced budget at home and a balance in its foreign trade account.

— Thatcher and Reagan: the difference by Joseph C. Harsch.

In other words, Thatcher was cruel but achieved success with her policies, while Reagan’s success is more open to debate. The difference in outcome, argues Harsch, is due to the severity of application of theory; Reagan raised his defense spending massively and cut income taxes radically, while Thatcher raised her defense budget in moderation and cut income taxes modestly.

Both paid a hefty price – Reagan in deficits, Thatcher in unemployment rates and failed businesses.

And yet, if you were to assign their policies based on their personalities, Thatcher was more abrasive, more confrontational, and less sympathetic, while Reagan was naturally a conciliator. Those traits would lead one to suspect Reagan of the softer, more moderate approach, while assigning Thatcher the more hawkish, uncompromising set of policies. I have no explanation, simply observing that one was a grandfatherly figure while the other was a stern mother, to their respective nations.

Nevertheless, the distinction between personality and policy, and resulting implications, needs to be understood by any GM with a campaign set in the era.

Middle: Eighties Angst

The discussion is starting to get away from me, in terms of length, so I’m going to try and reign it in a bit.

Eighties Angst wasn’t just expressed through TV shows and the like; people of the time often had good reason to fear for the future and worry about where it was all headed.

There were a number of factors contributing to this depressed attitude.

• This was the era when manufacturing jobs began to migrate away from the developed economies, though it might not be noticed for another 20 years in some cases. While some of that migration was direct – close a factory here and open another one somewhere else to manufacture exactly the same products – more of it was indirect, as was the case with the US auto industry being supplanted by Japanese small-car imports.
• The wage-inflation-cost spirals already discussed were an ongoing problem that no-one could see any hope of escaping. The resulting economic reality was readily visible – I remember interest rates of 21, 22, and 23% being thought ‘normal’. Even now, I’m not entirely sure how we got off that international treadmill.
• Reactions to the harsh economic practices of the time led to industrial disruptions and often contributed to economic disruptions, more particularly in the UK and other commonwealth countries than in the US, where a war against unionism inhibited them.
• Business failures, and the abject failure of pension funds etc that were supposed to insulate the workforce from such developments, created a sense of despair in the industrial sector workforce. Farm foreclosures did the same in the rural communities. This often manifested in anti-social behavior on the part of those who felt abandoned and without hope for the future, more notably in the UK – and thus arose expressions of social dystopia like Punk Rock.

A lot of people were desperate, surrounded by bleak times and unforgiving government policies, sometimes depressed and sometimes angry about it all, especially when it seemed to result from economic forces over which they had no control and less understanding.

Middle: Hope In The Face Of Despair

At the same time, there were rays of hope, a belief that collective efforts could yield social dividends that were greater than the sum of their parts. This started with the success of the Band-Aid single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas” – a friend of mine was in England at the time and he remembered the song being on a 30-minute rotation on virtually all the popular radio stations at the time.

That led into a US replica, and then the global Band-Aid concert, and then more diverse examples like Farm Aid and Artists Against Apartheid.

At least here in Australia, telethons had been around for a long time, usually in response to some particular pressing need or disaster, but they had started to lose some of their luster in the 70s. Prior to these examples of social welfare activism, the high-water mark had been the benefit telethon in support of the victims of Cyclone Tracy in 1974 – I have vague memories (possibly inaccurate) that all three commercial network and the national broadcaster worked in unison on that appeal. After that, they seemed to fade in significance and appeal – until the global Band-Aid telecast came along.

The success of these fundraising pursuits in terms of actually achieving their ambitions is disputable. There are those who claim that much of the revenue raised never made it ‘on the ground’, frittered away in administration fees. Regardless, though, their success in rekindling a sense of optimism and hope for the future marks them as a significant social change within the era.

End: Digital Development

As already intimated, computer technology never stands still. There is a perpetual engineering effort aimed at making computers stronger, smaller, faster, and cheaper.

Integrated Circuits had been commercialized in 1964, and the first microprocessor had been developed in 1971. From the mid-70s on, the first microcomputers were developed that were cheap enough to to be commercially viable.

In what was later to be called the Mother of All Demos, SRI researcher Douglas Engelbart in 1968 gave a preview of features that would later become staples of personal computers: e-mail, hypertext, word processing, video conferencing, and the mouse. The demonstration required technical support staff and a mainframe time-sharing computer that were far too costly for individual business use at the time.

— Wikipedia, Personal Computer

So the pieces of the puzzle had been there for several years. 1974 saw the introduction of what is generally considered the first true personal computer, the Altair 8800, based on the 8-bit intel 8080 microprocessor chip. The Apple -1 followed in 1976. The first successfully mass-marketed personal computer, the Commodore PET, was revealed in 1977, but it was back-ordered and not available until later in the year. In June 1977, the Apple-II was first shipped, followed later in the year by the Tandy TRS-80.

Even so, they were largely considered objects for play. They had infiltrated the home; software for personal productivity pointed the way to the future. The stage was set for the computer to enter the workplace in a serious way.

And with that, I’m right out of time. 30-odd years of recent history and economic change remain. To be continued!

For the first time since I started it, when I went to draft the penultimate(?) parts of the Economics in RPGs series today, I found myself unsure of how best to structure the post.

While I have total confidence that, given enough time, I would have found a satisfactory sequence to bring out the key points, I was extremely uncertain that I would have enough time to both do so and get the article written in time.

To avoid the problem, I pulled out a standby article concept that’s been sitting around for a while, awaiting just this sort of circumstance.

Lending weight to the decision was that this is not a small article, either; the decision needed to be made early enough that there would be time to write it before the normal publishing deadline.

I think that the decision has been made in sufficiently timely fashion – but waffling on in this introduction is eating into that time, so let’s get on with it!

Modifiers – A Ubiquitous Concept

Almost every RPG incorporates, either officially or unofficially, the concept of skill modifiers into its game mechanics. There are good reasons for this, and I’ll touch on several of these before the end of the article.

Superficially, these are a simple concept, simply applied. “Under the circumstances, you are at +x to succeed” – or maybe it’s “- x”.

But the more you dig into it, the more hidden wrinkles come to light. It’s not nearly as straightforward as it first appears.

Most GM’s cut through this complexity and confusion with chutzpah, gut instinct, and the Gamemaster’s Authority – they declare a bonus (or penalty) that simply “feels right” to them.

This is an approach that is beset with problems. Consistency of decisions is one – and a poor showing in this area can affect a player’s confidence in the GM. Errors of judgment are another; we’re all human and make mistakes, but proceeding on instinct incorporates no safety net against such errors. Perceived bias for or against a character (or worse, for or against a player, or worse still, against the players as a group and in general) is a third.

These are serious issues, ones that demand serious attention before they take root. There are solutions to these problems that can enrich the playing experience for all concerned.

The starting point for any such attention has to be a more detailed examination of the basic concept, so that’s where we’ll begin.

Conceptual Origins: Old-School Combat

I started out as a player, and then a GM, running an AD&D campaign. The fundamental representation of magic weapons and armor in that game system is as a modifier, either to To-Hit or Armor Class, respectively.

It’s a short step from that to adding additional modifiers to represent unusual environmental conditions and other circumstances – underwater combat, or unstable footing, surprise or distraction, to offer a couple of quick examples.

So elementary are these that many of them are incorporated into the official rules of the game. They, in turn, betray the origins of the D&D game system as a Wargame, which are full of such modifiers and complexities.

Once their incorporation into game mechanics is accepted, it’s only a matter of time before the question arises of equivalents in the application of Skills and Proficiencies of a non-combat variety. The representation of characters occupying space in a “simulated reality” makes the existence of Circumstantial Skill Modifiers something of an inevitability.

Even later incarnations of the rules contain these, though sometimes they cloak them in different attire – there’s the Difficulty Level of a check in 3.x, for example. But when you dig into the conceptual framework of the rules, you find they are simply different ways of assessing the same basic questions.

Skill Modifiers, or Difficulty Modifiers, or whatever a given game system calls them, are a ubiquitous concept, fundamental to the representation of characters functioning in a game world or game environment.

How Big An Adjustment? – The Eternal Dilemma

The problems with Skill Modifiers aren’t related to the fundamental concept, which is on a sound footing; they are related to identifying the various factors that should be taken into consideration and quantifying their effects – translating the situation in-game into numbers that the game mechanics can then take into account.

Some GMs avoid the whole question, making the assumption that for every modifier one way not quantified in the rules, there is one in opposition if you look closely enough, and hence anything that is not explicitly Rules-As-Written can be assumed to be already taken into account.

This makes the game simpler, and that can have its own virtues, especially when gaming with younger people and those of less experience. Personally, though, I dislike the approach; it sucks too much flavor out of the in-game situation (instead of projecting the flavor of the moment into the game mechanics), and places too much faith – and too heavy a burden – on the shoulders of the game designers.

It’s a starting point, and suitable when that’s all that participants can cope with, but a broader approach can take such games to an entirely new level of immersion and verisimilitude.

And hence, we arrive at the ‘gut instinct’ approach, and its attendant problems.

Three Types Of Modifiers

Once you start studying the details, you come to realize that “Skill Modifiers” is actually an umbrella term that encompasses three similar but distinct game variables.

For the purposes of this article, I have named these “Inherent, Relative, and Personal”.

One fallacy that some GMs fall prey to is limiting their Skill Modifiers to just one of these three sets of variables, and adopting an approach to the problem that fits that perception.

Expanding our understanding of the subject requires understanding all three.

Inherent Modifiers

“Inherent” Modifiers – sometimes known as “absolute modifiers” – are fixed in value. You can simply read the value off a table. Mostly, these are environmental in nature, and assume that the nature of the skill check and the expertise of the character are irrelevancies.

It’s quite common for these to be the sum total of Skill (and Ability) modifiers that a GM applies, at least when they are in the intermediate stage of experience.

They have the virtue of being fairly simple, and of applying universally to any situation. “-2 to all Dexterity-based skills and checks due to the cold of the environment” is an example. All a GM then has to do is discriminate between the different types of skill check with a simple question – does the “-2” apply to this check?

Adding to the appeal is the fact that such modifiers will generally also apply to combat rolls. That means that they are more likely to be predefined in any reasonably comprehensive game mechanics, putting less pressure on the GM.

Relative Modifiers

The second class of Modifiers relate to the task itself, whatever it might be. For the purposes of this article, I have labeled them “Relative Modifiers”, for reasons that will become obvious, and despite the fact that the third type of Modifier can also make justifiable claim to the title.

There are two subtypes to be considered. In general, they are mutually exclusive, with the alternative sub-type considered to be encompassed by the chosen sub-type.

3.x / D&D

Some game systems – D&D 3.x for example – confuses the whole Skill Modifier subject by applying these Modifiers to the determination of a target (DC), entirely separately to the other types.

Mechanically, any increase to a DC is exactly the same as a negative modifier to the skill being used to attempt the task. The major difference lies in the arithmetical operation to be performed – this edition of D&D tries to avoid subtractions at all costs, preferring to make everything an addition, even if it means applying the variable to the ‘other side’ of the basic equation.

Hero Games

The default approach of Hero Games is not dissimilar, either. They prefer modifiers that apply to an attack roll, for example, and separate modifiers that add to the target number needed for success. Their theory appears to be that this means that the player is doing half the work and the GM, the other half. In practice, the GM has to involve himself on both sides of the question, so it doesn’t actually make things easier. Our games using this game system revolve around the structure, Roll+OCV-11=Combat Value Hit.

This is simply a reformulation of the equations/process defined by the mechanics, but it means that the GM can announce any environmental modifiers that apply, the player can roll his die and perform the calculation and simply inform the GM of what defense he has overcome. The GM need only glance at the character being attacked to determine the outcome – which leaves him or her free to engage in other aspects of the game situation.

It also means that the GM doesn’t need to reveal critical information about the target. From memory, GURPS works in a similar way.

Generalizing the conceptual underpinnings of the question permits it to be rephrased, “How hard is this task?” Answering that question is where the two approaches make themselves apparent.

Version 1: Difficulty For An Average Character Or Reference Standard

One approach is to ask how difficult the task would be for an ‘average character’ to perform, or some predesignated reference standard of ability.

– “How hard is it for a blacksmith to repair this wagon wheel?”

– “How hard would it be for a typical motor mechanic to diagnose the failed water temperature sensor in the car?”

– “How hard would it be for a typical falconer to train a Roc?”

….and so on. That tells you what the DC should be, or what the modifier for attempting this particular task should be. The relative competence of the character making the attempt then defines their chance of success or failure at the task.

Version 2: Difficulty Relative To A Standard Task

The alternative is to define a minimal skill level as ‘competence to achieve a fundamental task X% of the time.” This approach has the advantage of viewing competencies as a general umbrella. “Fishing”, for example, would include the ability to craft a lure, or to repair a net.

Some GMs use a 50% success standard for a minimal skill, others take the approach that a fundamental task should succeed 95% of the time (in other words, on any roll but a natural ‘1’) because this task is fundamental to the skill. Still others pick somewhere in between.

A lot depends, in my opinion, on the basic level of competence that a minimal skill represents. If it’s enough for a character to operate professionally, the higher percentage is appropriate; if it’s barely enough for the character to function as an apprentice, the 50% (or even a 25%) definition might be more appropriate.

Critical to that question is whether or not the rules are being written for PCs, and their assumed levels of competence, or if they are to encompass the entire game-world population. I tend to think the latter, and so define a lower % frequency of success.

Personal Modifiers

Personal Modifiers, the third type of Modifiers, attempt to quantify the question of difficulty for the specific character attempting the task.

This is even more difficult than it sounds, unless a systematic approach is employed, and is full of fuzzy interpretations of vaguely-defined parameters and language.

Quantifying Characteristics Of Characterization

The systematic approach that I recommend is one part metagaming and three parts judgment, breaking the individual down into four components.

A Character’s Forte

The metagame element is this: is the task reflective of whatever is supposed to be the character’s forte? Every major character (which includes PCs, definition) should have their area of expertise in which no-one who does not share that expertise will be superior, even if they have the same (or better) stats and skill levels.

Some game systems define characters in terms of archetypes or character classes (although sometimes racial background and heritage will be more important – no amount of education on the subject can equal the experience of actually being an elf, or a Dwarf, for example).

In terms of character archetypes, no matter how educated a character might be in theology, they should be unable to match a character who actually is a priest or cleric. The educated non-theologian may have equal measure in terms of theory, but will lack the hands-on practical experience of the theologian, and it is entirely likely that the theologian will have access to abstruse texts and resources that no layman can match.

The same skill level, even with the same stats, doesn’t mean the same thing, once these contexts are taken into account.

Games that don’t employ such blatant and broad archetypes permit an even more nuanced approach. One of the PCs in my superhero campaign is a former police detective from Los Angeles; he knows the LA area better than anyone who has simply read books about the place ever can, and no matter how good a non-detective might be at deduction, when it comes to criminal investigation, the character should have a significant edge.

Such game systems routinely utilize character background concepts like this to justify and support the acquisition of skills during character generation, making the character naturally reflective of the concept to some extent, but this extends that synchronization into all the areas that aren’t represented by a specific skill or application of a skill.

Additionally, each character should have one or more areas in which they are psychologically predisposed to succeed; some things just come more naturally to them, and one hour of study may match the learning that takes an ordinary character a week or more.

A Character’s Inadequacies

Equally, most people have areas in which they are inadequate in comprehension. It’s as though they have to work twice as hard just to almost-fail. Sometimes, these can be incredibly nuanced. For example, I took to algebra and differential equations like a duck to water in school, but I struggled to learn my multiplication tables. In fact, to be honest, I never did – instead, I devised short-cuts and workarounds that enabled me to get around my inadequacy.

(An example: 6×7 – I know that 6×6 is 36, so I can simply add 6 to that. I also know that 7×7 is 49, so I can simply take 7 off that. And I know that 5×7 is 35, so I can simply add 7 to that. Experience has taught me that 7×7-7 is faster – for me – because it gets the 10s place right).

(Another example: Add up the digits of a number. If the resulting total is evenly divisible by three, so will be the original number. If there’s a remainder, dividing the original number by three will have the same remainder. This enables me to simplify the division and get to an answer more quickly. EG: 57 → 5+7 = 12; 12 / 3 = 4, no remainder, so 57 is divisible by 3. So I can quickly add three to it, divide the result (60) by three (to get 20) and then take one-third of three back off to get 19. This really pays off with bigger numbers, like 8695442 – the total of the digits is 38, so there will be a remainder of 2 from 8695442 / 3. That lets me simplify the calculation enough to do it in my head – 289480, remainder 2).

(One more: if the last N digits of a number are evenly divisible by 2^N, so will the whole number. So if I need to divide by 4, that’s 2^2, so I only need to test the last 2 digits).

Okay, I have learned some of the times tables through the years, not in a systematic way, but piecemeal. The point is that basic arithmetic presents problems for me that mean it can take me four or five times as long to get an answer. The fact that I know of these properties of numbers, and can use them in this way, arguably gives me a higher arithmetic skill than someone who has successfully memorized their times tables, with a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts – but that skill still leaves me worse off than someone with a better memory for numbers and less understanding, because they have learned the answer by rote.

A Character’s Psychology

That leads into the whole question of a character’s psychology and how that can help or hinder their abilities in a specific sphere or in tackling a specific problem. A character who is good at understanding people could have – should have – an advantage when it comes to analyzing possible criminal motives, for example. They probably still need someone with Detective experience to lay out the parameters and circumstances and gather the evidence that this character then applies.

Lets take the current crop of PCs in the Adventurer’s Club as an example. One is a doctor, and an experienced Medical Examiner – he’s good at gathering and analyzing forensic evidence. Another is an engineer – he’s good at analyzing physical evidence. And the third is a Priest – good at understanding people and finding credible motives for committing a criminal act. The three of them put together make one adequate detective – but it will take them three or more times as long as if they simply present their findings to an actual policeman.

A Character’s Experience & History

Finally, is there anything in the character’s backstory and in-game history that should assist them in performing the task. The mage in my superhero campaign grew up in a Nordic fishing village – he knows how to handle a small boat, how to fish, and so on. Because of the location, it’s cold most of the year, so he didn’t naturally learn to swim; even now, his locomotion through the water is slow, thrashing, and barely adequate.

Even if the character had not bought any skill at Fishing, I would take the background into account when determine the parameters of an attempt to do something similar.

Each of these approaches has its own set of merits, but I don’t consider any one of them to be wholly adequate to the task of assigning an appropriate Skill Modifier.

A Compound Approach

What’s needed is a method that combines all three – environment, task, and aptitudes. Breaking the problem up in this fashion also means that the scale of any errors in those ‘gut instinct’ values shrink in relevance, putting greater distance between the game and those potential pitfalls, and a formalized approach of considering each factor in succession further mitigates against such failures – and also provides an opportunity for error detection and correction.

How much longer does it take to make three informed snap decisions, and integrate them into a single answer, than to make a single uniformed gut-instinct call?

My assessment, from experience, is three-to-five times as long. Let’s translate that according to the time spent arriving at a gut-instinct estimated circumstantial Skill Modifier:

• 1 second → 3-5 seconds.
• 2 seconds → 6-10 second.
• 3 seconds → 9-15 seconds
• 5 seconds → 15-25 seconds
• 10 seconds → 30-50 seconds
• 15 seconds → 45-75 seconds.

These time frames show that if you are used to making quick decisions, all it takes is a moment or two of added reflection to implement a more robust solution to the problem.

Mitigating the potential severity, the decisions to be made are more focused and specific, and hence more easily made. You can normally cover the entire process with a smooth patter mentioning some of the main factors that you are taking into account – and this has the added advantage of telling the players that you are taking these factors into consideration, and not just plucking numbers out of the air.

But for all the added precision, ultimately, the process is still about mentally employing a holistic approach rather than a long, tedious, ultra-precise approach.

The other benefit of outlining what is to be considered a reasonable time-frame for the entire process to take is that the process itself can be tailored to meet the requirement.

What follows is the step-by-step process that I routinely employ. Most of the time, each step is in the 1-3 second time frame, and the totality thus lands somewhere near the 15-second total specified above. In a complex or game-critical situation, I can take a couple of extra seconds on the relevant steps and still remain well within the time-frames given.

1. Standardized Ideal Environment → Inherent Modifier Foundation

I start by assuming that the task will be attempted under ideal conditions, with no time or performance pressures; the character can theoretically take as long as necessary, and may even be able to backtrack if an error takes them down the wrong path. I then abstract that set of hypothetical conditions into a base modifier.

2. Relative Modifiers

Determine how difficult the task would be to accomplish in an ideal environment, taking into account any time or performance pressures. Sometimes I will use approach Version 1, sometimes Version 2, according to which one I consider more appropriate to the actual task and the game mechanics. Abstract the result into a Relative Modifier contribution.

I often find it useful to have a list of “difficulty standards”, which may or may not have fixed modifier ranges allocated to them. For my superhero campaign, for example, the categories are:

• Trivial task
• Routine task
• Easy task
• Moderately Difficult task
• Difficult task
• Very Difficult task
• Extremely Difficult task
• Almost Impossible task
• Absurdly Difficult Task
• Virtually Impossible Task

That system is % based, with skill values ranging from -100 to 150 (a revision is in progress to change that to a range of 0-250). A score of 0 is enough for the character to earn a living using that skill, it’s a minimum ‘professional’ level.

The modifiers that go with the categories are +100, +50, +25, +0, -10, -30, -50, -75, -100, and -120, respectively – so Moderately Difficult tasks use the skill levels as the character has them, anything easier gets a bonus that ranges from substantial to huge, everything more difficult attracts either a small penalty to a significant one to an absolutely huge negative modifier.

You can appreciate the system best by contemplating the resulting chances of success for a character with, say, 30% skill: 100% chance at trivial tasks, 80% for routine tasks, 55% for easy tasks, 30% for moderately difficult tasks, 20% for difficult tasks, 1% (the minimum) for very difficult and harder tasks.

Compare that with the capabilities of a character with 0% skill, or one with 60% skill. I wanted scores in the range from 0-100 to be significant in terms of what scope they gave the characters.

For a d20 / DC -oriented system, I would use DCs of 3, 5, 8, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, and either 70 or 100, respectively.

3. Subtotal

I compound the two variables into a single total, if that’s appropriate; in game mechanics where it’s not, the Relative modifier gets recorded on scrap paper (or mentally, if I feel up to that) and the subtotal is the Inherent Modifier. There are also times where I consider it most appropriate to apply some of the relative modifiers to a DC / target, and some to the chance of achieving that target – but that’s a rather more complicated choice that I only apply because I’m used to employing both alternatives.

4. Adjust Modifier to the Individual

I think about the character and how much more skilled than the reference standard they will be under these conditions and circumstances and adjust the subtotal accordingly.

5. Inherent Environmental Factors

I mentally compare the actual environmental conditions to those that would be considered ideal for accomplishing the task. These conditions include the lack of resets at critical points for some tasks, like carving a model or adding spices to a roast.

There may also be standard modifiers defined by the game system – for being blind, surprised, underwater, or whatever. This step is where I add those in – or, more commonly, an estimate of what they will amount to, overall. One of the most common is applying range modifiers to skills being used at a distance – associating landmarks / signposts to navigational references, for example.

Circumstantial Modifiers also get factored in – performance anxiety, the need to deliver, time pressures, distractions, etc.

Abstract all of those environmental considerations into a modifier describing how much worse the actual environment is than the ‘ideal environment’ assumed in step one.

6. Adjust Environmental Factors for Equipment

Good equipment can help mitigate these environmental difficulties. A lack of essential equipment can make them a lot worse.

Note that this ‘essential’ equipment doesn’t actually need to be essential – it simply has to be ‘essential’ in the character’s mind, because that’s what he has been trained to use.

It can be absolutely reasonable to apply a penalty for lack of essential equipment, a bonus that partially compensates for possessing the real minimum requirements, at the cost of taking three or four times as long to complete the task, and then a further penalty for the resulting time pressure.

But I try not to get that deeply into specifics, most of the time. Instead, this simply generates an adjustment either upward (greater difficulty) or reduces the existing environmental modifier from step five towards zero.

It should also be observed that it’s rare for equipment to actually do part or all of the job for you – that should get factored in separately in a later step – so it’s not likely that equipment adjustment will be enough to turn the negative environmental modifier into a positive.

7. Adjust Environmental Factors for Individuality

People who are used to cold conditions are less affected by cold conditions. The same is true of any other environment. However, acclimatization wears off surprisingly quickly if you aren’t regularly being exposed to it.

Although it’s not completely realistic, I divide such adjustments into two components – one that wears off quickly and one that persists for quite a long time, but will wear off eventually.

It’s also true that those used to a cold environment will find it much harder to cope with a hot environment and vice-versa. There’s a natural sensitivity to the opposite that also needs to be taken into account.

Unlike equipment, a favorable acclimatization can absolutely completely overcome penalties for a non-ideal environment (though it can’t do much more) – and that can permit equipment bonuses to breach the “better than ideal” barrier.

I adjust the environmental modifier from step 6 to take such capacity on the part of the individuals into consideration.

8. Total

Add the resulting environmental modifier to the subtotal determined in step 4, and you’re done – announce the total.

Well, you’re done if you’re seated at the gaming table, performing an ad-hoc adjustment for some task that the player has decided to attempt. I try very hard to anticipate critical skill checks when doing game prep, allowing a still more robust approach.

The Metagame Approach – What chance of success do you want?

That robust approach is far more heavily metagamed, and adds another six steps to the process.

9 Assess The Character’s Chances

The first step is to work out what the character’s chances of success are, given the Circumstantial Modifiers determined. It doesn’t have to be exact, but it should be enough to give you a sense of what their chances of success actually are.

10. Assess The Level Of Challenge

I then compare that result to the degree of challenge that I want the skill check to pose to the characters.

11. Assess The Adequacy

Comparing the two describes the adequacy of the challenge actually being presented to the character. It’s possible that the answer is “close enough”, but it’s far more likely that it is too easy or too hard.

12. Revise The Target Chance

How much harder or easier do the circumstances have to be to turn the first chance into the second? Just roughly, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

13. Document the resulting actual Modifier to be applied.

Taking that correction into account, I document the actual Circumstantial Modifier to be applied to the skill check, and write it down. This is simply a matter of taking the rough correction value from step 12 and adding it to the total from step 8.

14. Revisit Foundation Decisions To Account For The Difference

But that revised difficulty value needs to be justified – the decisions made in steps 1-3 and 5-7 need to be reassessed and the circumstances modified to reach the desired target Difficulty.

Because time is less of a factor when you can do the work in advance like this, there is less time pressure on the GM to make and refine these decisions. Even so, it doesn’t tend to take much more than the same time, again, to perform these additional steps – and that’s a fairly small investment to make.

Modifiers At The Speed Of Plot Part I: Planning For Success

Something ‘proceeding at the speed of plot’ is a favorite expression in these parts. It describes such a multitude of sins, but what it boils down to is subordinating something of inherent importance to the even more important goal of collaborating with the players to tell a coherent, compelling, and exciting story that entertains those participating.

Skill Modifiers, and skill checks in general, are no exceptions to this principle.

It’s at this point that I usually pull out the plot structure pyramid, last shown in Simulated Unreality: Game Physics Tribulations, which also contains links to its earlier appearances.

In this context, you should take a moment to plan for the characters succeeding at some task, especially if you’ve stacked the deck against them.

The check of success is either a function of the Official Rules or applicable House Rules, possibly overridden or modified by the simulation of a coherent game reality or of fitting the plot to the genre.

What’s being discussed here is modifying level 5, Plot, to service the needs of the Campaign, level 6.

Critical Successes?

A related issue that also needs to be addressed is, Does your campaign, and its underlying game mechanics structures, permit or anticipate the possibility of critical successes? Some do, some don’t. If they are required, you need to make sure that a critical success at the right time both rewards the successful character and doesn’t derail the adventure’s plot.

There are four ways to reward a critical success – pick one that makes sense, given the context, and the check being made, and that avoids plot destruction.

Option 1: Less Time

It takes the character half as much time as would normally be the case – every decision or step in the process of completing the task fell into place almost automatically. The character was, quite simply, at the top of his game – at least for a while.

Option 2: Quality Of Result

This option doesn’t really apply to some skill checks. It’s at it’ most powerful when the skill check is to craft something or do something creative, but it can also apply to interpersonal skills. It can be applied to research tasks but this tends to have greater long-term impact than is desirable.

Option 3: Penumbra Of Expertise – Putting 2 & 2 Together

This option shines where the previous one doesn’t apply. Research and deduction and other intellectual skills are at the heart of it. There can be application to interpersonal skills, as well, when the subject of such skills ‘just happens to mention’ something useful to the PCs somewhere down the track.

One of my favorite applications of this benefit is connecting seemingly-unrelated pieces of information. A critical piece of information lies in a book, waiting for a PC to make a research roll of some sort – but, on a critical success, they not only find the information they want, they find a hint to a future problem they will face, and notice that the previous person to borrow this book from the library is an NPC that has exhibited a deep interest in their progress through the adventure – because, unknown to the PCs, he is secretly in league with the enemy of the adventure. Noticing that little detail will give the PCs another line of investigation – one that won’t solve the major puzzle for them, but will give them an advantage later on in the adventure (because the villain will be less informed of their capabilities and progress.

A Bigger Picture

Picture a series of standalone adventures whose primary metagame campaign-level purpose is to present characters with a need to make a specific skill check. An ordinary success is dealt with in the ordinary way, but the intended purpose is to give the characters a chance to have a critical success – and their reward for doing so is the discovery of some critical fact deriving from a past adventure, connecting smaller plots and plot threads together into something much larger, leading to a much bigger adventure once the current one is completed, abandoned, or delayed.

Option 4: Distributed Benefits

There have been times when I have distributed the success amongst two or more of the preceding categories – not giving full value in any one of them, but giving something of value in all that apply.

Not all rewards for a critical success need to be earth-shattering; often, a couple of small advantages are sufficient. The resilience of your adventure can only be applied in the context of the circumstances and the specific skill check; determining the correct level and nature of reward for success is best done in advance, especially if it can be potentially adventure-wrecking.

That said, every now and then, let the PCs short-cut an adventure, just as it might happen in real life – assuming that you have a Filler of some sort on standby for the next time you need it.

Modifiers At The Speed Of Plot Part I: Planning For Failure

Just as essential as planning for unexpected success when failure is anticipated is planing for failure when success can be reasonably expected, especially if the consequences can be campaign- or adventure-wrecking.

I know that some GMs advocate letting the chips fall where they may at such times. While I can understand their perspective, this perpetually flirts with campaign train-wrecking in the name of player agency, with only the GM’s wits insulating against disaster.

A better approach, in my opinion, is to prepare for the worst just in case – you only need to make it seem like disaster at the time!

That explicitly does NOT mean that you should hand the players a get-out-of-jail-free card; it may add considerably to the difficulties that have to be overcome before the adventure reaches its climax. Just because there may be an alternative route through the adventure, you don’t have to immediate;y dangle it in front of the players noses.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory can happen to the bad guys, too. Maybe the consequence of the players’ failure is that the villain grows overconfident and overreaches at a critical moment – but, in the meantime, the players get to wallow in the consequences of their failure.

There are four options for dealing with failures, and – still more pointedly – with critical failures. All of them should be accompanied with the enemy against whom the players were acting (directly or indirectly) with some sort of advantage. But it won’t happen in a controlled manner without a little advance planning on your part.

Option 1: Multiple Attempts

The simplest option is to give the characters multiple attempts. Perhaps the book in which they sought answers contains a veiled reference to some other work, where the answer can ultimately be found.

Too often (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone else), GMs make the mistake of telling the players that they can try again. While this prevents the failure from being a show-stopper, it sucks all the pain that should be there out of the failure. Instead, make the search more arduous.

The only time when this might not be the case is when there is, in-game, time-critical pressures known to the players – a time-proven way of heightening tension that can occasionally blow up in the PCs faces.

In such circumstances, I might relent to the point of giving the PC who failed a partial success – insufficient to progress, but enough when married to information gleaned by another PC from another source – if and when the players are clever enough to put two and two together to make four.

A favorite technique for achieving this is to have an NPC make wild, ill-informed speculation that contains a nugget of truth – a nugget that can only be exposed by connecting it with the hint that is the “partial success”.

Option 2: Extra Time or Delayed Cognizance

A twin-barreled alternative is to determine that success is inevitable – eventually – and that it’s the timeliness of the solution that is the real benefit of success.

Extra Time simply means that the answer takes longer than expected to disinter, or the crafting strikes surmountable hurdles that delay the eventual success.

Delayed Cognizance only applies to information-gathering / research rolls. When the player is subsequently presented with a ‘trigger’ of some sort, the answer (or part thereof) will come to them – a flash of inspiration, as it were.

There can be catastrophic consequences of this approach, however, if the character feels that eventual success is inevitable, when they come up with the right answer without the GM providing the intended hints. You can dodge this bullet if you are adroit enough – “Charlie, when Abby makes her half-in-jest speculation, you suddenly realize that she’s closer to being right than you were expecting…” – and proceed to lead the character who failed to the correct answer by coupling what they gleaned from their research with a piece of the idle speculation.

Option 3: Multiple Pathways & Back Doors

Having some alternate route by which the failure can be overcome is often a preferred solution. As noted earlier, you don’t have to make this obvious – creating a sense of frustration over the failure, a sense that shadowy forces are moving unchecked as a result, that time is passing as the sword of Damocles descends above the PC’s heads before the alternative pathway to success or even a back door out of the failure is essential. Again, you want the players to feel the pain of failing a critical roll.

What is a back door? Giving the answer to the question the roll was supposed to solve to an NPC – who will only think to mention it when the PCs happen to say the right thing to the right person. “Funny you should say that, I was reading something about it in the paper just the other day. I think it said…” and follow it with a breadcrumb and a lot of hogwash. The players then have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Option 4: Outside Assistance

The fourth method converting a failure into a success is by factoring in some form of outside assistance that increases the chance of success.

It’s quite unrealistic, these days, for a breakthrough discovery to be attributable to a single researcher; instead, it’s generally a team, with a handful of assistants. Or an army of assistants.

For this approach to work, you have to convince the player who failed that he feels right on the edge of success, but there’s something that he’s missing, and he knows it. That can be tricky, as it frequently feels manipulative and anticlimactic to simply announce it outright. You need to approach the issue more covertly, more slowly, and more lingeringly so that the player feels the frustration.

The general concept of outside assistance raises a number of associated issues; not all of them will be a part of every such situation, but sooner or later they will manifest.

Confidence Vs Overconfidence

Ultimately, the root cause of failure that can be overcome with outside assistance comes down to mistaking overconfidence for justifiable confidence. The character thought he could succeed, when he didn’t quite have everything he needed. The role of the outside assistance is to provide whatever is lacking.

“Confidence” is a key word to employ in describing the road to potential failure.

There can be occasions when an outside factor intervenes to transform what should have been a success into a failure. “Flying monkeys descend and commence ripping pages out of the book you are trying to study” is probably going too far, but it’s correct in principle.

Teamwork

That shows that the form that the assistance takes can be much more varied than is usually realized. It is also important to recognize outside assistance as a form of teamwork; it’s not like the helper has to have the same skill as the primary character is using to attempt the check.

When anticipating possible failure, however unlikely, it is worth asking how another PC or allied NPC (or even loose-lipped enemy NPC!) can bridge the gap between failure and success – without simply serving up the correct answer on a platter.

The Benefits of Unskilled Assistance

With any number of practical tasks, an unskilled assistant can enable the skilled character to focus on the heart of the problem or task. Simply holding a piece of timber steady while a carpenter measures and marks it, then cuts it to size, doesn’t sound like much, but it can be enough that the carpenter recognizes an error in the design in time to correct it – simply because he has less on his mind.

The larger the project, the more likely it is that one or more unskilled assistants can be beneficial.

But it works with research tasks, too. Consider an unskilled character combing bookshelves looking for books on subject X for the skilled character to search through; perhaps he picks up something that seemed to fit the bill but isn’t actually relevant in the mind of the skilled character. Nevertheless, there has to be a reason by it was categorized where it was found, so – while taking a break from the research – the skilled character finds himself casually flipping through the book – only to discover something crucial within its pages.

There are, of course, limits. I prefer to think of them as diminishing returns. It might take two additional assistants to do twice as much as one, creating a progression: 1, 3, 7, 15, 31, 63, and so on – each offering one incremental gain equal to the contribution of that first assistant (the progression might make more sense if I write it 2-1, 4-1, 8-1, 16-1, 32-1, 64-1, and so on).

The Pitfalls of Skilled Assistance

If unskilled assistance can be useful, surely skilled assistance can be even more so?

The answer to this rhetorical question is yes, obviously – but there are a couple of pitfalls to be wary of if you’re the leader of such a team effort (on top of concerns like security and jealousy that are outside the scope of this article).

Pitfall 1: Too Many Cooks

The assistant can misjudge entirely his own competence and make decisions that he can’t justify. “I was only trying to help” is cold comfort. The larger the team grows, the greater the vulnerability. What’s more, the larger the team, the more time the leader has to spend on administrative tasks, removing his focus on actually solving the problem. The real cap on effective assistants is far smaller than that indicated by diminishing returns.

Pitfall 2: Failures of Assumption

“I thought Dendron was taking care of that”. “I didn’t think it would matter.” “It looked like a shortcut.” these excuses, and many more like them, are all reflective of failures of assumption on the part of the assistants, which are much more likely to occur when the leader can no longer give each assistant a specific task that contributes to the central effort, but must delegate authority.

Basic Errors

One final source of failure deserves special mention – the skill attempt itself can be misdirected, the lead character having made some fundamental error in formulating the plan for tackling the task. When this is the case, it always has to come from the player deciding to make the skill check; the GM cannot foist this justification for failure on s player from the outside.

When this happens, success means that the character recognizes the mistake in time to redirect his efforts to answering the question he should be asking; failure means that the research continues until the character realizes that he’s made some basic mistake in his thinking. When he can formulate, unassisted by the GM, the nature of that failure, he can make another attempt – at the expense of more time.

Sidebar: A Pathway to learning

That brings up an only tangentially-related subject. In a Traveller campaign of which I was once a player, skill use was the only way to improve a character’s expertise. On a success, a character got to roll two additional dice; if they came up Box Cars, the character got +1 to his skill for the next time he used it. But the GM held to the principle that you learn more from failures than from successes – so if you failed, you rolled two dice and if either of them came up a 1, you also got a +1 to your skill thereafter.

The big benefit is that you couldn’t be trying to use a skill simply for the sake of putting it up – there had to be real stakes attached. You had to be trying to do something that would advance the adventure or the campaign, and that made gains in the things that fitted your character’s role within the campaign more fertile ground for further gains.

Success also meant that further progress became slower, because the chance of failure diminished.

As a house rule, it was clever in a number of ways. I’m not suggesting everyone adopt it – I don’t use it in any of my campaigns – but it’s an idea that each GM should evaluate for themselves.

Modifiers – Complexity Disguised As Simplicity

For such a simple and ubiquitous concept, there sure are a lot of nuances to the subject of Skill Modifiers, as shown by the fact that this article is now around 8000 words in length!

Good usage of Skill Modifiers can enhance a campaign in any number of ways, but achieving good usage requires some effort on the part of the GM. The easier part is assessing potential modifiers on the fly in a rational and systematic way. Much harder is dealing with the consequences, which would be present whether or not you employ skill modifiers at all.

If anything, you could say that using the Skill Modifiers assessment process provided affords you a measure of control over the circumstances of those consequences. As tools go, they are a pretty good one – but they are facilitators, not ultimate solutions in and of themselves, and certainly no way to avoid hard work in the development of adventures and campaigns.

Learn to use them wisely, and rewards will follow. But you have to put in the work.

A word of advice: Each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article.

Welcome & General Introduction

So, here we are – the six parts that have preceded this one have delivered us to an era that can generally be considered now. I’ll go into the specifics of what changed and how it affected the economy in the next part – because, at last, we’re up to the blog post within this series that I originally intended to write.

You see, a while back I started seeing a lot of ill-informed vitriolic posts on social media about the US Economy, specifically the interest rates and the terrible job that President Biden was doing with the economy.

At much the same time, Interest Rates were experiencing sustained and regular rises in England, where similar rhetoric was on display – just a little toned down.

And Australia was also experiencing a similar phenomenon, creating what’s being described as a “Cost Of Living Crisis”. But our interest rate rises were more cautious about potentially creating a recession, and so – while in the US they have now moderated to something America can live with, and the rhetoric has shifted focus – Interest Rates remain high here – and the opposition have tried to employ similar rhetoric (but it hasn’t worked).

As I was reading the umpteenth variation on the theme, it was becoming more and more apparent that a lot of people have no idea how and why interest rates are set, and how economies worked. And I thought to myself, “What a pity that it’s not suitable for a Campaign Mastery post that could explain it all – more or less.”

And then I realized that every modern game out there has, or should have, some form of economy, and that GMs should have at least a basic idea on how they worked, and so it was a suitable topic, after all.

But I thought that it needed context to make it relevant to non-modern RPGs, and so the rest of the series was born.

A disclaimer: I am not an economist and I’m not trying to turn anyone else into an economist. An awful lot of this content will be simplified, possibly even oversimplified. Bear that in mind as you read.

A second disclaimer: I’m Australian with a working understanding, however imperfect and incomplete, of how the US Economy works, and an even more marginal understanding of how the UK economy works (especially in the post-Brexit era). Most of my readers are from the US, and number two are Brits. Canadians and Australians fight over third place on pretty even terms, so those are the contexts in which what I write will be interpreted. And that means that the imperfection can become an issue.

Any commentary that I make comes from my personal perspective. That’s important to remember. Now, sometimes an outside perspective helps see something that’s not obvious to those who are enmeshed in a system, and sometimes it can mean that you aren’t as clued-in as you should be. So I’ll apologize in advance for any errors or offense.

I’ll repeat these disclaimers at the top of each part in this series.

Related articles

This series joins the many other articles on world-building that have been offered here through the years. Part one contained an extremely abbreviated list of these. There are far too many to list here individually; instead check out

the Campaign Creation page of the Blogdex,

especially the sections on

• Divine Power, Religion, & Theology
• Magic, Sorcery, & The Arcane
• Money & Wealth
• Cities & Architecture
• Politics
• Societies & Nations, and
• Organizations, and
• Races.

Where We’re At – repeated from Part 3

Along the way, a number of important principles have been established.

1. Society drives economics – which is perfectly obvious when you think about it, because social patterns and structures define who can earn wealth, the nature of that wealth, and what they can spend it on – and those, by definition, are the fundamentals of an economy.
2. Economics pressure Societies to evolve – economic activity encourages some social behaviors and inhibits others, producing the trends that cause societies to evolve. Again, perfectly obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious at first glance – largely because the changes in society obscure and alter the driving forces and consequences of (1).
3. Existing economic and social trends develop in the context of new developments – this point is a little more subtle and obscure. Another way of looking at it is that the existing social patterns define the initial impact that new developments can have on society, and the results tend to be definitive of the new era.
4. New developments drive new patterns in both economic and social behavior but it takes time for the dominoes to fall – Just because some consequences get a head start, and are more readily assimilated into the society in general, that does not make them the most profound influences; those may take time to develop, but can be so transformative that they define a new social / political / economic / historic era.
5. Each society and its economic infrastructure contains the foundations of the next significant era – this is an obvious consequence of the previous point. But spelling it out like this defines two or perhaps three phases of development, all contained within the envelope of a given social era:
   • There’s the initial phase, in which some arbitrary dividing line demarks transition from one social era to another. Economic development and social change is driven exclusively by existing trends.
   • There’s the secondary phase, in which new conditions derive from the driving social forces that define the era begin to infiltrate and manifest within the scope permitted by the results of the initial phase.
   • Each of the trends in the secondary phase can have an immediate impact or a delayed impact. The first become a part of the unique set of conditions that define the current era, while the second become the seeds of the next social era. There is always a continuity, and you can never really analyze a particular period in history without understanding the foundations that were laid in the preceding era.

The general principles contained within these bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be repeating them in the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in the series.

1. Inflation & The Economic Thermometer

Simply put, Inflation measures how much faster an economy is growing. In a system tied to a standard, like gold or silver, the number is relative to expectations, which define how much currency needs to be printed and put into circulation.

In economies with a floating currency, if you print too little, it just means that the value of the currency rises to compensate, and vice-versa – but that affects all sorts of other things if you buy or sell anything internationally, so a controlled inflation rate remains absolutely critical to keeping an economy stable.

Negative inflation rates – deflation – are undesirable. It’s the same thing (essentially) as setting interest rates too low, which I’ll get to a little later.

Pandemic

That’s what happened in the pandemic – people weren’t going out, lots of businesses were closed, money wasn’t being spent, and the economy started to crash.

Stimulus

To fight that, governments issued economic stimulus in various forms. This artificially stimulates the economy, but it increases the total purchasing power of the sum of all the money in the economy. That’s inflationary – a good thing in this scenario – but once the cause of the slowdown ends (lockdowns, in this case), all that extra money starts to circulate, and the economy starts to overheat.

Post-Pandemic Inflation

The law of supply and demand means that this expenditure is also inflationary, so inflation spiked, all over the western world – especially as supply chains had been disrupted and would take a while to get back to normal. That meant that supply was down just as demand was going up, and that results in higher prices – which cause inflation.

I’ll cover a whole truckload of economic vulnerabilities a little later – this is just supposed to be a general introduction to the subject.

So, economic managers – whatever their job title – within any given government will make it their business to know what the economy is doing, so that they can intervene if necessary.
.

2. What’s More Important than the current Inflation Rate? Tomorrow’s Inflation Rate!

To be honest, what the inflation rate is now is not all that important. What matters is what it’s going to be – assuming that you do nothing – and how that forecast is affected by economic management (i.e. doing something).

You see, the ‘current’ interest rate is the result of what has already happened within the economy. It’s too late to change it. What matters is how you respond to it.

Because deflation is so nasty, the usual practice is to aim for a modest, consistent, economic growth, and matching low levels of inflation – generally, 2-4%. If your inflation rate is higher than this, you’re in an economic boom – and those are usually caused by an economic “bubble” of some sort that will eventually burst. And that’s bad.

To forecast what Inflation is going to be, you need to identify a trend. And a good starting point is the change in the inflation rate now compared to what it was, the last time you measured it.

But it’s not that simple.

3. Crystal-ball-gazing, Economic Style

Measuring Inflation is never as easy as it is made to sound on the TV News. Predicting what it will be is even harder.

Here’s a set of charts that I put together to illustrate the problems.

Figure 1 is the ideal situation. It shows three measurements of inflation – one very good figure, and two with a margin of error.

You usually get a very good number once a year, or once a quarter, and two less reliable figures in the months that follow.

But the core numbers are solid and show that in period 1, inflation rose by a small amount, and in period 2, it went up by a lesser amount. It then projects that last measured change forward to what it will be at the end of the year/quarter, if it keeps changing at the last measured rate of change.

Figure 2 allows for a margin of error upwards. Figure 3 adds a margin of error downwards. The bar on the right shows the level of fuzziness this introduces in the forecast. Based on this, you’d probably not see an intervention as warranted.

But there’s that pesky margin of error. In figure 4, I project the results if the current number is at the extreme low of the margin of error, and the previous result was at the extreme low, at the estimate, and at the extreme high. And it paints a very grim picture.

Figure 5 does the same thing based on the true value currently being at the top of the margin of error. And it’s results are equally nasty.

But those are unlikely extremes. If you put the two together, you can actually map out a bell curve, just like you would get with (say) 3d6. The center of the curve is right at the point of our original estimate, and spreading out to to either side by the original fuzziness. based on that, you still probably wouldn’t intervene.

But how do you know? Well, you can compare the fuzzy figure at your next measurement to the current one, and it will indicate the current trend. If it’s a, the end-of-period number will be the alarming a1. If it’s b, the forecast will be the still-serious b1. If it’s c, the forecast will be the alarm-bell-ringing c1.

But it’s still not that simple. Numbers need to be adjusted for seasonal variations, which means taking whatever your forecast says and guessing what it will be once those only-fuzzily-known errors are taken into account.

And, on top of that, the reason that there’s a margin of error in the first place is that a lot of the contributing economic factors aren’t precisely measured until the end of the period. Until then, all you’ve got are estimates and indicators, producing an estimated number..

4. Underlying Causes and Trends

The obvious thing to do is to look at the constituents, and use the estimates and indicators to track trend lines in those economic variables, and from that, try to work out what part of that bell curve you are likely to be heading for.

They never quite match up with reality. Think about those 3d6 again, and pretend that each d6 represents one of these underlying constituents. The average of a d6 is 3.5. So tell me then, how many of those d6 are actually going to roll 3.5?

That’s right – none of them. The best that you can hope for is that if one comes out particularly low, another will be high, and the whole thing will balance out in the end.

These contributing trends are called “underlying causes of inflation” by economists. If the underlying trends are fairly stable, so will the inflation rate be fairly stable, and that nice, simple forecast from figure 1 is probably going to be fairly close.

In actual fact, there are eight underlying values or trends that go into a normal inflation forecast.

5. Entwined Correlations & Vicious Circles

But it’s STILL not that simple. Lots of these underlying values are entwined and interconnected – and these secondary impacts often have delayed impacts as well as immediate ones – and not all of the eight factors are ever equal in their contributions; some are bigger, some or smaller. And these scaling factors can vary with the size of the underlying trend.

Let’s take a fairly realistic example: The price of crude oil gets put up by OPEC, as recently happened.

Gas stations raise their prices. Distribution costs of goods goes up.

It costs more to farm. Food prices go up.

It costs more for your employees to get to work. They start pushing for a pay rise, and because their food prices have gone up, they want it to be a healthy increase.

Oil prices eventually feed into the cost of power, which your employees use at home to run their refrigerators and TVs and whatnot – like cooking food. Their demands get larger and louder.

Meanwhile, the cost of electricity also means that it costs more to keep your lights on and your machinery operating. In some cases, this costs a bit; in others, like aluminum manufacturing, it costs a huge amount. So you have to put your prices up, and the employees get at least some of the pay rise.

(Not all industries and businesses are going to be affected the same way or by the same amount, by the way).

But if you and everybody else puts their prices up, it now costs more to buy everything. So the employees want another pay rise.

In the meantime, the extra spending power that they now have gets spent, and as a result, there’s more money in the economy. That’s inflation.

It can all end in a vicious circle in which the necessary response to inflation creates still more inflation.

To put it in a nutshell, the more overheated the economy, the more unstable it is.

6. Hyperinflation, Recession, and Depression: Why Inflation Matters

While the causes of these phenomena are quite different, a lot of the symptoms of the economic disruption are the same.

When one of these positive feedback loops goes completely out of control, you can end up with hyperinflation. Anything more than about 20% inflation is considered hyperinflation.

Germany experienced Hyperinflation between the world wars; people had to literally cart wheelbarrows full of notes to the store to buy bread, which cost a ridiculous amount, and which was increasing in price daily.

Imagine buying a dozen eggs one day for $2.50. The next day, those eggs cost $3.00, the day after, $4, then $7, then $12, followed by $16 and $25. A week after this hyperinflation started, you can no longer buy eggs by the dozen; it’s one egg at a time, for $5 each – then $7, $10, $16, $22, $40, $70, and $120. With prices going up like this, in a few weeks you will be talking about thousands of dollars – for an egg.

Pay rates can’t keep up. No-one can afford to buy eggs (or anything else) – so they steal them. Black markets start dealing in basic (stolen) produce, and people buy from them because they have no other choice but to starve. Riots and looting ensue. The shopkeeper doesn’t have the income to keep his shop open, so he closes it and joins the rioters – and so do anyone who used to work there. If this is restricted to one country, anyone who could has fled to somewhere else long ago – but hundreds of thousands more are following. Instant Dystopia.

Employment rates are a function of supply and demand, too. In a hyper-inflation situation, the demand vanishes, and there are hundreds of people for every vacancy.

Of course, everyone’s withdrawn what money they have saved long before, so the banks have collapsed, too.

Recessions

A contracting economy is not an improvement on this situation.

Recessions happen when there’s not enough wealth being generated by an economy to sustain spending. You can hide one by going into debt, borrowing money from somewhere else – for as long as they will lend it.

In a recession, expenses go up, profit margins go down, and businesses start to collapse. This drives a spike in the unemployment rate and pretty soon there are dozens of applicants for every job. When I first entered the job market, there was a small recession, with 10-12% unemployment. That’s only happened once or twice, since.

Depressions

If you get two quarter-years (usually abbreviated quarters) of economic contraction in a row, a Recession becomes a Depression.

You might think that there’s not much difference, things just don’t improve – but that assumes that a new equilibrium is reached in the economy, and things stabilize, albeit at a level that contains a lot of suffering.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Some businesses are ‘primary arteries’ within the ‘body’ of the economy, essential elements of the economy itself. In a Depression, these start to fail. The electric company. Major supermarket chains. Banks.

Domino effects follow, causing the closure of many businesses that might have survived, and massive downsizing of those that attempt to weather the storm.

The greater significance within the economy that these institutions represent makes a Depression slightly different in kind, and not just in degree.

A recession is the economy experiencing sudden, acute, alarming chest pains. A Depression is a full-blown heart attack. A prolonged depression is a stroke on top of the heart attack.

And depressions generally last a long time. It’s that much harder to rebuild the economy without those arterial components; it can, and has, taken years. It’s like a flood caused by the sudden collapse of a dam, a flood that wipes out the only available suppliers of steel and concrete (which you need in order to rebuild the dam). Before you can rebuild the dam, you need to replace those suppliers; before you can replace those suppliers, the flood waters need to recede; and even accomplishing all this still leaves a mess to repair.

7. Interest Rates & Inflation

The most effective tool to use against inflation in general is interest rates. You lower them to boost the economy and avoid (or mitigate) a recession; you raise them to suck money out of the economy when it starts to overheat.

If you rely on today’s inflation rate, you will always do too little, too late. You need to forecast what the inflation rate is going to be and set your interest rates accordingly.

Increasing interest rates has a whole slew of effects. It makes it more expensive to borrow, so people can’t spend as much on housing. The same effect makes it harder to keep a business operating (almost all businesses are built on debt, the infrastructure needed for the business to operate is too expensive).

So businesses need to put prices up, and that means that people won’t get as much to spend on luxuries. Rents go up, and so do power prices. Banks need to raise the interest rates they pay for savings in order to maintain liquidity.

Businesses also look to lower what costs they can – and that often means doing without as many staff. So employment goes down, and unemployment goes up. Pay rates may be cut – just when people are demanding that they go up.

And so on. But that brings me to a second wild-card when it comes to forecasting inflation rates – not all these effects migrate through the economy at the same speed, or with the same intensity. Some of them are immediate; others are a ticking time bomb.

Economists in Australia are forecasting a gradual but steepening fiscal cliff as people’s mortgages go from fixed (low) rates, set before the current financial problems arose, onto variable rates (set according to the current economic conditions), for example.

Just in case it works differently, I should explain that in Australia, ‘fixed rate loans’ on housing are for a limited period – sometimes one year, sometimes two, occasionally five – after which, the loans revert to variable rates. A lot of people refinance their mortgages when that happens, for obvious reasons – a great fixed rate often means a more draconian variable rate.

On top of that, some of the effects of an interest rate increase are persistent, they linger – just as hitting the interest rate brakes don’t slow the inflation trajectory all at once, so taking your foot off the brake has both immediate effects and slower, longer term ones.

Our electricity regulator has fixed prices for the remainder of the year at a rate commensurate with the high costs experienced earlier in the year (when it looked like those prices were going to go up by another 20%, it must be admitted) – which means that they will stay high even though the wholesale cost of generating and distributing the power has now started to fall.

There will be no relief on electricity and gas rates until January next year. The Reserve Bank (which sets interest rates here) could drop rates tomorrow, and they would effectively stay ‘locked in’ at the higher rate so far as power costs are concerned, at least until then.

8. Putting The Cart Before The Horse

So, not only is forecasting the inflation rate much more difficult than it might initially have seemed, it’s also far more important to get right – because that determines the interest rate settings, and those have a profound impact on the economy.

One of the ways economists counter the difficulty in predicting inflation rates is to put the cart before the horse. Instead of trying to measure the effects driving inflation, they measure the consequences of inflation on a given key element and use that to infer what the impact on inflation was over the period in question.

You can get an idea of how much more or less people have to spend by looking at house prices, and at retail spending – and at what people are spending money on. This uses the consequences of the inflation that has already been experienced to deduce the trend, the impact that the resulting patterns of expenditure will have on the future inflation rate.

It makes the guesses more informed, in other words.

Unemployment Rates

Another key example is the current unemployment rate, because that is driven by the inflation that was. If unemployment is too high, it’s a sign that the economy may be heading into a recession; if it’s too low, it means that demand for workers remains high, and that means that businesses have the money to spend on hiring more workers – and that’s a sign that the economy might be overheating.

In any given jobs market, there is a given percentage of the workforce that are going to be in the process of changing employers. The technical term, believe it or not, is “slosh’. It’s usually around 2-4%.

When there is a strong jobs market, and unemployment is low, employees feel more confident in their ability to get a job if their current one isn’t satisfactory for any reason – so slosh can actually go up, even though the overall unemployment rate is down. That confidence can flow through to other indicators, like retail spending, as well.

When there’s a lot of unemployment, businesses work extra hard to keep their best staff but treat everyone else as disposable parts – because there are multiple applicants for every vacancy, and they can pick and choose amongst them. People are less confident in their job security, and less inclined to risk changing jobs unless they have to.

So the unemployment rate is not only a key indicator in its own right, it also provides valuable context for the interpretation of other values. If only it weren’t always 4-6 weeks out of date by the time it gets measured…

9. Surfing the crest of a placid wave

Economists love it when things are nice and calm, when all the indicators are that inflation is stable at a couple of percent or so, unemployment is 50-75% churn (around 4-4.5%), and so on. When that happens, they can set Interest rates to a nice stable 4% that doesn’t put significant price pressure on wages or anything else, and they can continually surf the crest of a very placid wave.

That rarely happens. So many things feed into an inflation rate that there’s always something that’s too high or too low or too unstable and needs to be monitored. If it’s only one or two variables, that can usually be managed – though the reporting delays create considerable discomfort – but when persistent, nerves grow.

10. The Blunt Weapon

Part of the problem is that Interest rates are very much a blunt weapon.

Let’s say that there’s low unemployment, and housing prices are setting new records, and power prices are high, and OPEC have just reduced global supplies to increase the price of Oil. Those are all indicators that inflation is high, and needs action.

But at the same time, there’s high levels of mortgage stress, and there’s a mortgage cliff approaching, and families are under considerable price stress that is impacting retail sales and travel is down, and food prices are too high, creating considerable pressure for wages growth – those are all signs that interest rates are too high, and raising them further will only make things worse.

That’s the situation right now in Australia – about half the indicators say inflation is too high, and half say that interest rates are too high, and you can’t have it both ways.

It takes nerves of steel not to jump, one way or the other. What it probably means is that interest rates are too high, but have to stay that way until at least one more of those high-inflation indicators comes down. That will happen as people start falling off that mortgage cliff; the trick is to help retail and tourism businesses, and those individuals living at lower economic levels, survive until interest rates can be safely cut – without pumping more money into the economy, which will delay that fall.

At any given point in time, there are ten economic vulnerabilities that can massively disturb that placid wave. Governments usually have no control over these; they simply have to deal with the consequences. One is usually not enough to create an economic panic – but two or more can combine at any time.

11. Vulnerability 1: The Price Of Oil

The first vulnerability is the one to which everyone is most vulnerable, even the oil-producing nations.

That might not be immediately obvious to readers. Let’s say that another country restricts oil supplies (hello, OPEC); that has no bearing on how much it costs to produce your oil, so – in theory – the price of oil doesn’t go up in your country. Except that the oil producers are private companies who – like all such – are required by their boards an\d shareholders to make profits, and so they will restrict the amount of oil they sell domestically to increase what they can supply to countries where the price is higher. In effect, in order to be competitive, your country has to raise its domestic oil price to the international value, or close enough to it.

This is the vulnerability that completely blindsided everyone in the 1970s, bringing an end to the Pre-Digital Tech Age, as discussed in the previous part of this series. Simply put, no-one really recognized that it was a vulnerability until then; it was simply taken for granted.

The price of Oil impacts delivery and transport costs, so everything goes up in price. There are a huge number of products that are petroleum-based, especially plastics, so packaging for a lot of things goes up, too. It impacts the cost of consumer travel, so people have less money to spend on other things. It affects the cost of power, which takes longer to work its way through the system but adds an unwelcome second kick to all three effects.

And it’s completely out of your control; or more accurately, it’s subject to the whims of the least-stable oil-producing nation. Everyone – including the oft-maligned Saudis (at least in this space) – is hostage to the price of oil..

12. Vulnerability 2: The Price Of Power

Everything uses power, even oil refining. Manufacturing, packaging, transportation, distribution, communications, retail, domestic consumption – you name it.

Even today, when they should know better, economists frequently underestimate the impact of rising power prices, getting unpleasant surprises as a result.

Some industries and operations are more vulnerable than others; leading this pack are aluminum refining, who pass these costs downstream to every product that uses Aluminum components, or uses machines that contain aluminum components (thankfully, there aren’t so many of those).

Right behind them are anything that has to be stored in a refrigerated state. And that’s more foodstuffs than anyone realizes.

Anything that impacts the fundamentals of food prices has a disproportionate impact on consumer spending, consumer confidence, and consumer demand for better wages – and so rapid is this response that it can often outpace the spread of its causal impact through an economy.

Third in line – nominally – is anything that gets transported by road (or by rail, in many cases). Guess what the two primary distribution methods are? This effect is all about street lighting.

Domestic cooling and heating are in fourth place except every summer and winter, when they vault into third place. That’s because these are fundamentally inefficient processes. But this includes the cost of heating or cooling workplaces and office spaces, so it affects virtually everything.

Even seemingly unrelated industrial processes still rely on electricity to make their conveyor belts and other machinery function.

The price of power is in an especially precarious state at the moment. Already vulnerable due to labor costs and long-standing neglect of distribution infrastructure – substations, poles, and wires – environmental reality is mandating a switch from coal- and oil-powered power generation to more ecologically-friendly sources. This shifts power generation from instantaneous demand responses to longer-term supplies – and that demands new storage technologies that are inherently expensive, adding further cost pressures to the electricity price. In time, those will moderate and the system will stabilize, but its currently precarious.

Even the cost of steel is impacted by the price of electricity and gas.

13. Vulnerability 3: The Price Of Materials

Which brings us to the bogeyman that arose as a consequence of the oil shock in the 1970s – the shift in thinking from an unlimited- resources perspective to a limited-resources perspective.

Ironically, this seems to have coincided with a rise in consumer consumption of disposable products – many are no longer designed to last as long as possible, but incorporate planned obsolescence, designed to increase profits for the manufacturers and sellers.

The truth is that many of the commodities deemed most greatly at risk have proven more resilient in supply than was dreamed of, back in the 1950s and 60s when the first warnings were being sounded on the subject (and falling on deaf ears). It’s materials that were largely unnoticed back then, like lithium, and rare-earth metals that are critical commodities these days – and part of that is due to supply-chain issues and politics.

Rare Earth Metals

In particular, China is the world’s #1 source – one-hundredfold or more – of these commodities, upon which all domestic computers and mobile phones and other smart electronic devices depend. That’s more than 100-fold compared to the rest of the world combined.

Rubber

There was a time in which there was not enough rubber being produced to meet demand. This would have been the first great Materials Shock (predating the Oil Shock by decades), but an artificial supply was devised in the nick of time.

Helium

Let’s talk for a moment about another material resource that doesn’t get enough attention: Helium. Modern disk drives rely on Helium to achieve their astonishing capacities and life-spans. Without Helium, you’re back at the 1 terabyte bricks of yesteryear – at best. Laptops and smartphones are suitcase-sized, and heavy. Helium and Hydrogen are the only suitable gasses – the next lightest gasses are Oxygen and Nitrogen, which won’t work for obvious reasons; you may as well use air. Hydrogen doesn’t work because the atoms are so small that they escape too quickly. The only satisfactory compromise is Helium, and for that reason, it’s now designated a Strategic Material by the US Government.

Yet, we throw it away on party balloons. The only reason this isn’t stopped is because it is feared a public panic would result – and it’s a hard sell persuading people that the second most-common substance in the universe is in critically-short supply.

Silicon

One more, for the sake of completeness: Sand is everywhere, and its the source of Silicon, which are fundamental to all sorts of computer chips. Not something you would ever expect to be in short supply. But it is.

The reason is that modern computer chips require exceptionally-pure silicon, and that only comes from exceptionally-pure sands, and that – in turn – is in comparatively short supply. The only reason this is not as dire a situation as the others mentioned is that there are expectations that ways can be found of ‘purifying’ lower-quality sources – though these are likely to double or triple the prices of electronics virtually overnight, if (when?) they are ever needed..

Food Sources

An afterthought, but an important one. How much agricultural land in the US is actively farmed, do you think?

About 16.8% of the US is considered arable – that is, capable of producing crops. This number is rising as we get better at farming – it was reported to be 17.24% in 2020.

Of that percentage, 52% is actually used for agriculture. Some of it is reserved for forests, for example.

Because of subsidies, the most profitable crop is corn, so that uses up more than half of the land actually farmed. By area, that’s roughly the size of California.

The rest – roughly the size of Indiana – is where the rest of the American food supply comes from.

Because farms need to make profits, too, there’s an incentive for corn syrup to be put into almost everything. This contributes massively to the health problems in the US – about 42 pounds of the stuff per head, each and every year. For comparison, the average American also consumes about 110 pounds of red meat a year.

It’s too late to change – farming anything else would require a multi-generational investment in different farm machinery that would send farmers broke long before they got there.

Everyone needs to eat – so anything that affects food prices (like, say, an invasion of the #1 grain-producing nation on earth, Ukraine) is going to affect everyone and everything.

14. Vulnerability 4: The Price Of Labor

By and large, this is a negligible factor unless inflation is already running rampant, but labor costs are extremely sensitive to other primary vulnerabilities. This has enabled past state governments in the US to pass laws limiting – almost eliminating – employee rights. Nevertheless, as the current Hollywood strikes reveal, if everyone pulls together, massive disruptions can still occur – employees can only be pushed so far before they will revolt.

Unions, by giving employees some negotiating power, can actually decrease the level of industrial disruption – at the price of increasing its frequency.

What’s less harmful? The occasional catastrophic meltdown, or smaller but more frequent temporary disruptions? I don’t pretend to know the answer, but lean toward the latter.

Nothing happens without workers somewhere in the process. So everything is equally vulnerable to general increases in the cost of Labor. But, at the same time, some growth in this area is essential or you get those catastrophic meltdowns, no matter what interventions may attempt to prevent them.

The cost of labor is a key ingredient in everything from mining to power production. This ubiquity means that labor cost increases have delayed impacts on every other critical vulnerability, capable of sending them over the edge.

Minimum Wage

So the answer is to suppress the fundamental cost of labor as much as possible, right? No, no, no! Every time a general increase in minimum wages is mooted here in Australia, the conservative side of politics sound alarm bells about businesses collapsing, and I have no doubt that it’s the same everywhere else in the world.

If the minimum wage is too low, people have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet – and exhaustion means they will be less productive at all of them. There was a time- back in the 50s and 60s – when a family could live comfortably off a single wage; that’s no longer the case.

Two-Income Families

Economics driving social changes which in turn drive economic changes – this is something I’ve tried to show in this series as a significant pillar of reality. In this case, consumer habits adapted to twin-incomes, and businesses evolved to satisfy those consumer habits, and before you know it, you need a two-person income to achieve a satisfactory standard of living.

Which leaves single-income households in a very difficult position. There are only two solutions without raising wages – government support, or second jobs. So the one person is now ‘consuming’ two or more job vacancies, at the expense of someone else who wants a job. The end result is an increase in the unemployment rate, and a more profound increase in the long-term unemployment rate.

This suits businesses, however, because it keeps their labor costs down, enabling more income to be characterized as profits.

Doubling the minimum wage

I remember clearly a doubling of the minimum wage in the US being mooted by some as proposed policy in the 2016 US elections, and on first glance, it would do a lot of good. But…

Does anyone have any doubts that doubling the minimum wage would flow through to increases in all other wage levels? I don’t. The effect might be attenuated for those already on good money, so it wouldn’t end up doubling the entire wage levels of a country, but it would be a significant increase. Conservatives are right about that.

Aside from this, what would happen if such a policy was enacted? Well, people would no longer need a second job, assuming that nothing went up in price. That means that they would achieve a better work-life balance – good for mental health and general happiness.

To replace them, employers would have to recruit more workers. So unemployment would go down, and things would stabilize at a new normal – ironically, one closer to the much-lauded 1950s idolized by the MAGA-crowd.

But, if labor costs go up, businesses will lose profits – and that’s unacceptable. There would be an immediate increase in prices, which would start to erode those wage gains. On top of that, there would be massive short-term economic disruption, with some businesses not raising prices enough and some going too far.

You can only raise prices so far before consumers stop buying. So there are limits to the wages growth that business can absorb, ones imposed by public opinion. So some businesses will get their adjustments wrong, and lose profitability, and go out of business. And some will make the calculations correctly, and conclude that they won’t stay profitable because they can’t raise profits enough, and close.

Doubling the minimum wage will have all sorts of short-term economic and social benefits – before plunging an economy into a Recession or a Depression. Not good.

Equally severe problems result when this picture is used to suppress growth in the minimum wage. They are just less overt and obvious. When this happens, the only solution is to raise pay scales – and if you suppress wages growth too much, for too long, you eventually reach the point where you need a doubling just to get to where your wage-rates should have been.

Theoretical Solutions?

So, short-term, what you need is a graduated rise in minimum wage, rather than trying to do it all in one hit, with a defined end-point.

Once you get there, indexing the minimum wage to Inflation seems the obvious long-term solution.

It’s not that simple, because wage increases are, in and of themselves, inflationary. This is a positive-feedback loop – another one – that will regularly send the economy surging out of control.

Businesses thrive on stability, and this is anything but stable. As with many other things in life and politics, there are no easy answers, and anyone who tells you there are is attempting to pull the wool over your eyes.

15. Vulnerability 5: Economic Disparity

While I’m in the vicinity, I should talk about this momentarily. Income Disparity, also described as Income Inequality, is the uneven distribution of total income throughout a population.

In modern times, it means too much money going to executives and shareholders and not enough being fed into the pay packets of the people actually generating the income.

This is an obvious result of pushing labor costs down too much. Those who stand to gain – the wealthy and well-paid – are obviously in favor of it, for purely selfish reasons. This leads them to donate heavily to political groups who promise to cut their taxes or keep wages “under control”.

Some are smart enough to recognize these as short-term gains leading to long-term pain, but many are not. This problem produces a hidden instability within the economy but competitive pressures – pay scales at the top end necessary to recruit good employees – restrict action to deal with the problem.

Solutions need to affect everyone all at the same time, whether they like it or not, and that makes them the responsibility of the highest levels of government.

In theory, higher tax rates help to balance the pressures – but greater access to tax avoidance mechanisms minimize this effect.

The only solution that I can see is some sort of imposed regulatory mechanism which fixes the wages of a supervisor at (say) 2.5 times the average scale of pay of those supervised. But that contains inherent inefficiencies, encouraging poor business structures, and I doubt that any political party espousing it could ever get elected, so it’s neither effective enough nor ever going to be implemented. No easy answers – again.

16. Vulnerability 6: The Price Of Land

Land is sometimes said to be the safest investment, because – in the long run – land values always go up, not down. Oh, dear, sounds inflationary, doesn’t it?

This is one of those statements that’s both usually true and misleading at the same time. It depends on how volatile the housing market is in a given region, and how long “in the long run” is, and all sorts of other factors.

If you buy property in a small town, and the rail line to that town closes, you’d better believe that the bottom will fall out of the property market – you may have to wait a century or two for land prices to get back to where they were.

Buying property that’s in demand because workers in a nearby factory need residences, if that factory contaminates the water, your property will become worthless overnight. If you’re lucky, the government will forcibly buy you out – for 1 tenth what you paid for the land, which – effectively – will never go back to being worth what you paid for it..

Here in Australia, the big stink is about insurers who will no longer cover communities for flood damage because once-in-a-century floods have struck twice in the last two years. This devalues the property concerned so significantly that the government is contemplating relocating entire towns to higher ground, and confuses probabilities with predictions – but that’s a bitter debate for another day and maybe a different venue.

Part of the problem is that there is no formula for working out what a piece of land is worth; there hasn’t even been a proper analysis to identify the factors and their relative strengths. Instead, the ‘formula’ is to look at what properties in the area went for recently, how this property compares with those, what’s changed economically in the area since then, add a gut-instinct variation to that baseline for these factors, plus 5% and inflation, then list it and wait to see if anyone bites.

The inherent volatility of Auctions don’t help matters any, either.

I remember when the first property in Sydney sold for more than a million dollars – a mansion with estate grounds in the most affluent part of town, overlooking the world-famous Sydney Harbour.

These days, the average 2-BR house sells for over a million, and despite an initial dip when those who saw the interest rate writing on the wall got out while the getting was (relatively) good, prices are still surging.

The number of sales per month is expected to triple or quadruple over the next 4 months, as more people fall off the mortgage cliff already described and either sell up (accepting a loss) or get foreclosed by the banks. Around Christmas, it will be a buyers’ market – if you’ve got the money to invest.

The value of property feeds into inflation in a number of ways – first, mortgages eat into disposable income, in exactly the same way as high inflation does; and second, rents always go up when property does, and that means that business premises cost more, an expense that gets passed on as higher prices for goods.

This can be viewed as the tail wagging the dog – by mimicking the consequences of a rise in inflation, the price of land creates a rise in inflation. Cause-and-effect are all messed up in economics – at least, when it comes to land prices.

A sudden spike in the value of land tends to be a relatively local thing, and so you get pro-inflation hot-spots breaking out here and there all the time. That’s happening right now to land around the still-under-construction second International Airport for Sydney – except where the land lies under the flight path of jet aircraft, where values have crashed. Those affected get only a modicum of sympathy from me, it’s only been on-again-off-again for three decades now; they knew the risks when they bought there.

Most of the time, those hot-spots get ‘leveled out’ to a large extent by the far greater lands where the prices are relatively stable, or even declining. Take a look at photos of the urban decay in Detroit sometime, and think about the property values. There are locations where the cost of demolition of decrepit structure are more than the land is worth as an empty lot.

But these hot-spots arise as a confluence of random and non-random events – and, just as you can roll four sixes on 4d6 three times in a row if you roll for long enough, sooner or later those random hot-spots can combine into a national housing value boom. Once they start, there’s nothing that can be done about these, because house and land prices are as much about perception as they are any concrete, justifiable, valuations. All that can be done is to ride the whirlwind and wait for the inevitable crash.

Supply and demand also factor into the land-value equation; if something happens to limit supply, or greatly increase demand, inflation, and inflation of land values, are the inevitable results.

17. Vulnerability 7: The Price Of Goods

I’ve already touched on this, under the heading of the cost of materials. Consider these formulas:

• Wholesale Price of Goods x Units produced = (cost of materials + manufacturing + labor + packaging + distribution + marketing + overheads + loan repayments + savings) x (1 + profit margin/100) x (1 + inflation/100).
• Retail price of goods x units purchased = (cost of sales + labor + warehousing + sub-distribution + marketing + overheads + loan repayments + savings) x (1 + profit margin / 100) x (1 + inflation/100).

There are so many inputs into the final cost that the customer pays for his goods that anything and everything makes them go up. If any factor ever causes them to go down, that can be taken as additional profits or hidden as a ‘sales price’ because it will only be temporary.

And, again, that all sounds very inflationary, doesn’t it?

If modest increases happen in several – or all – of these factors, even though they are not of concern individually, they can aggregate and then amplify into out-of-the-blue spikes in retail prices. I’m talking rises of 30-50% in one step.

Most of the time, that’s just a blip, and while market share may be impacted, for the most part, things go on as usual.

Every now and then, however, some critical commodity will be impacted – be it ball bearings or electrical switches, and there’s an unexpected snowballing in the price of goods that are deemed essential by the consumer.

Most of the time, these impacts are just noise within the system, with a small overall upward trend. Like rolling 6d6-4d6 repeatedly.

Although most of the results will be scattered between, say, 2 and 12, and the occasional oddity might be between -1 and 15 but not in that core region, every now and then, you’ll hit the jackpot.

Inflation can come out of nowhere, when the stars align.

18. Vulnerability 8: The Price Of Services

The same thing can be said for the price of services. But there’s a bias that is often not taken into account.

In Australia, there was a time when a University Education was free; it was felt that the contributions an educated workforce would make to the economy would more than repay the investment in the future of our society.

Successive governments first undermined this system (because it was expensive) and then made a concerted effort to underwrite it by introducing university fees, something similar to US-style college fees, except that the up-front costs were paid by the government who then forced repayment of the resulting debt by the student. There are some protections for the students – you only have to start repayments once your income hits a certain level, for example – but the fees have simply grown and grown since.

These costs obviously flow directly into the fees charged by these graduates for their services. The whole thing is directly inflationary, and at the same time, a drag on economic growth – a contradiction in terms that only resolves when you realize that we’re talking about different time scales.

University administrators love the scheme; by putting a flat fee on the price of a degree, they can charge international students up-front, easing their running costs. A Bachelor’s Degree is costs AU$15K-33K per year, usually for 3 or 4 years. A Masters is two more years at AU$14K-37K a year, a Doctorate is a couple more at the same rate. Medical and Veterinary degrees are up to twice this amount. An MBA can cost as much as AU$121K per year.

As of 23 June this year – about two weeks ago – it was estimated that there was a total of AU$74.4 billion owed by about 3 million Australians, an average of A$24,700 each. Any outstanding debt is indexed every year against inflation – they went up 6.6% this past June 1. This encourages students to repay their debt before the threshold is reached.

The problem here is that incomes have not risen by anywhere close to the inflation rate – so ex-students are suddenly falling deeper and deeper into debt. In effect, 7-14 years of student productivity is lost to the economy repaying this debt.

The more an ex-student can charge for their services, the more quickly they can discharge their debts. This is keeping graduates from home ownership, for example, and increasing the stress they experience, increasing drop-out rates in various professions, while at the same time pushing the services in question further out of reach of lower-income clients. The full social and economic impact has yet to be discovered, but the indications are not good.

The college system in the US sucks this money out of the parents’ finances, so the economic impact starts immediately instead of being deferred.

In effect, this is acting as an amplifier to inflation rates in a limited range of areas. It means that any sudden increase (however temporary) in inflation rate gets an additional boost. What may have been a manageable 4-5% inflation has the effects of a 6-7% rise.

It doesn’t matter what the cause is – if the cost of plumbers and electricians and doctors and teachers and the like go up, it drives inflation beyond the increase itself.

19. Vulnerability 9: Corporate Greed

A favorite bogeyman of the left, and with some justification. It doesn’t matter if 99 out of 100 corporate citizens behave responsibly; that 1-in-100 can and usually does have a disproportionate impact.

Greed basically siphons money out of the economy and parks it where the greedy individual can profit from it but no-one else. Effectively, this is the same as not printing enough currency, which in turn raises the value of the currency – which, at first, might seem to be a good thing for reducing inflation.

The problem is that every dollar (or peso or whatever) that gets spent anywhere else in the economy is therefore essentially spending more than the face value – and that is inflationary.

On top of that, even the hint of an allegation of corporate greed is guaranteed to get workers agitating for a pay rise, for their fair share. Since the mid-90s, governments have linked productivity gains (which boost the economy) to wage rises; the problem is that since 1994-5, every 1% productivity gain has only earned a 0.8% pay rise. That other 0.2% has gone to business owners and shareholders.

I have seen arguments that this is entirely justified – “After all, its their business and they deserve to get more if the business becomes more profitable.” The flaw in this line of argument is that they would get more anyway.

I’ll be the first to admit that the diagram above is exaggerated – it’s intended to illustrate the principle, not the reality.

The White bars are the total income of the business, adjusted for inflation. Unrealistically, it’s the same throughout. This is distributed into three areas – Profits, Wages, and Costs, colored yellow, Green, and Red, respectively. In figure 1, these are roughly equal (again, improbably).

Row two illustrates a 30% productivity gain, over several years.

Row three shows that if the proceeds of the productivity gain are shared equally between owners (profits) and workers (wages), everyone is equally better off. Of course, profits may be divided amongst one or many, but it’s unlikely to be as many as the wages are divided amongst, so an individual will get less in dollar terms – but everyone gets 15%. At least in theory.

Row four, completely unrealistically, shows all 30% of the productivity gain being diverted into profits; the wages segment is the same size as it was in 1 and 2.

The reality is that we are 1/5th of the way between 3 and 4. As I said, this is exaggerated for illustrative purposes.

It’s critical to realize that industrial relations are as much to do with perceptions and mindset as they are economic realities. What that one-in-100 business is doing affects that mindset, and that spreads far beyond that one business, creating an us-vs-them mentality.

If this sort of thing was the result of one decision, it would be bad, and the results would be ugly. Because it has been the result of many wages decisions and agreements over many years, it has largely sailed under the radar, and there was not a lot of outrage – until the current ‘cost of living crisis’ made people search for every last cent they could find.

Those in other countries may have escaped that crisis – certainly, despite a lot of noise, the US economy seems to be loping along quite comfortably at the moment – but there remains plenty of evidence of the same problems there. Explosions in this area are only ever deferred, never avoided – and sometimes, are all the worse when they do finally explode because of the additional buildup of pressure.

20. Vulnerability 10: The Banking Sector

It’s an old story, best elucidated in the movie Sneakers.

“Posit: Someone starts a rumor that a bank is financially shaky. Consequence: people withdraw their money, and pretty soon, it IS financially shaky.” — from memory, so don’t be surprised if this is slightly paraphrased.

Banks are businesses like any other, and like other businesses, they can fail. The difference is that when banks fail, they take other businesses with them. Too many bank failures, or banks of a certain scale failing, can rot an economy from the inside.

And all that is before the impact on public confidence is taken into account – even though that can be the most damaging of all.

It’s fair to say that the biggest crisis in the US economy of late has been the failure of three banks in close succession. In each case, there was ‘good’ reason for the failure*, and the system that has been built up since the GFC did what it was supposed to do, protecting the consumers who banked with those institutions.

* – well, in two cases there were good reasons. The third case was different, and more a manifestation of perception over reality, magnifying a short-term problem into a terminal ailment. Which goes back to the opening comments of this section, I guess.

The banks are the heart of the economy, pumping money around. Once, there was some cushion – physical cheques in the mail – but these days its all done electronically, for the greater convenience for customers. That takes away a safety net, but so far, that defensive mechanism hasn’t been needed.

Nevertheless, any failure – perceived or real – of the banking infrastructure can place an economy on life-support, no matter how robust it might otherwise be.

21. The eleventh vulnerability

Let’s talk about the stock market for a minute, even though most of my knowledge of it comes from Trading Places.

In essence, it’s all about confidence. When people aren’t sure how much a stock will be worth tomorrow, they sell it – and usually put their money in something they think more secure. The more at-risk the stock, the greater the potential gains, but most such bets don’t pay off; the safer and more stodgy a stock, the less likely it is to pay a big return (but the more likely it is to pay that smaller return reliably).

When things look they are going well, in economic terms, the stock market becomes bullish, and the traders who buy and sell stocks more inclined to take a risk; when things look precarious, the opposite happens.

‘Gold Fever’ is a real phenomenon, and it has its modern-day equivalent on the stock market floor. If convinced that a company will deliver in the long run, investors are quite capable of throwing good money after bad – regardless of the reality. Equally, doubt and a lack of confidence can be contagious, driving down the value of perfectly acceptable companies.

Postulate a company, XYZ Tech (I hope it’s not a real one!). For the last three years, it’s traded steadily at $1 a share. But there are rumors of a big contract being negotiated, so today, it’s trading at $2.50 a share, and rising. There are two schools of thought: buy now, because it’s still rising; or don’t buy, because most of the good profit has already gone out of the transaction, instead focusing on the businesses that will go higher if the rumors are true – and some that will rise if they aren’t, depending on how much stock you put into the rumors.

Tomorrow, the news breaks that the negotiations have failed, and the stock plunges to 60 cents a share. Those who bought at $2.50 lose a lot of money, that being the risk of the gamble. There are, once again, two schools of thought: one is that you should under no circumstances buy, because there’s no evidence that the slide is over, or that the company can even survive this roller-coaster. The other looks at those years of stable trading, and decides that the likelihood is that the stock will eventually stabilize at something close to that original $1 a share – buying now will not only shore up the stock price, making that a more likely outcome, it will come close to doubling the money of anyone investing in those shares.

Context is obviously all-important in choosing between these different perspectives. What else is going on that could impact share values, and shares of this sector and this business in particular?

The stock market thus provides a direct connection between confidence in the economy and decision-makers, albeit one that is hopelessly drowning in noise. Nevertheless, the long-term trend of stock markets is normally upwards (beware of the rare exceptions, however!). So it’s that whole 6d6-4d6 thing all over again.

There’s not much of a direct link between a stock market and economic health; it reacts, it doesn’t drive. But what it reacts to DOES impact inflation, and interest rates – by affecting profitability – DO impact on the share market, driving some shares higher and some lower.

Viewed from another perspective, a stock market always reacts to events and to the perception of events, with foresight if at all possible. And that makes it a valuable guide to what an interest rate decision needs to be, in order to manipulate both the economic factors that are directly affected and the public confidence and perceptions that stem from them.

To what extent is the Great Depression directly attributable to the Stock Market Crash? And to what extent were both driven by other factors that they had in common, or domino-consequences of those factors? You can spend years unpicking the minutia and still not be sure, because the ultimate connecting tissue is the attitude and psychology of the time.

Which raises the question, “What were you Thinking?” to a whole new level.

22. Impossible Predictions?

By now, it should be easy to see why accurate predictions of inflation, and hence of interest rate needs, are all but impossible. The best that can be hoped for is to get an educated best-guess that’s not too far wide of the mark – and to shade your guesses based on recent events and underlying trends. “If in doubt, do what you did last month” is trite – but not as far wide of the mark as people might think.

The RPG Perspective

There are so many inputs into inflation and interest rate decisions that a GM can plausibly make these (and other economic indicators) do anything they want, within reason (I’ll come back to that caveat in a moment).

Understanding what the vulnerabilities of an economy are, and what the underlying contributing factors are, means that you can sound credible when asserting those decisions “made in-game by NPCs with the authority to do so”. This understanding also prepares the GM for handling any PC engagement with the economy – whether that’s building a castle or persuading the government to fund your Yiddish Space Laser Defenses.

But here’s the rub: these announcements don’t come at random intervals. There’s always a key reporting date, and a key meeting by the central bank or whoever it is that makes the decisions. Plausibility demands that the relevant trends, and their consequences, manifest a month or months earlier, even if you don’t draw attention to them. And it’s important to note any remedial action that will logically take place in consequence, too, and any direct consequences of such actions.

The in-game economy is completely in your hands. What you do with it is up to you – but before you start playing with the controls, it might be worth taking a moment to skim the instruction manual.

That’s what this post is: a generic user manual for modern economic conditions. Use it in good wealth!

In part 1:

1. Introduction
2. General Concepts and A Model Economy
3. The Economics of an Absolute Monarchy (The Early Medieval)

In part 2:

4. The Economics of Limited Monarchies (The Later Medieval & Renaissance)
5. In-Game Economics: Fantasy Games

In Part 3:

6. The Renaissance, revisited
7. Pre-Industrial Economics I: The Age of Exploration
8. Pre-Industrial Economics II: The Age of Sail

In Part 4:

9. Industrial Economies I: The Age Of Steam
10. In-game Economics: Gaslight-era

In Part 5, Chapter 1:

11. Industrial Economics II: The Age Of Electrification & Motoring

In Part 5, Chapter 2:

12. Industrial Economics III: War & Depression
13. In-Game Economics: Pulp
14. In-Game Economics: Sci-fi
15. In-Game Economics: Steampunk

In Part 6, Chapter 1:

16. The Pre-Digital Tech Age
17. World War 2
18. Post-war & Cold War

In Part 6, Chapter 2:

19. Government For The People
20. Aviation

In Part 6, Chapter 3:

21. The Space Race
22. Tech Briefing: Miniaturization
23. Behemoths Of Blind Logic (early computers)
24. The Promise Of Atomics
25. A Default Economy

In this Part:

26. Economic Realities (Inflation & Interest Rates)

Planned for parts 8+:

27. Digital Economics
28. Post-Pandemic Economics
29. In-Game Economics: Modern
30. Future Economics I: Dystopian
31. In-Game Economics: Dystopian Futures
32. Future Economics I: Utopian
33. In-Game Economics: Utopian Futures
34. In-Game Economics: Space Opera

Because the last part of the Economics in RPGs Series ran to three parts, I’ve decided to throw in an extra non-series article before continuing with it next week. Fortunately, I had an idea on tap.

The Holistic NPC

“Holistic” essentially means ‘complete’. The term derives from Holism, which is a philosophic notion that focusing on specific aspects of something doesn’t convey a complete understanding of the whole, no matter how perfect the understanding of those aspects – the interconnections between them mean that the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts.

Medically, the term refers to the treatment of a person as a whole, regarding the interplay of conditions, rather than just the symptoms of an illness, specifically incorporating mental and social factors.

So a Holistic NPC is one that is more complete, more rounded, more comprehensive than is normal. Today’s article provides and describes a process for the development of such an NPC.

Clearly this is not something that should be utilized routinely. It promises to be a lot more work and to require a considerably greater effort than most NPCs, and should only be used when that is warranted. My go-to for most NPCs remains the Partial NPC (see Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep).

The good news is that you can feed the results of just about any other NPC-generation process into the Holistic procedure as a starting point.

1. Central Focus

The process starts by defining the central focus of the NPC. This might be a particular ability or professional skillset that is defined by their intended role in an adventure, or within a campaign. It might be a particular personality trait. It might be a particular professional role, or even a specific weakness of personality.

This is the most important element of the character from the point of view of the campaign. It will serve as a focal point around which everything else will revolve. It’s critically important to get it right, and not to choose the first thing that jumps into your head.

I have often found that a singular adjective and a single, specific noun, work best, but that’s not always the case. It’s usually a good starting point, however.

2. Inevitabilities

With almost every central focus, there are traits, skills, and characteristics that come as baggage; these are essential to match the NPC with the assigned role. Sometimes, these are more obvious than at others.

Nuance can be incredibly important in defining something as an inevitable corollary of the central focus. Foe example, if we’re discussing a Priest, “Pious” and “Religious” are not the same thing – one describes a personal philosophy or central belief in a faith, the other refers to the practice of behaviors that are commonly associated with such belief. That practice can be the result of such beliefs, or it can be a cloak, superficial trappings.

3. Manifestations & Consequences

The third step is to take the entirety of the world around the character and contemplate the interactions between that world and that character in three broad areas. The goal is (1) to define the ways in which the focus and the inevitabilities will manifest, and (2) to define the consequences for the character.

Note that so far, what we’re producing is essentially a cardboard cutout of the character defined by the Central Focus. The fact that such variety of focus is possible creates somewhat greater variety of 2-dimensional characters than would otherwise be the case, but be under no illusions – the real effort is still in front of us.

That said, let’s look at those three broad areas.

Background

Background refers to the current status of everything except the character and his family. Everything in the game universe – whether that’s practical and objective, or conceptual, abstract, or subjective.

A “cop” means vastly different things in a street-level superhero campaign, a cosmic thriller, and a post-apocalyptic wilderness.

Before you can place the character, you need to know what these surroundings are, and what they represent within the campaign. What part do they play, and how does this character’s role intersect with them? If there’s anything for which you can honestly say, “It doesn’t”, then that’s an irrelevancy that defines that part of the background as something to ignore so far as this character is concerned. Only relevant background applies, in other words.

Culture

A Culture is not the same thing as a society. Rather, it’s the context within which a society exists. For most characters, there will be a broader culture, and frequently, a number of sub-cultures that are applicable.

What are the expectations of behavior, the general perceptions of such characters, that apply to characters of this particular focus?

Society

Society defines the rules of interaction between individuals – everything from marriage to criminal acts and their punishment.

Again, ignore anything that’s not directly relevant, but annotate this section with anything that does pertain to the character.

Once you have the three broad areas populated with the relevant constituent elements, it’s time to focus on how the character will manifest, and what the consequences will be for the character, for each item listed within each of the three areas.

These are signposts to the character, sometimes useful in and of themselves for defining traits or circumstances, but more important when treated as facets of the whole. The goal is to generate a brief description of that ‘whole’.

An example to get the mental wheels turning over: contemplate an ‘honest cop’ within a society in which the police are generally viewed as lazy and corrupt.

4. History, Family, & Shaping Events

Personality traits don’t emerge from nowhere, career decisions are rarely made flippantly, and it exceptionally rare for someone’s first job to be the same as their current job – even if they still have the same job title.

The goal in this stage of the process is to take every trait, characteristic, and fact determined thus far and trace them back to a causative trigger. There may be a number of steps in between the ultimate cause and the current situation; don’t be satisfied with simple answers. These should be classified into one of three broad phases of life – Childhood & Family; Youth & Education; and Vocation & Career To Date (which includes any vocational training)..

Childhood & Family

Childhood friends, parental figures, other relatives, and family friends, they all normally have some impact on the life of the NPC as a child. Sometimes this impact is a positive one, sometimes it’s negative, and sometimes it’s a mixture of both.

There are two major reactions possible to each: either a guiding force or principle, or rebellion. The greater the negative impacts of alcoholism by a parent, for example, the more powerful a driving force sobriety becomes, for example – that may not mean complete abstinence, it could simply mean a determination to retain self-control.

Youth & Education

Beyond the early formative years, there are the years in which some responsibility are conferred on an individual but they are nevertheless not free to make decisions for themselves in many parts of their life. Western societies tend to label this period as adolescence, and it generally coincides with external role models and life experiences with educators when universal education is a part of the society surrounding the character in their early years.

Fantasy games tend to be set in a more medieval society, in which characters serve as footmen or apprentices. There is frequently an assumption that apprenticing to a trade locks a character into pursuing that trade, or some offshoot of it, and any deviation from that course is traumatic, disruptive, and a personal milestone event.

One of the great takeaways from Magician by Raymond E. Feist was the concept of a pre-apprenticeship, in which youths get shared around as general laborers amongst the different trades so that aptitudes and attitudes can be assessed; those with an affinity for a particular ‘trade’ are then taken on as apprentices within that trade. Each year, any given trade only has so many vacancies to fill, so the naturally gifted tend to get chosen first while the mediocre sweat it out. I’m not suggesting that this system is, or should be, universal; but the need for this (or some equivalent) is so obvious that it should be a central element of the society.

Vocation & Career To Date

What led the character to the profession he or she now holds? What experiences did they have along the way that have shaped their capabilities, attitudes, and reputation? What training did the NPC have, and who delivered it, and how did what the NPC learned shape him or her into the future? What natural gifts did he or she possess that have aided them in this vocation, and what gifts or traits were possessed that occasionally lead them to contemplate some other path in life? Finally, what traits had to be overcome in order to succeed, and how did they learn to do that (if they did).

Once a catalog of formative influences and critical events has been compiled, this step is completed by projecting the character’s life story forward from the critical moment to the present day and the character’s current circumstances.

Some influences play a part in the character’s development and are then superseded by a differing influence, as the character grows as a ‘person’. These mark distinct phases of life for the character, and these are critical in delineating the character’s personal story and their personality. Very few of us do not experience some such moment of transition; some of us are unlucky enough to experience several. The transitions are always moments of great personal growth, and critical to defining the character as they are now.

This approach has the virtue of ensuring consistency within the character’s life story even if the end result appears to be a mass of contradictions.

An Abstract Representation



It can sometimes be helpful to view this stage of the process through a more abstract perspective, so I thought I would offer one as a tool.

The triptych above represents the process as something similar to a spiderweb of straight lines.

Panel 1

The first panel starts with the ‘now’ of the hollow circle (the central focus) at the bottom and traces it back through the character’s past to a critical incident that shaped the character’s decision or destiny to become the central focus. Every time that critical incident caused the character to make a decision, it is represented by a change in direction and a marker that indicates an intermediate stage of development, a personal history milestone.

Panel 2

The second panel starts back at that formative event, and traces other impacts of that and the other secondary milestones. In the process, two personal crisis moments (shown in yellow) are identified, moments when two or more of the character’s values came into conflict.

These are interconnected insofar as the second is a conflict between the consequences of the first and another key aspect of the character’s primary focus. If the character’s path had changed direction at either of these incidents, that’s an example of a “slippery slope” in which an avalanche of past decisions begins to accumulate and will eventually threaten to overwhelm the character.

Note that such an avalanche is not necessarily a negative – it might be a crisis of conscience in which a villain reforms, at least partially. The first crisis might be an act that the NPC was required to perform and that he came to regret; the second is a moment when he second-guessed his duty or task because of the regret. Again, he did whatever it was that he was being paid to do (no change in life-course) but this only compounded the regrets and – no doubt – doubts would begin to emerge as a consequence.

These can be considered secondary elements, subordinate only to the primary focus.

Panel 3

Panel three examines each of the critical moments and whether or not there is a direct consequence of that decision that is unaccounted for. These are often fringe issues to the central focus, and can be considered tertiary to the other manifestations and influences generated in preceding panels.

For the first time, this takes the character beyond the simple cardboard cut-out, exploring the penumbra of the formative decisions of the character’s past and the ramifications of those past decisions on the character’s present.

5. Personal Consequences

Step four defined other aspects of the character’s personality by way of past decisions and formative events. These should all have consequences in one or more areas: Relationships, Financial Status, or Social Status.

What’s more, each of these consequences should also manifest in one or more of the areas of initial development – background, culture, or society.

One of the formative personal events may have led to the character entering an unhappy marriage, for example (a relationship impact) – that could have ramifications on the character’s role within the general campaign background, though that’s relatively unusual; but it is far more likely to have an impact on the character’s role within his culture and society, in the form of obligations and expectations.

Relationships

Relationships include spouses, children, employers, employees, personal contacts, friends, allies, and enemies. Despite the breadth, only those relationships that can be deemed essential to understanding the NPC should be listed, or those which signpost an aspect of the character’s personality or ethos.

These are important because in any investigation of the NPC, these are the indicators that reveal – at least in part – what sort of person the NPC is. Such an investigation might never connect with the events that shaped the character’s thought processes; why they did what they chose to do is not especially relevant, what matters is any impact on future decisions.

Financial

Many decisions will have financial repercussions.

Continuing the unhappy marriage example, it might be that this was necessitated to gain access to a business opportunity. That means that it had a positive effect on the character’s finances as well as the negative effect of sharing any prosperity while the character is married.

Should the marriage strike rocky ground, the financial consequences could be dire economically, or it might be that the character needs to undergo a (presumably bitter) divorce and make a fresh start in order to take advantage of future opportunities. It wouldn’t be the first time that an opportunity steered someone into a personal or professional cull-de-sac.

Social

Many decisions compromise a character’s social engagements, and this is often a factor that is not taken into account when assessing the costs and benefits of a decision. I know one person who got married and was forced to give up RPGs as a result – the wife did not understand them, or what the player got out of them, and made it a choice: her or the games. After a while, she relented to the extent of permitting him to play board games with other people who played RPGs, but he never got back into the hobby, even after they were divorced.

You can never go back again to exactly where you were after events like this, as the example demonstrates. The more traumatic the events, the greater the loss; other social activities tend to expand to fill the resulting free time, and the person undergoes a personal evolution as a result.

The more quickly the reversal takes place, the closer to ‘the way things were’ the character can get. Married in Vegas as the highlight of a drunken weekend? Divorced on the Monday, when you came to your senses? Relatively little impact – unless the new partner makes trouble, of course. Married thirty years earlier? The entanglements ensure that a divorce will be traumatic and expensive.

6. Causes & Contradictions

Step six is to identify and catalog the things that the character believes in, and any contradictions within his persona.

Note that the layout of the graphic emphasizes that these are more removed from the Core Focus of the character concept.

As usual, there are three general subdivisions.

Passions, Addictions, & Interests

What is the character passionate about? What does he do habitually – whether he needs to, or not? What subjects and activities interest him?

These need not have any relationship whatsoever with the central focus of the character. Quite often, the less they relate to that focus, the more noteworthy they are.

I once knew an English major who liked to solve differential equations as a way of ‘loosening up his mind’, distracting himself from the world around him and whatever his personal circumstances were so that he could achieve maximum creativity. He had me write a random equation generator app for his laptop when we were both at University.

My sister loves “True Crime” stories, for no particular reason. They have nothing to do with her career or family. My niece’s favorite color is Purple. No identifiable reason, but it’s a defining characteristic of who she is. My brother and I are both interested in Formula 1, but for very different experiences – I like the tactics and engineering, he likes the excitement and drama. He enjoys going to F1 races as a consequence, while I prefer to watch on television.

Prejudices

Everyone has prejudices, even if they are nothing more than opinions formulated on an encounter with one individual that has been generalized.

Sometimes, these prejudices take the form of a receptiveness, a greater willingness to take a chance that interactions with an individual won’t be a waste of time – My twitter feed shows clear evidence that anyone involved in TTRPGs, Sci-Fi / Fantasy, or Photography / Art is very likely to get a ‘follow’ from me without further inspection; accounts that do not fall into this category are subjected to far more stringent examination.

Another manifestation is a dislike of certain kinds of behavior that the individual considers socially or personally unacceptable – berating a partner in public, for example.

But everyone has prejudices.

Weaknesses & Mistakes

There can be, at first glance, considerable overlap between this section and the other two. ‘Weaknesses’ generally refer to behaviors rather than to “Kryptonites”, if you get what I mean. Someone who can never resist the last slice of cake, or the last little leftover bit of dessert. It’s not an addiction, it’s not something the character obtains deliberately – it’s something that outside circumstances regularly offer them.

‘Mistakes’ also come with a caveat – these don’t include any of the formative events listed in stage 4 of the process, but they do have to be influential on the character or their circumstances. You would have to be a saint not to have made mistakes in the past, whether acknowledged or not.

The other content to be incorporated in this section is anything that stands as an unresolved contradiction to the general nature of the NPC as already described. Someone who is extremely safety-conscious, but loves to drive fast. Someone who is financially fastidious (even miserly) who indulges in collecting something (regardless of cost or monetary worth).

Some people are a bundle of conflicts and contradictions; most are more consistent. But we all have exceptions, hot buttons that override our normal behavior.

7. Ramifications<, Manifestations & Consequences

Of course, everything that got listed in Stage 6 is rooted in the character’s past. So the next logical step is to explore the impact that they have on the character’s present-day personality and circumstances.

The subheadings in this phase map directly onto those from stage 3 – in fact, you can simply expand that section if you want, though I find it more useful to keep them separate, so that stage 3 represents the direct consequences of the Core Focus. If there is ever a contradiction or conflict between two aspects of the character – one in this section and the other in the manifestations / consequences of the core – it’s usually the core that holds sway, perhaps modified slightly.

Just to remind you, those three sub-fields are:

• Background
• Culture
• Society

Their definitions haven’t changed since Stage 3, so I’ll forego repeating them.

8. Correlations: The Origins Of Beliefs

Stage 8 of the process is to take all the entries in the “Causes & Contradictions” category and use them to further populate the “History, Family & Shaping Events” category. What this means will differ depending on the type of content in the “Causes” subcategories.

For “passions” (and “interests”), where did the character first come into contact with the subject? And how did it impact on, and interact with, their other formative events?

A passion for art might have started as a mild interest in drawing, but harsh dictates by a parent who saw it as ‘wasting time’ restricted its expression. What might have been a passing phase or minor sideline grew, through lack of satisfaction, into a more obsessive interest – probably manifesting in a complete different manner to the original, such as being a collector of artworks.

Addictions deal with when the character was first exposed to the substance or practice.

One can argue that Weaknesses were always a part of the character’s makeup, but they have a strong potential to interact with critical decisions, often to the character’s detriment.

Mistakes generally translate into specific incidents in the characters’ past. It’s often not the event of the mistake itself that is significant, however, but the awareness that the character has made a mistake that is important. Nevertheless, it can be useful to incorporate both, with a link connecting the two. Even that impact can be delayed, if the character was not in a phase of life that encouraged or permitted introspection, so there can even be a third step in the causal chain before the original mistake becomes important to the character’s development.

Contradictions can require a deeper consideration – when did they start, when have they contradicted something in the primary makeup, and how was that contradiction resolved without eliminating the contradiction and without it being a formative event critical to the core focus? Sometimes, these answers are easy; sometimes, you will need to look deep into the character’s psychology, and perhaps even conclude that on this subject, they are deluding themselves.

9. Correlations II: Consequences

Of course, once you have new entries in the “History, Family & Shaping Events” category, you need to process these into consequences, in the same way that you did in Stage 4. Since the process is exactly the same, I’ll forego additional details.

10. Interpolations

The interpolations stage is two-fold:

1. Take everything that’s listed in the Personal Consequences space and interpolate connected entries in the Manifestations & Consequences space, and,
2. Take everything that’s listed in either of the Manifestations & Consequences spaces that is not already connected to Personal Consequences and interpolate additional entries in the personal consequences space.

It is these connections that are ultimately the difference between this process and other NPC generation methods. Throughout this procedure, the emphasis has been on how two discrete elements of the emerging character concept interact and relate to each other. Put that together with all the elements of the character, and ensure that the impact on the character is front-and-center, and the end result is a more holistic definition of the character.

In particular, emphasizing the connections ensures that the character is internally consistent, even those elements that are contradictory.

11. Concluding Stage

Of course, it’s not entirely in user-friendly format at this point. You have perhaps a page of conceptual elements, classified and categorized in various subcategories. You’ve ensured that everything correlates and interconnects as it would if you were describing a real person, and documented those correlations and connections in two or three additional pages, also within the same categories and subcategories.

The final step is to take each of these lists and combine them into a brief narrative description. In particular, you want to generate a thumbnail perspective of the character’s past history, of the primary focus and inevitabilities, of the way everything manifests outwardly, and what the personal consequences are for the character.

The result is purely conceptual in nature. It is a road-map to the expression of the character in game mechanics, and – as a general rule of thumb – should override any such mechanics that don’t fit. If the concept demands a character who is a skilled negotiator, with a particular approach to such negotiations that breaks through entrenched positions to get results, and there are no game mechanics for such negotiations, either let the approach always play out in roleplaying terms, or introduce such game mechanics (since it’s clearly a hole in the system).

NEVER let the mechanics restrict or interfere with the character concept that you have so clearly crafted; unless you have been completely myopic and created a Saint or a Devil, your creation will have inbuilt checks and balances, flaws and the potential for misjudgments and errors, and that’s all you need in terms of restriction.

It’s a different story for PCs, where there may need to be game mechanics restrictions as well as conceptual ones; if this process is used for the creation of PCs, the “always play it out” option is off the table, simply because there will always be a gap between the player’s skills and abilities and those of the character that they control.

Postscript: Full-sized Graphic

To fit everything in, this had to be a large graphic (1807 × 1723), and almost 4Mb in size. This in turn made getting everything to be legible when compressed to Campaign Mastery’s display footprint a challenge.

Because the final graphic incorporates everything from all ten stages, I thought it best to overcome the latter problem (as usual) by providing a full-sized version.

to open it in a new tab, from which it can be downloaded – complete with spelling error!

Today I’m going to tell readers about something I’ve been working on a lot over the last few months, because it highlights an important principle – you can usually do a lot more with basic tools and utilities than you think.

A Recurring Pattern

Every now and then we seem to get waves of tools and utilities emerging, as though in support of the premise, “One Task, One Tool for that Task”. It happens in real life, it happens in the world of computer software, and it happens in RPGs.

What usually happens is that someone decides that they need to perform a particular task and either none of their existing tools and utilities will do the job, or none of them will do it in the way that the person wants the job done. So they write a Utility to do that job for them, and then make it available to others.

Eventually, that functionality gets incorporated into a larger application, and the Utility gets abandoned and fades away – if the incorporation is successful. Sometimes, the developer of the larger application can’t do the work cost-effectively or without hitting legal trouble, and they will buy the rights to the Utility from the original developer – creating an incentive for that developer (and others like them) to go write another one.

I wrote about the Office Suite that I use in The Braiding Of Plot Threads, more-or-less in passing. For some reason, it’s not a subject that I’ve written about = maybe because what I use might not help others, or because I have a fairly eclectic selection that’s built up over the years.

I might have to do something to correct that deficit in the near future…

RPG Equivalent

The RPG equivalent is writing a standalone mini-supplement to solve a particular creative need, and offering it either as a free download from somewhere or through someplace like RPGNow. These succeed because they plug a hole in one or more game systems. When a new version of those game systems gets written, the best of these solutions get incorporated into the revised mechanics, or the authors put in place an ‘official fix’ for the hole – either way, the standalone product goes away.

The reality is that people often already have all the tools that they need, they just don’t want to – or have time to – do the work, or they don’t know exactly what their existing tools can do.

The back-story

The players in my superhero campaign have chosen, as their new base of operations, a Mansion in Royal, Arkansas. The process of making this their Home-away-from-home and a functional base of operations is now underway.

Meanwhile, I have been working on implementing their decision into the campaign in various ways, effectively converting the reality of Arkansas as it now is (because that’s what the internet gives me access to) into the fictional post-Ragnarok 1986-era version of Arkansas that exists in the campaign.

I want to admit up-front that there is absolutely nothing stopping me from inventing things ad-hoc as needed – except that spur-of-the-moment creativity is rarely as effective as putting a little time and effort into things in advance.

Purposes

One of the things that I wanted to do is create a sortable, searchable, database of businesses and interesting localities within ‘adventuring range’. The latter is defined by the parameters of this phase of the campaign, and can grow and change in time.

Originally, my intent was simply a list of townships, but it quickly grew from that basic concept. If the PCs needed a set of four different banks in their local vicinity, for example – a need that I both anticipated and that has now materialized within the campaign – having a list of the ‘real’ banks in their local area would save me a lot of work. If they find that they need a particular type of consultant, or a particular chemical, or whatever, I wanted to know where they might look for that resource.

And, I wanted a spur to my creativity in coming up with adventures.

Data Acquisition

Before you can create a database, you need the information with which to populate it. Of course, you need a preliminary design so that you know what information to look for, too!

In this case, what I wanted was a list of targets.

Basic Parameters

Operations of the PCs meant that road distance and driving time were all that would be relevant for the most local business operations – Royal and the nearby Hot Springs, basically. Outside of that, I would also need straight-line distances.

Anything and everything within about 100 miles of their base of operations was fair game.

I decided fairly quickly to exclude churches, temples, and the like, because none of the PCs is especially religious and most of the adventures involving such were becoming stale. But businesses and retail operations and landmarks were fair game. Later, I revised those parameters to specifically include graveyards, because I had a specific idea regarding them. I also excluded hotels and wedding venues and the like; the key intention was to list the suppliers that the PCs might want to buy from, and the services that they might want to employ.

Scope

Arkansas is a little like medieval France – some bigger places (but none as big as you would expect) and a huge number of much smaller places. In fact, if you count suburbs as ‘towns’, you can get the sense that the average gap between such is 1 every 10 miles or so. If each location has between 3 and 50 businesses, how many does the zone of interest run to? How big a list are we talking about?

What I’ve essentially defined is a circle 100 miles in radius, with an excluded zone in the middle of 10-16 miles radius, and what I want to know is how many more 10-mile radius circles I can fit into it. Multiplying the answer by 3-to-50 gives some indication of how many entries to expect.



100 miles radius = 100 × 100 × π = roughly 31,416 square miles.

10 miles radius = 10 × 10 × π = roughly 314.2 square miles.

16 miles radius = 16 × 16 × π = roughly 804.3 square miles.

Difference = 30611.7 to 31101.8 square miles.

Divide by 314.2 = 97.4 to 98.987 localities. Call it 100 for convenience.

Multiply that by the estimate of 3-50 data points per locality, and you get 300-5,000 entries.

But this is very sensitive to the initial inputs, especially the gap between localities and the number of entries per locality. If the true gap is, say, 8.5 miles, then I get 30611.7 to 31101.8 divided by 226.98 square miles = 135 to 137 localities. Call it 136. If the number of data points per locality is more like 10-100, that’s 1,360-to-13,600 entries.

Realistically, I expected 1000-2000 entries.

Approach

The basic approach to acquiring those entries was simple: Call up Google maps, locate the position selected for the Mansion, measure out a straight-line distance of 141 miles (a right-angle triangle with sides 100 miles long gives a hypotenuse of 141) at a 45-degree angle to get the corners of a box that’s 200×200 and centered on the zero point. Then start listing localities.

Once I have that list, I can zoom in on each and create a list of the entries of interest.

Map

As always, shrinking a full-screen capture down to fit the available visible space at Campaign Mastery remains a challenge, especially if legibility is to be retained. The top part of the image shows the whole window, resized to fit; the bottom is an extract from the source at something close to actual size.

Creating the list is just a matter of being organized and systematic.

List

I ended up with 343 localities, and that’s without treating suburbs independently. That’s very bad news because it means that the average gap is nowhere near 10 miles. Doing the reverse calculation – square root of (31101.8 / 343 / π), I get 5.372 miles between localities.

But that’s okay – if the number of localities is 2-3 times as many as expected, I can simply list only 1/2 to 1/3 of the entries for each location. A little more selectivity and a little more ruthlessness would keep the job to manageable proportions, or so I thought to myself.

Here’s a sample of what the resulting list looks like:

Chappell Armory (Army Reservist Training Center)
Camp Joseph T. Robinson aka Camp Robinson (Army Reservist Military Base)
Arkansas Storage Centers (Self-Storage Facility)
Smackies Grill (Discount Restaurant)
S&V Renovations LLC (Remodeller)
Family Dollar, 5613 MacArthur Dr (Discount Store)
Levy Concrete, 5613 MacArthur Dr, Crystal Hill (Discount Shop)
Dollar General, 6700 MacArthur Dr, Crystal Springs (Discount Shop)
Two Men and A Truck, 4125 Crystal Hill Rd Ste A, Crystal Hill (Removalist)
Smith Campers (Campervan and Caravan Dealer)
Nicky Houses Cleaning (Janitorial Services)
Ed’s Corvette Body Repair (Auto Body Shop)
Hatchet Jacks Sport Shop (Fishing Store)
Taco Mexicano (Fast Food – Mexican)
Skyline Automotive (Car Repairs & Maintenance Service)
Laffert Equipment Manufacturing (Automated Systems Manufacturer)

After each entry, using copy-and-paste, I then added a line for the data to be gathered:

    x miles, x min, x km (x miles) straight line

I ended up with about 1200 entries to process. Sounds good, right? Well within estimates.

You may also observe that I added a description of what the business was or did. In a lot of cases, these were obvious; in others, I was greatly assisted by the fact that if you hover your pointer over an entry, a pop-up appears within the map that contains additional information about the place – sometimes an address, sometimes a photo, sometimes a description. I soon came to the conclusion that most of these were provided by the business themselves. I have an illustration of that, but I’ll save it for a few minutes.

Map Scale

I was, in fact, close to completing the task when I had my graveyard brainwave and decided to add them to the list. After all, how many could there be?

If those sound like famous last words…. The reality was that I had to zoom in closer than the 1km-per-inch that I had been using in order to see most of the cemeteries on the map.

And when you do that, you discover that there’s a lot of businesses that simply aren’t shown until you get in close enough. Important businesses, ones that should be included.

Long-story-short: The list of entries now has 2837 items. I keep finding more to add. About 300 of the additions are cemeteries, and about 1500 are places that I overlooked on my initial sweep, by using too small a scale. Ultimately, I went to a scale of about 200 ft per inch outside of urban areas, and 100 ft per inch within urban areas. This still won’t show everything – most shopping centers are represented by only one or two entries out of maybe 50 stores – but it’s good enough.

Data Processing

But that lay awaiting discover in my future as work got underway.

Basic Tools

I want to make it clear how basic the tools were – pencil and paper to start with, then a text editor (the same one that I use to write adventures and Campaign Mastery articles), and my web browser.

Windows Arrangement

The screen capture above shows the basic layout that I employed: text editor on one side, at a fairly narrow width, and browser window with map and navigation panel on the other. I had no control over how much screen real estate Google Maps used for it’s navigation panel (visible on the left-hand-side of the browser), I needed a reasonable amount of space for the map itself, and whatever was left was used by the text editor.

I quickly discovered that if I chose a text-editor-window that left the last “x” – the one in (x miles straight line) – at the end of a line, I could simply use the “end” key to get there, and repetition made even the smallest time saving worth the effort.

I had three additional factors to contemplate as I went.

Correcting for 1986

Back in ’86, there were nowhere near as many foreign-car dealerships. There were a few, but nothing like there are now. There were genetic testing labs, and medical imaging was far more primitive – and less common. Instead, we had video rentals, and record stores, and so on. Every time I found a business that looked like it didn’t fit the 1986 era, I would replace it with something era-appropriate that wasn’t around in modern times. Even so, stores like Blockbuster are probably under-represented.

Correcting for Campaign

I also had a few business operations that never existed in real life but that either had been, or should be, established within the campaign. Entirely fictitious creations, but I actively looked for ways to insert the Campaign Continuity into the database.

I added things like a Kzin spaceport / launch & landing facility, for example, and thought about crew needs and human proclivities – that’s why one fast food joint of a type that seemed over-represented became “Cardinal Landing”, offering Americanized Kzin cuisine for the curious and the real thing for the benefit of the crews, and a real pet grooming establishment became “Kitty Pride Fur & Grooming”, a Kzin Grooming and Clan-marking establishment, and a generic gift store became “Kzin Imports” – no prizes for guessing what they sell, both wholesale and retail!

Rebuilding after Ragnarok would have created considerably more builders, electricians, plumbers, etc, so I deliberately over-represented them on my list. But most of these would now be starting to struggle – most of the rebuilding has now been done, and the world is starting to return to whatever passes for “normal” in a world in which Ragnarok happens – and is stopped by superheros.

Sparks Of Inspiration

The third and final factor to be taken into account are outright inspirations. A business that didn’t exist in the fictional 1986 could become something far stranger – sometimes with a name change, sometimes not – simply because it offered opportunities for adventures. A “Geo-chemical & Genetics Research Lab,” for example. An “Exotic Meat Butchery”. A “Genetic Engineering Company”. And so on.

For example, when I went to screen-capture one of Google Maps’ popup descriptions – I wanted one that was as complete as possible – I came across this:

“Omega Technical Violator Center”, described as a Prison. It’s NOT on my list of entries (yet).

I can well imaging that in real life this is a location for low-risk short-term prisoners (unpaid parking tickets, anyone?) – I didn’t bother to look it up. Because the name itself, and the descriptor as a “Prison” is suggestive of something completely different, in a superhero world. This is now a high-tech super-max prison for supervillains, a very different interpretation of the term “Technical”!

Doing The Research

So I took the whole-of-screen capture presented earlier and added some graphics to highlight the process of completing the data capture.

Don’t worry, I’ll be zooming in and going into specifics – this is just to give you an idea of the overall workflow, showing it to be a six-step process.

I’ve divided the work up into full-page blocks that take between 60 and 90 minutes to complete. If you look closely at the Text Editor, just after the blank space, you might just be able to make out a “25” – that tells me that I have 25 full-screen lists to go.

And if you look at the Greeked-text whole-of-document panel on the right-hand-side of the editor, you can get a sense of just how big that 25 pages is, compares to the work already done (perhaps that should be, “how much has already been done, compared to that 25 pages”).

Acquisition, Step 1

Step one only has to be done at the start of a session.

I highlight the address of the mansion in the text editor, copy it, and paste it into the Map Search.

Acquisition, Step 2



For the first item, I then add ” to ” and then the name of the business to be located to the search. Google maps will then present me with one or more alternative interpretations; I pick the right one.

The search box splits into two, one for the start point and one for the chosen destination, both already filled in for you.

On subsequent searches, the two separate search panels already exist, so I just have to click in the box and over-type what’s there with the next name.

Sometimes, you have to specify the street number and name (if they are known) or the locality (if known) in order to find the business. I didn’t know that at first, but once I discovered the fact, I started noting the (incomplete) address when I could get it from the hover-over described above – that’s why some of the unprocessed entries already have the location listed.

Acquisition, Step 3

Google also (usually) adds the address, which I then type after the name in the text editor.

Google is not always very good at getting the locality right – it defaults to the nearest big settlement, not the actual location. The same is true of suburbs of larger cities. I list the locality both ways, putting the real locality in brackets after the “map search” answer.

Acquisition, Step 4

To measure the straight-line distance for the first time, you have to right-click on the start location, and then somewhere near the end location. I zoom in to the 50′ scale (which is probably more accuracy than needed) in order to do so, then zoom back out to place the destination marker.



Zooming in to the destination point indicated by Google’s trip calculator, I can then click-and-drag the straight line destination marker to that it coincides – moving (3) to (4) on the captured image above.

Thereafter, when you change the destination (in Step 2), the straight-line-destination marker stays where it is, and it has to be shifted again, while the start-position marker remains unchanged. So this part of the process gets quicker for subsequent searches.

Acquisition, Step 5



From the information panel on the left of the map, I locate the distance and travel time, and enter these as the first two ’empty’ x items on the blank in the text editor.

That sometimes entails changing the route offered by Google, it doesn’t always make the best choice.

It also requires converting the hours-and-minutes time that often results into just minutes by adding 60 or 120 or whatever.

Acquisition, Step 6

The last step is to look at the “measure distance” box at the bottom of the map and extract the Total distance.

Because I’m in Australia, where km are the default, the distance is shown in km with the miles in brackets afterwards; I would presume that if I lived in the US, it would only show miles, or it might show miles and put kilometers in brackets afterwards.



This is shown to far greater precision than I need; I round off to the nearest 0.5 km / 0.5 miles. This means that I can get a little quick and sloppy in position the start and end points of the straight-line measuring tool, greater speeding up the whole process.

Why do I need the straight line distance at all?

The PCs are going to get to “superhero emergencies” by flying.

Flight speed in the hero system is given in inches per second, and there are 2m in every Hero-inch. And, of course, you fly in a straight line, instead of following the sometimes convoluted road routes.

Strictly speaking, I don’t need the distance in miles at all – but it will provide a convenient reliability check on the quality of data once it gets entered into the database.

Problems & Solutions

Google Maps is sometimes very broad in its interpretations of the name you’ve searched for, but there are times when the slightest error in punctuation or capitalization means that your search won’t be found.

So I’ve taken extra care to match what I’ve listed in the text editor to the exact spelling shown on the map. But minuscule errors, like leaving (or adding) a full stop after “Inc” or a comma between business name and “LLC” can make all the difference in the world.

SOLUTION #1
Sometimes, though, all of the above is not enough. When that happens, I’ll try a sensible best-guess for the locality, on the presumption that I’m more likely to list two things that are close to each other, sequentially. That’s best-guess #1.

Best Guess #2 is the actual locality of the previous destination, (because Google is inconsistent). Best Guess #3 is always Hot Springs because I went over the local area with a finer comb. Best Guess #4 is Little Rock because it’s biggest.

SOLUTION #2
If that doesn’t work, I’ll cautiously try some obvious variations on the spelling, as described above.

SOLUTION #3
If I’m still coming up dry, it’s time for desperate measures. Option #1 is to get rid of the measure distance box and clear the destination field; doing that lets me click on a business name on the map and Google will decide that’s where I want to go, and fill in the destination search box appropriately. But for that to work, I need to find it on the map, and that’s sometimes easier said and done. I won’t spend too much time searching, because….

SOLUTION #4
Google maps is incredibly efficient at removing businesses if they go out of business, or at processing changes of name. And a gap of one-to-eight weeks between my listing it as an entry to search is more than enough for this to happen. So my last resort is to open a new tab with a regular Google search, because other sites – like Facebook – are slower to take down old information. Once I have the street address, I can enter that into the search panel, ignoring the business name, and the problem is solved.

SOLUTION #5
My absolute last resort is to treat the location as “lost” – set it aside and just keep an eye open for it as I continue on.

Frequency Of Problems
It’s near-certain that any given page will have at least one or two cases where I have to resort to ‘stronger measures’ than the quick-and-easy Google Maps search. These techniques are in the sequence presented because I’ve found which ones are the least work for the maximum likelihood of getting a result.

End-Of-Page

Google Maps appears to chew up a huge amount of disk cache. By the time I’ve done about a page-and-a-half, Chrome will start throwing up “Not Responding” messages that will grow progressively worse; by the time I’ve done two pages, the browser is essentially frozen.

The only solution to this problem (aside from more memory) is to close the browser and then start again. So that’s exactly what I do. But first – just in case something goes wrong – I’ll save the updated text file!

And before I do that, I’ll cut and paste the page that’s been done to the end of the list of completed work, so that the line with the mansion address is near the head of the next page to be processed.

The List After

After about an hour’s work, I’ll have a page of completed results. For the sake of being complete, here’s the most recently-completed set of results.

Burger King, 4227 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Crystal Hill) (Fast Food)
    71.9 miles, 69 min, 94 km (58 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila (Bowman), #A1, 1011 S Bowman Road, Little Rock (Brodie Creek) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    63.5 miles, 63 min, 80.5 km (50 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila, 2000 S University Ave, Little Rock (Boyle Park) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    66.5 miles, 64 min, 85.5 km (53 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila (Cantrell), 14524 Cantrell Rd, Little Rock (Woodland Heights) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    68.7 miles, 67 min, 80.5 km (50 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila (Sherwood), 8605 AR-107, Sherwood (Apple Valley) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    74.7 miles, 75 min, 99 km (61.5 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila (Maumelle), 9847 Maumelle Blvd, North Little Rock (Maumelle) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    69.7 miles, 66 min, 86.5 km (54 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila, 4304 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historic District) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    71.8 miles, 69 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
McDonalds, 4422 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historical District) (Fast Food)
    72.0 miles, 69 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen, 4704 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historical District) (Restaurant – Chicken / Cajun)
    72.0 miles, 70 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Kroger, 4401 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historic District) (Grocery Store)
    72.0 miles, 70 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Edwards Cash Saver, 3801 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historic District) (Grocery Store)
    72.1 miles, 69 min, 93.5 km (58 miles) straight line
El Paisano, 406 W 47th St, North Little Rock (Grocery Store)
    72.2 miles, 69 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Arvest Bank, 4724 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historic District) (Bank)
    72.3 miles, 70 min, 94.5 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Hogg’s Meat Market, 3901 John F. Kennedy Blvd, North Little Rock (Lakewood) (Butcher Shop)
    71.1 miles, 68 min, 94.5 km (59 miles) straight line
Bargain Brothers NLR, 4135 John F. Kennedy Blvd, North Little Rock (Lakewood) (Discount Store)
    71.4 miles, 69 min, 94.5 km (59 miles) straight line
Hobby Lobby, 4701 John F. Kennedy Blvd, North Little Rock (Lakewood) (Craft Store)
    71.8 miles, 69 min, 95.5 km (59 miles) straight line
Camp Robinson Mountain Biking, North Little Rock (Crystal Hill) (Sports Venue)
    76.7 miles, 78 min, 92.5 km (57.5 miles) straight line
Pi Roofing and Construction, 6109 Remount Rd, North Little Rock (Indian Hills) (Roofing Contractor)
    73.2 miles, 71 min, 95 km (59 miles) straight line
Bungalow Bills, 22 Remount Rd, North Little Rock (Indian Hills) (Novelty Store)
    73.5 miles, 72 min, 95 km (59 miles) straight line
B.E.E. Promotional Products, 7000 Remount Rd, North Little Rock (Indian Hills) (Gimmick Manufacturer)
    73.8 miles, 72 min, 95.5 km (59.3 miles) straight line
US Army Reserve Center, 8000 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Crystal Hill) (Government Office)
    74.3 miles, 74 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line

Data Entry

For obvious reasons, I haven’t seriously started on the data entry stage. But I have started work on the database that I’ll be using.

The Database

This takes the form of a spreadsheet, because the easiest way of actually using the results is to sort the table contents by different columns, and the results can be used directly and immediately – and updated instantly.

There are 21 fields and sub-fields in the design.

Entry Number

Entry Variation – see note 1 below.

Name
Address – doesn’t include locality.
Google Locality – see note 2 below.
Actual Locality
Type – see note 3 below
Dist to near outskirts by Road (miles) – see note 4 below
Driving Time w/out stops (min)
Est. breaks (min) – Calculated automatically – see note 5 below
Time Zone Adjust (hrs) – see note 6 below
Net travel time by Car

(min) – Calculated automatically by adding breaks and driving time.
(hrs, min) – Calculated automatically by dividing the travel time by 60 and using a different number format.

Direct distance to same point

(km)
(miles)

Flight Time with Time Zone adjust – see note 7 below

(ST B s-sonic, min)
(ST B s-sonic stealth, min)
(ST B noncom, min)
(ST B noncom stealth, min)
(ST B evasive) (min)
(ST B evasive stealth) (min)

Notes – see note 8 below

Notes

[1]

Sometimes there are two or more alternative routes of significance. Most of the time, I’ll just measure the fastest/most direct, but where there’s a variation, a number will be put into this field.

[2]

Only present to permit the address to be located again using Google Maps.

[3]

I’ve tried hard to be consistent, but already know that I’ve failed spectacularly in this respect. But by sorting on this field, and using down copy, I can perform mass-entry editing to fix that. I was originally going to put this information into the Notes – and skip it when it was obvious, eg “Lanais Funeral Home” – anyone want to guess what the service they provide is?.

[4]

I want to briefly comment on the “Near Outskirts” specification. Some communities are tiny, some are huge. I deliberately targeted the nearest ‘city limits’ rather than the Google Maps default (somewhere in the middle).

It will be renamed for the business / specific sub-table.

[5]

Standard practice of the PCs is to stop for 5 minutes every full hour – except when they reach their destination.

[6]

I’ve also done a list of other significant cities in the US, which will be extended as more become relevant, and a very selective list of international locations which might become relevant if the PCs do something they aren’t supposed to. These will be put in a separate sub-table with the appropriate adjustments for time zone noted in this field.

[7]

The character providing ‘transport’ for the group, St Barbara (operating under the name ‘Nightshade’ in this sub-campaign) has several flying modes. This set of fields automatically calculates the travel time in these different modes.

The modes are

– Supersonic (100 km in 1.62 min = 3704 kph)
– Supersonic Stealth (100 km in 6.48 min = 926 kph)
– Non-combat (100 km in 16.67 min = 360 kph)
– Non-combat Stealth (100 km in 50 min = 120 kph)
– Evasive (100 km in 100 min = 60 kph)
– Evasive, Stealth (100 km in 200 min = 30 kph)

Date becomes Information

The whole point of this exercise is to generate information that can be used by players and GM alike. They may be at DeBarrie and decide they need sacks of cement – where’s the nearest place to get some?

The data entered into the table becomes information when it has meaning attached to it. Often, that meaning is relative to other related entries. “Where’s the nearest Demolitions expert? The nearest Doctor?” – and so on.

This meaning is conferred by sorting the information in the table. Sometimes, a sort can be ad-hoc, but I actually think that duplicating the tables and doing semi-permanent sorts is the best way to go. Or maybe I’ll do a sort and save the results as a PDF.

Already, I have 8 Useful ways to sort the information.

1. Locality, Type of business, Distance, Name, Address

What’s at a location. All the businesses in a given locality, grouped by type, in sequence of distance i.e. flying time. If there are multiple examples eg Fast Food restaurants all the same distance away, they are listed alphabetically.

2. Locality, Name, Type, Distance, Address

What’s at a location, 2. This is a basic business directory.

3. Distance, Type, Locality, Name, Address

‘What’s nearby?” Note that really local businesses will have no Straight-line Distance information because the PCs aren’t supposed to fly to them.

Process Flaw

In theory, since the group will be driving to a nearby secret location and flying from there to avoid risking their secret identities I should have been measuring distance from that departure point. Except that they will only be doing so in daylight, and will forego it if the emergency is serious enough.

What’s more, if their destination is in the right direction, this error will have comparably little effect on the total. It is most significant when they drive one way and then fly back the way they came.

With all that in mind, and remembering that the drive time to the secret location is only about 10 minutes (less if they speed), the resulting error seemed relatively negligible, and not worth the effort of taking into account. But it is a flaw in the process, and one that I might eventually be able to use against the PCs!

4. Drive Time, Locality, Type, Name, Address

A variation on “What’s Nearby” that takes into account road quality and focuses on communities as a whole – “where’s the nearest town with a dentist?”. I will probably stratify this into time bands – <3 min, 3-10 min, 10-20 min, 20-30 min, 30-45 min, 45-60 min, 60-90 min, >90 min.

5. Drive Time, Type, Locality, Name, Address

A variation on “What’s Nearby” that focuses on type of business. Stratified as above.

7. Type Of Business, Locality, Name, Address

List every builder in the state, in order of where they are – that’s achieved by loading this sort and scrolling through to “builder”.It relies on consistency of nomenclature in classifying businesses to work, though.

8. Name, Locality, Type

Finally, when you’re looking for somewhere specific, this is the list of value.

There may be others, or refinements to these. They are so easy to produce that if something proves useful, I can generate it ad-hoc and keep it forever. And if one of these proves less useful, it can be replaced or simply deleted.

The key point is that I don’t want to have to enter new entries multiple times. One master file that gets resorted is a lot less upkeep!

The Lesson To Learn

This entire process uses only basic tools – a browser, google maps, a text editor, a table, table sort functions, and maybe PDF export function.

In other words, a browser, text editor, and office suite.

I could search Google for weeks and not find what I’m looking for simply because that relies on other people doing the hard work for me.

What we get out of it

For the next few weeks, game time, the plan is for the PCs to head for a randomly chosen location and do superheroic things as opportunity presents – and just get to know the place until it knocks.

As a planning tool, the right type of sorted list will be invaluable. And, if there’s no inspiration in sight, the entire outing can be hand-waved. So they get more adventure, and I get less ongoing work, and sources of inspiration.

Generalizing

As I wrote at the start of this article, the general principle applies in all sorts of ways.

Let’s take a D&D example, just for some variety.

You could buy a supplement – “99 Swamp Encounters”, a simple table listing things that you might encounter. The results are likely to be fairly generic and you might well commit to something only to draw a blank on the specifics, or have the players not be interested.

Or you could have a list of the various monsters and an entry for each terrain in which they are common, and then sort it. You could add in other monster supplements from other publishers – that requires adding a field that lists the source, and – to be truly convenient, the page number.

You can modify and home-brew the official data to fit your campaign world.

And that’s only a direct replication of the core concept.

Further Generalizing

So let’s look beyond it. I can’t present the chart below in legible form without ruining a forthcoming adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign.

Fortunately, I have a version without labels and other tell-tales. It took me about 4½ hours to create AND fully populate – using the draw function in my Office Suite, a part of the package that I had never used before.

Once I had the structure, I added some blocks of color and a temporary background – and that’s included in that 4½ hours, too.

That’s a ferocious learning curve!

In the past, I’ve looked for an online diagram generator, or even downloaded and installed software just for the purpose. But everything needed was already there.

What else can my Office Suite do? I use a fraction (about 1/2) of its modules – Writer, Spreadsheet, now Draw. What else is in there? What functions are hidden from view in menus and sub-menus?

What else can your basic utilities do for you? Maybe a sortable list of every NPC ever to appear in your campaign, for example?

I’ve clearly decided to push on and get this trilogy of posts out of the way before interrupting the series for another break.

As usual, because this is a direct continuation of what’s already been posted, I’m going to skip the usual preamble, so make sure that you have read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 first.

But before I dive headlong into it, there are a couple of Kickstarters that are worth mentioning.

First up, and closing early next week, is The Geologist’s Primer by Anna Urbanek, with additional content by Jakub Wisz.

A massive 360-page “illustrated guide to Magical gems, rocks and metals – Gem Folklore, Magic & Occult Magic Item Recipes, Game Master’s Tools” – and more.

Click the image to visit the Kickstarter Page.

System-agnostic, the list of content inclusions is quite comprehensive; “Each entry in the Geologist’s Primer provides basic geological information, notes on where to find and how to extract these materials, along with their industrial, decorative, magical, and sometimes even culinary properties. Each entry also includes a short, handy description. So if you’re just browsing for information, you won’t have to read through pages of text!”

Click the image to open the Kickstarter page.

The example pages look fantastic, and the utility of this as a reference work amply justifies backing it. Note that most of the stretch goals that have been unlocked so far have created Add-ons which have to be added to your order when you back the project.

This project was fully-funded within 5 minutes of launch and has currently raised more than $430,000 toward it’s $10K initial goal, so it’s as sure of delivering as any Kickstarter ever can be. Time is running out, with 2/3 of the funding window already closed, so if you are interested, the time to dive in is now.

The PDF-only option is a relatively-affordable $20, but I put my money down on the hardcover, costing $50 (I briefly considered the US$80 deluxe edition, but my budget wouldn’t stretch that far).

The scale of the public response shows quite clearly that there is a significant level of demand for this product, so I’m quite sure that it will interest some of you out there!

One down! Here’s the second serve:

I snuck this photo out of the campaign preview I was sent. But I won’t tell if you don’t! Click it to visit the Kickstarter Page (once it’s live).

Next, and launching (if all goes according to plan) later this week, there’s some newly-designed dungeon tiles and 3D printed accessories that are sure to interest some of my regular readers.

Mad Wizard’s Hall provides “Pre-painted wooden tiles, doors, columns, and traps for any fantasy tabletop RPG and miniatures games”.

These look great, and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. There’s a free print-for-yourself sampler, and 341 people have subscribed to be notified on launch already, so it’s very likely to get up.

These are the first major outing for an indy designer hailing from Kipeda, Lithuania.

Yes, Lithuania – talk about gaming having a global reach! So to welcome Ilya into the pro gaming fold, you should at least consider backing his project!

Okay, with the decks cleared, lets get back to business!

The Space Race

It’s fair to say that the Space Race was the single most transformative economic event series within the twentieth century – and in a period that includes two world wars and the Great Depression, that’s saying something.

Entirely separate from the outcome and spin-offs, and the space industry itself (addressed separately below), there’s the direct investment – Project Mercury was $2.57 billion in 2021 money; Project Gemini, $8.2 billion in inflation-corrected currency; and Apollo $178 billion in 2022 money.

That adds up to (roughly) 189 billion (corrected) dollars in direct investment in the research, engineering, and manufacturing capabilities of the US. Even had the project failed, it’s hard to see that not having a massive economic payoff in the long run.

Nationalism Vs Progress

The roots of the Space Race run deep, and branch off into unexpected sociological domains. One of the strangest is the complete 180°-reversal in public perceptions that followed.

When the trilogy of space programs began, supporting them was very jingoistic; there was a sense of direct confrontation with the advance elements of the Enemy, and failure to support the space program was viewed as ‘unpatriotic’.

As soon as the Apollo program succeeded with Apollo 11, that began to change, and quite rapidly. Space exploration was immediately and increasingly subject to harsh budgetary constraints and the catch-cry (paraphrased) was ‘there are more important priorities here on earth’.

Poor Salesmanship

To be fair, NASA did a very poor job of selling the economic value of their achievements, and still do. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, so it’s entirely possible that the decline in American manufacturing capabilities mirrors the retreat from investment in space technologies entirely by coincidence.

But the list of sciences and technologies that got a big boost out of the Space Race reads like a comprehensive list of human technological and social achievements. And that’s without the spin-offs and indirect benefits. We’re talking everything from computer technology to materials science and all points in between.

Softer subjects also benefited – there was so much written about the space program that literature itself had to evolve. There were so many creative artists in other fields that drew inspiration from the projects that whole new fields and styles began to manifest. And manufacturers were quick to learn that if you slapped “Astro-” onto the name of a product, or established some connection with the space program (however tenuous), sales went through the roof.

Social Antagonism

The post-Apollo shift defined a new social antagonism between the interests of Nationalism and those of Research. Suddenly, research grant applications had to justify their funding requests in terms of concrete benefits, and you can’t run research efficiently along such lines; the only guaranteed outcome of research is that you’ll have the chance to learn something. What that something might be, and how it might translate into economic and social benefits, is completely unpredictable.

From a modern perspective, it’s easy to cast this as an opening skirmish in the political wars between progressives and conservatives, but that’s an oversimplification, in my view; NASA simply failed to plan for Apollo’s success, taking their funding for granted, as I have explained in earlier sections of this article.

That failure is what opened the door for those forces of economic management that wanted to re-prioritize and cut expenditure. These were politicians who saw only the immediate / short-term goal of “Beat The Russians” and not the longer-term benefits to society, and NASA failed to educate them about the longer-term gains. I’m quite sure that they tried, but on this mission, they failed.

The demand for practical research outcomes to justify investment became a characteristic of the remainder of the 20th century and still lingers today to a large extent. It became part of the economic and social infrastructure of the western world, a fundamental assumption of society, thereafter.

Progress Vs Service

Increased funding for social programs was often used as a justification for winding back investment in the space program, and that had the flow-on effect of painting those two elements of society into an antagonistic relationship.

Increasingly, they were seen as competing for shrinking slices of the available resources.

The attitudes engendered were pernicious, and spread into a perception that funding of research stole money from the delivery of services as politicians employed divide-and-conquer approaches to enable a growth in their personal power.

There is a key sequence in The Distinguished Gentleman, the political comedy starring Eddie Murphy in one of the best-written roles of his career (link is to a Double-feature DVD set with Trading Places, his other great role in this sphere. I get a small commission if you buy).

Murphy’s character is meeting lobbyist Olaf Anderson who sounds him out on the choices that he has on various policy perspectives so that he can know which lobby groups he can direct funding from into Murphy’s reelection campaign. Olaf doesn’t care which position Murphy takes; if he chooses a position in favor of a policy, group “A” will give him money, if he opposes it, group “B” will do so. And, either way, Olaf remains the Kingmaker and gets his slice of the pie from both sides.

While a cynical exaggeration, this explanation for why nothing ever gets done in government save for politicians feathering their own nests still resonates. Systemic corruption by lobbyists continues to handicap the political system of many nations; only the form varies.

The key point in this context is that artificially created competitions for funding set different lobby groups into antagonistic positions which can let the orchestrators play one off against the other, to the benefit of the orchestrator.

Service Vs Profit

The increasing emphasis on environmental regulation and protection was always described in terms of the public benefit that would (and did) result. That this regulation ate into the ability of a given operation to generate the maximum possible profits created another of these antagonisms, in which the corporate sector increasingly focused on the short-term over the long term and the immediate benefit over the short-term.

There is little doubt that the same forces which antagonized research from service delivery also encouraged this perspective, but it was all an outgrowth of the more general government vs business disharmony that had existed since the end of the Second World War.

Three Rivalries

These three rivalries, manifestations of deeper political philosophies and personal greed and altruism, became increasingly strident as the Pre-Digital era neared its end.

There are those who would argue that they did not reach their most extreme levels of conflict until the 1980s, but I think of these trends as more of a parabolic arc; the impetus pushing these agendas begins to tail off at the end of this era but momentum pushes the conflicts to greater extremes before the social perspectives responsible begin changing course.

Any campaign set in this time period needs to keep the three rivalries in mind, and GMs should remember that there will be forces on all sides who will resent and resist any efforts to change the status quo – sometimes from the best of intentions, sometimes for more venal reasons, and sometimes out of pure self-interest.

Alliances are short-term, extremely focused, and unreliable. There are too many social and political forces pulling these “special interest groups” apart for them to last very long.

Very Strange Fruit

Getting back to the Space Race, the legacies of the Apollo program and its predecessors were more significant indirectly than they ever were directly. In order to make Apollo work, industries needed to learn to do new things, and they often found those lessons applicable in other areas and new products.

For example, the adhesives industry was revolutionized by the space program; it wasn’t so much the adhesives needed for space applications as it was taking the failed experiments along the way to those products and turning them into something useful (and profitable).

Computers and Communications and Satellite weather maps often get the headline billing when discussing Space Race spin-offs, but the technological ramifications and confluences run much deeper, and include artificial limbs, scratch-resistant lenses, insulin pumps, firefighting equipment, automation, water filters, sports shoes, long-life tires, freeze-dried food, ear thermometers, vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, LEDs, pens, medical imaging and diagnostic technology, and (of course) Velcro!

Every new product creates new employment and new manufacturing needs, new marketing requirements, new or augmented distribution channels, new demands on income, and new prosperity.

Despite the high price, the economic benefits were an ongoing contributor to the global economy that far outweighed the costs.

Tech Briefing: Miniaturization

One of the biggest forms of technological progress to result from the space race was miniaturization of electronic components. While no more than half of this takes place in the pre-digital era, it’s worth looking at the totality, at least briefly, because the beginnings of this process set the foundations for the era to follow as well as impacting the available technology throughout the part of the era that follows WWII.

Beginnings

Vacuum tubes were developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The simplest and most common examples were the humble light globe.

Vacuum Tubes of greater sophistication are delicate, expensive, and fragile. Glass-sealed, air slowly leaks into the vacuum sealed within and destroys their effectiveness. Some could last for many years, and some could die a very quick death, depending on the quality of manufacture and the complexity (amongst many other factors) – but quality always costs.

They are large, and heavy, and power-hungry.

Worse still, they are horribly inefficient, wasting a lot of the energy fed into them as light and heat. Light could be lived with, but heat distorts glass and can render the technology stone dead.

Early computers needed significant cooling in order to function, and this could easily double the cost of an installation.

Vacuum Tubes to Transistors

Vacuum Tubes made digital computers possible, but not practical. So many of them were required that the director of IBM, in the 1950s, famously predicted a total global market of five or six computers.

The first transistor was invented in 1947. Discrete components mounted individually on a circuit board, they were soon 1/100th the size of a Vacuum Tube equivalent, consumed 1/100th the power (or less), and wasted 1/20th as much of that power (or less). TV sets went from being a large and bulky cabinet to being portable devices, despite still relying on a vacuum tube for the television display.

They were more reliable, more robust, less expensive, less expensive to operate, and much more compact.

The improved electrical requirements also meant that power supplies could be made smaller and more reliable.

All this meant that more circuits could be squeezed into a given space, and that gave rise to greater capabilities. The earliest remote controls could arguably have been achieved using transistors, but development was proceeding at a breakneck pace.

In 1954 the worlds first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1 used four Texas Instruments npn transistors and cost $49.95, equivalent [to] $507 in 2021 [dollars]. Today, a 512GB SD card can contain over a trillion transistors and costs about $30.

— Curious-Droid.com, MOSFET – The Most significant invention of the 20th Century

Transistors to ICs

In 1958-59, a way was devised to mount many transistors and a number of auxiliary components onto a single piece of silicon, shrinking the transistors at the same time, and increasing all those other benefits of transistorization at the same time. This was the beginning of the Integrated Circuit.

The 1962 prototype contained 16 transistors. In 1964, the first commercial MOS integrated circuit was released, containing 120 transistors. These were roughly 1/50th of a millimeter (0.787 thousandths of an inch) across. 120 discrete transistors would have taken up an area of about 3 inches x 4 inches – assuming no electrical components were required in between, but they almost always were. This could easily double or triple the area required, so call it the equivalent of about 7½ x 10 inches.

ICs to Chips

By the late 1960s, Integrated Circuits had grown so large and complex that a new term was in use: LSI, or Large-Scale Integration. Early in the 1970s, this gave way to VLSI (“Very Large Scale Integration”).

The first digital microprocessor is generally considered the Intel 4004, a four-bit CPU whose descendants lead all the way to the Pentium and beyond. It had 2300 transistors on a ‘chip’ of silicon about 3.15×4.46 mm (1/8th of an inch x 2.1 eighths of an inch) – plus case.

Moore’s Law

Moore’s Law postulated that the number of transistors on a single chip would double every two years for an unforeseeable period of time, but certainly, for the immediate future.



A logarithmic graph showing the timeline of how transistor counts in microchips are almost doubling every two years from 1970 to 2020 (Moore’s Law) by Max Roser & Hannah Ritchie, from Our World In Data via Wikipedia (image page) and licensed under CC Attributions 4.0 International license.

While it’s been refined and revisited a number of times, as a rough-and-ready guesstimate, it’s proven remarkably resilient. On several occasions, doom-and-gloom forecasts have prophesied the end of Moore’s Law, only for new technological developments to make the formerly impossible, possible.

History shows that Moore’s law is a useful generalization. If it were perfectly valid, the graph above would be a perfectly straight line; clearly, it’s not.

There are corollaries, which state that power requirements are a function of the physical size of chips (and hence power requirements per transistor will continue to fall), and that R&R and manufacturing costs also increase exponentially in proportion to Moore’s Law – which means that the cost per transistor would remain constant, but actually continually falls with economies of scale, which are driven by demand. Those have also proven useful rules of thumb, but less accurate than Moore’s original law.

Chips to Multi-cores

Modern computer chips have transistors that are as little as 35 silicon atoms wide. There can be billions of trillions of transistors in each. We passed the threshold whereby quantum effects had to be taken into account a long time ago – around the time of the Pentium IV or V, if memory serves.

These days, a single CPU can’t pump electrons through its circuits fast enough; problems and tasks are distributed amongst several CPUs on the one chip, a multi-core, designed to utilize parallel-processing methods such as multi-threading.

Supercomputers can hold as many as 20,000 processors (not necessarily all on one chip). The technicalities don’t matter much – the operative factors from an economic perspective are that computers get cheaper in (real terms) and more powerful every year or two from the moment of first creation in 1970 through to now (though there have been the occasional brief reversal of this trend).

Ubiquity

Despite the dire prediction of that IBM executive, that essentially means that computers have been getting cheaper and more powerful over that period of time. It’s well known that the onboard computers that ran the Apollo spacecraft were less powerful, in computational terms, than those of a 1990s engine management computer in a typical family car.

A lot of that reduction in price is due to economies of scale – essentially, the more you make of something, the less per unit they cost. And the only way you get economies of scale is through increased usage. Almost everything has an onboard computer of some kind, these days – right down to extension cords and power sockets.

This has been a steady progression that started in the 1970s and has continued ever since. It was in its infancy at the end of the pre-digital era, but had progressed far enough that bureaucracies and large corporations were increasingly using computers by this point in time.

Behemoths Of Blind Logic

Which means that public perceptions of computers had also begun to take shape. These would also evolve with increasing ubiquity, but – outside of specialist areas – the headline of this section denotes the general attitude that I remember.

Many people could see, at the time, that this would not always be the case; the promise of computer technology was well-known and widely appreciated – and frequently mis-characterized or misunderstood by CEOs.

These failures would exist right through to the 2000s – in particular, the belief that computers would streamline workflows and permit a reduction in labor costs, making a business cheaper to run. That never happens, in my experience. What computers facilitate is greater control, and better management of internal processes – but they were and remain unforgiving.

GIGO is an abbreviation for “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, a phrase that was coined all the way back in 1957. Back then, computer professionals used it in reference to sloppy programming practices, but sometime in the 1970s it began to be used to refer to operator errors and corrupt data, and when PCs began infiltrating office spaces, the term almost exclusively referred to these problems.

Operator Error

When computers were new, operators needed – and received – special training in how to use them. This training was not cheap, and often extended for weeks or months.

In part, that was because many operations that take place automatically in modern times needed to be carried out manually.

Computer Errors come in four basic varieties:

Logic Errors

Computers are – currently – stupid devices, the current crop of “AI” functions notwithstanding. They will do whatever they are told to do, whether that is the right thing to do or not. Errors in the underlying logic that the computer is to implement are the most fundamental mistakes, and some of the hardest to diagnose and correct.

Hardware & Software Bugs

If the intended instructions to the computer are correct, they can be mistranslated into computer instructions (a software bug) or misunderstood because of a flaw in the hardware itself. These days, the latter are so rare that there is an almost-automatic assumption of the former. That’s what made the floating-point computational error of the early Pentium chips (now known as the FDIV bug) so shocking to the IT community in the mid-1990s.

User Errors

By far the biggest cause of computer errors is an operator typing in something they shouldn’t. Some estimate that 90% of computer code is directly purposed at spotting and handling such incorrect inputs, but I think this exaggerated – a little.

A real-world but trivial example is of an operator entering numeric values for invoices with a dollar sign at the start – “$123.45” instead of just “123.45”. If the software isn’t told how to handle this – something that could take several lines of code – it won’t add up the invoice line entries to produce a correct total.

There are all sorts of derogatory terms used by computer professionals to describe this sort of error, most of which will go completely over the heads of laymen, but these are becoming more rare in the modern world because of user-friendly interface design expectations, which hold that operator errors are the fault of the system programmer who should have anticipated that possibility.

Interpretational Errors

The fourth type is perhaps the most pernicious, though slowly becoming less frequent; it occurs when the computer does everything right, and so does the operator, but the human who receives the information misinterprets what the results are telling them.

This used to be a lot more common when computerized functions were newly-introduced to a business, and the wealth of data outputs first became available to management. I once knew a manager who was quite happy spending 12 hours a day restructuring his reports to view information in new contexts, for example.

Like everyone else who has trouble with data saturation, he eventually figured out what reports were actually useful and what were simply noise, or worse yet, misleading.

Nevertheless, this remains a valid interpretation of GIGO that casts the expression into a more human context.

No matter how highly trained, computer operators were human and capable of making a mistake. Depending on the specifics of those mistakes, the results could be catastrophic in terms of the purpose of the information being processed, and decisions deriving from it.

PCs

With the advent of the business-purpose personal computer, there was a significant reduction in the training that operators received, and a natural increase in the number of errors that would typically occur.

Let me be clear – it takes time to master ANY software. The best software for any purpose is often the software that lets you dive straight in and start being productive right away; that doesn’t reduce the learning curve, it just lets you do something useful in the meantime.

For example, I’ve tried more than a dozen varieties of different music composition software, but one of them clicked with me immediately (sadly, it’s no longer available). Others who tried the software on my recommendation found that it was not so user-friendly for them – in particular, if they knew (musical) keyboards and used one to ‘play’ music into the software (I did everything by mouse). Other packages were ‘best’ for them.

The immediacy of productivity didn’t mean that I had mastered it; I was still learning new tricks right up to the day that a forced operating system upgrade meant that it stopped working.

But the Pre-digital era falls at the very beginning of that story, at a time when many of these dangers went unrecognized, at least by management; there was a sense that computers were infallible amongst those who had championed their use by a corporation, and there was little capacity for human judgment to leaven harsh and sometimes incorrect decisions.

The popular zeitgeist at the time was that computers would be responsible for all manner of simple mistakes that common sense would prevent immediately, like issuing invoices for 1 cent, often due to a rounding error, or for 99.999 dollars.

Of course, mainframe computers were both huge and hugely expensive. So: Behemoths of blind logic.

Whatever fun mistakes you can have an overly-literal computer make, I guarantee that a worse mistake really happened.

The Promise Of Atomics

Sci-fi of the 1930s had a rose-colored myopia with respect to the future of atomics. The writers of the time had enough understanding of the fundamental research that had been published that they could (and in at least one case, did) predict atomic weapons.

But, to be honest, it was frequently a catch-phrase meant to “sci-fi” an object up. ‘Destroyer – sounds too naval. I know, we’ll call it an Atomic Destroyer!’ Or an Atomic Car. An Atomic Dredge. An Atomic Mole.

Atomics promised power supplies that were smaller, lighter, and more powerful than anything then available – and that was the serious stuff. Every city block would have its own atomic generator that would last a decade, or maybe a century. Self-powered factories, automated refineries…

More frivolous and less-grounded but still somewhat-plausible applications that were predicted included transmutation, atomic-powered rockets, force-fields, and atomic rays.

Setting aside the ridiculous stuff, concepts like Atomic Automobiles that never needed refueling were not only seriously contemplated but expected.

All that was the promise of Atomics.

So, what happened?

Stumbling Block 1: Cold-War Paranoia

Klaus Fuchs arrest in 1950, and the Rosenburgs in 1953. These three names were sensationalized following their arrests and trials (and in the latter case, executions).

On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union secretly conducted its first successful weapon test. On September 23, President Truman revealed that the Soviets had developed their own version of the super-weapon that many felt had ended the War.

These developments did not ignite the Cold War, which had already been underway since 1945, following a string of broken agreements regarding the post-Nazi-defeat in Europe and Iran. But they did signal an increased level of (justifiable) paranoia toward secrecy regarding key aspects of nuclear and other cutting-edge technology.

While military applications – better and newer bomb designs, delivery systems, nuclear-powered vessels, and attempts to create defenses – were well-funded, there was a slowing effect on civilian applications of nuclear power.

Stumbling Block 2: Government Protectiveness

The growing environmental awareness of the 1960s and 70s also had a massive impact. Suspicion that nuclear power was not the key to unlimited energy had been growing for a while, as the dangers emerged onto the public consciousness.

In response, safety standards for nuclear power plants were set at an almost impossibly-high level. The granite of Grand Central Station, like all granite, was slightly radioactive, and in fact exceeded the permitted emission standards applied to US nuclear reactors.

The accidental escape of radioactive gas at Three Mile Island turned nervousness into outright panic for some. Fact: the radioactivity released was less than that received in a dental x-ray, or a single trans-continental flight..

The shielding and safety mechanisms that were required – rightly or wrongly – made atomic installations huge and expensive. Both factors signaled the death of the Promise of Atomics.

Stumbling Block 3: Fear & Atomic Nightmares

B-movies frequently used Atomic-based monsters as villains. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms had a fictional type of dinosaur awakened from frozen ice in the arctic circle by an Atomic weapons test. Them (1954) and Godzilla (1954) cemented an exaggerated concept of what nuclear power could do.

There were more serious movies as well, ranging from The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961), in which atomic tests displace the Earth from it’s normal orbit through to movies like The China Syndrome (1979), On The Beach (1959) and Silkwood (1983).

All of these, and many more, created a distorted awareness of nuclear power that resisted the directly the atomic dreams of the more optimistic visions of nuclear power. I don’t know that it ever reached the point where support for the nuclear industry was enough, on its own, to cost someone victory in an election, but it was often a drag on political support.

Chernobyl & other nuclear disasters

That’s not to pretend for one minute that Nuclear Power is not dangerous if mismanaged. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 is proof of that.

Nor can nuclear power ever be made 100% secure against natural disaster, as demonstrated by the 2011 Fukushima accident.

And, one can never entirely dismiss inimical acts by others, such as the ongoing Russian invasions of Ukraine.

The Russian 22nd Army Corps approached the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on 26 February 2022 and besieged Enerhodar in order to assume control. A fire began, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated that essential equipment was undamaged. Despite the fires, the plant recorded no radiation leaks.

— Wikipedia, Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Southern Front

That, of course, did not end the danger; in fact, the Russians attempted to use the power plant as a pawn in their invasion as the offensive bogged down (see Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Zaporizhzhia Front).

The plant continued to be a strategic target in the months that followed.

On 3 September 2022, an IAEA delegation visited the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia and on 6 September a report was published documenting damage and threats to the plant security caused by external shelling and the presence of occupying troops in the plant.

[Eight Days Later] at 3:14 a.m., the sixth and final reactor was disconnected from the grid, “completely stopping” the plant. The statement from Energoatom said that “Preparations are underway for its cooling and transfer to a cold state”.

— Wikipedia, Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Zaporizhzhia Front

Ukraine, of course, remains subject to threat and the invasion is ongoing. Until that changes, the danger posed remains, however it has been mitigated.

Other uses of Atomics

Nuclear materials, of course, have a number of other applications, which many people overlook. Medical uses are obvious (see Wikipedia, Nuclear Medicine). There are other industrial and commercial applications, too such as Industrial Radiography – used for

….the testing and grading of welds on piping, pressure vessels, high-capacity storage containers, pipelines, and some structural welds. Other tested materials include concrete (locating rebar or conduit), welder’s test coupons, machined parts, plate metal, or pipewall (locating anomalies due to corrosion or mechanical damage).

— Wikipedia, Industrial Radiography – Inspection of products

Whenever I think of this subject, though, an odd source springs to mind – a secondary plot thread in Arthur Hailey’s Wheels, in which an auto worker accidentally spreads radioactive contaminants.

Alternate Reality, Alternate Physics

So there are lots of good reasons why the envisaged ‘golden atomic age’ didn’t, and was never going to, happen.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m a GM; I’d never let something so trivial get in the way if I really needed a campaign element like ubiquitous atomics. All that’s needed is some simple plot devicium to eliminate the dangers and the need for heavy shielding.

A thin material that uses something similar to the photoelectric effect to transform one type of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma) into electricity would do it – and would simultaniously get rid of the bulky (and heavy) plumbing, permitting the direct conversion of radiation into energy. One triple layer later and the “Pocket reactor” (perhaps one cubic meter, perhaps half that) is ready to go.

A Default Economy

Time is starting to get away from me – I really wanted to reach this point in the article three or four hours ago. But, press on…

One of the biggest changes over the last 50-70 years of economics has been the relative importance of wages as a component cost of manufacturing. Wages have, in the western world, skyrocketed (in relative terms); this, more than any other factor, has resulted in the exodus of manufacturing to regions where the wages bill will be smaller.

This effect may have been less noticeable in the early 1970s but it was nevertheless present; the increasing pressure on the US auto industry was an early manifestation, and while it will take the Oil Crisis of 1973 to bring matters to a head, this only accelerated greatly a transition that was already ongoing to some extent.

Prior to the Oil Crisis, the dominant cost factor to the manufacturing sector was industrial in nature – machinery, tooling and resources (materials). Environmental concerns were a growing area of expense for many industries, but still secondary; and wages and training were a remote third (Administrative costs were fourth on the list, which will become significant in the next era).

Many of the classic entrants into different genres of RPG were written by people whose experience in economics was rooted in the society and attitudes of the era, and hence a low-scarcity high-manpower foundation became the default economy of those games.

Incorrect Economics in Fantasy

Most fantasy GMs knew enough to recognize that assembly-line techniques were inappropriate to the genre, but that was often as far as they went. Very few investigated the economics of steel production, especially the impact on forests. To be fair, the resources to do so were not as readily available.

But let’s think about this a moment: anything in scarce supply goes up and up in price – that’s the law of supply and demand. And labor was in very short supply – which means that the basic model of the economics was wrong.

Some GMs tried to correct this problem by increasing labor efficiency and effectiveness – healing magic to make the population healthier, more capable of hard work, and greater crop production through Druidic intervention (not only makes the populace healthier, but frees more of them up to work elsewhere.

Nothing wrong with that as a foundation for fantasy economics – but many of the secondary impacts of these changes were ignored, or not spelled out properly (at the very least), and the changes themselves were inserted as explanation after the fact. No impact on the prices and availability of various goods was taken into account, for example.

Now that this has been pointed out to you, you have three choices:

• Make the explanation official and correct the game mechanics to devalue skilled labor costs and introduce other relevant knock-on effects, including social consequences;
• Remove the incorrectly applied assumptions and their consequences to produce a more realistic medieval economy and society;
• Find some other explanation for the incorrect modeling, one that (perhaps) requires less change to other areas of the mechanics – and implement the consequences and knock-on effects without fear or favor, having first adjusted for the incorrect assumptions already present.

Anything magical or mechanical in nature .should either get a little cheaper or a lot more expensive. Anything that requires extremely high skill, likewise. Anything in common demand will be more easily available, and this may act as a depressant to the price.

Similarly, apprentice numbers for blacksmiths and wizards and what-have-you will either go down considerably, or go way up.

These changes aren’t rocket science; they are fairly straightforward and simple, actually. But there’s a lot of them.

Once those are complete, you can start thinking about economic flows and who has money – and who doesn’t, but wants it – because the generic fantasy society that I have often seen at play is no more realistic.

To be clear – you can choose not to change a thing, especially if this level of realism is not considered desirable by your players; but this should be an intentional choice, and those who make it should at least give passing consideration to the consequences.

Sci-Fi Optimism: A Simpler Age

But, befitting an age of technology, there’s a lot more to talk about on the Sci-Fi front.

Modern sci-fi is far more dystopian in tone, far more cynical and pessimistic. Sci-fi that’s rooted in the era can go one of two ways:

• It can be faithful to the era, with a far more positive outlook; read classic Heinlein and Asimov and EE ‘Doc’ Smith for tonal cues. And, in general, think a little more ‘Victorian’.
• Or, you can adapt to service a modern audience, with cautious injections of pessimism and cynicism – but these changes won’t come out of nowhere and will have knock-on effects, and your campaign setting will need to incorporate and reflect those. Start with the three axes of conflict described at the start of this post, amp them up to 11, and throw in modern levels of political corruption; then incorporate some form of massive betrayal of the people to create that tonal quality within society. Go full pre-Cyberpunk, in other words.

Sci-Fi Pessimism: Monster-bashes

Monster movies should be treated as documentary references. This week, the Triffids; next week, Them; and so on.

Take Myths, Legends, and Cryptids, and add a sci-fi twist. The Headless Horseman from Mars? The Radioactive Ghost? Swamp Men from Venus?

Why not?

Sci-Fi: Optimism Depth & Richness

Both pessimistic and optimistic genres are morally-simplified in some ways. Identify the ones that pertain to your particular genre and run with them.

In particular, though, the pessimistic route involves more universally-down attitude; greater variation and richness is possible in a more optimistic campaign, even if it’s a single persistent thread through the darkness.

Sci-Fi Pessimism: Apocalyptic Visions

There is no such thing as the doomsday clock in an optimistic vision of the sci-fi world; in a pessimistic sci-fi campaign, it should represent an ever-present existential threat.

A perfect comparison is possible: watch both the original 1960s version of The Thing and the John Carpentier remake. Then watch a whole bunch of other sci-fi and categorize each into either ‘B&W Thing’ or “Carpentier Thing’ compartments, tonally. Alien? – Carpentier. Aliens? B&W. The Blob (the original with Steve McQueen? B&W – the good guys win in the end, and the threat is ended. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers? More ambiguous, and there’s always a suspicion that a pod has survived, somewhere – so that equals paranoia, and that’s Carpentier in classification.

And so on.

Sci-Fi Optimism: The Scale of Ginormous

More than anything else, this section tips a hat toward EE ‘Doc’ Smith, and towards the original Star Wars (the revised Death Star in Return Of The Jedi may have been bigger, but it didn’t feel bigger. Just the opposite, in fact).

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Spacecraft 5 miles long? Go for it! Spacecraft 15 feet long? Get ye to the Dark Side – except in comparison to the scale of the enemy, of course!

That’s the only reason for the X-Wings to be so small – to make them more insignificant relative to the Star Destroyers and Death Star of the Empire.

This applies to more than just the physical infrastructure. Contemplate for a moment the economics of building something on the scale of a death star. Here, this site should help: John M Jennings – Economics of the Death Star.

Superheroics & Idealism

Okay, let’s take a sideways step in Genre. It’s clearly just a short step from the positive sci-fi sub-genre to the idealism inherent in a superhero campaign.

Once again, though, contemplate the economic impact of what your PCs and their enemies are up to. If there’s one crisis a month, resulting in significant damage to one or more metro areas, that’s a downward damage bill that’s going to total up into the billions – of 1970s dollars. Possibly more.

Either the national economy of your setting is going into a lasting depression, with public confidence in the toilet and going under for the third time, or there is some factor that’s giving everyone an unlikely positivity.

Two obvious factors can (should?) play into that confidence: the good guys always win (in the end), and/or there’s a steady growth in technological prowess that shows up as a more vibrant economic outlook.

Let’s start by thinking about the rebuilding costs – unemployment goes down, and scarcity of good workers drives wages up. That money has to come from somewhere, and the easiest source is a more rapid technological progression, which boosts corporate profits. And it all plays into greater tax revenues. But, since 90% of the economy gets those positive effects without experiencing the downside, the result is an economic boom.

So far, so good. Sure, the government will have some additional expenses – a more potent space industry? A holding facility to contain supervillains? And so on – check and check. Rebuilding that damaged infrastructure is just another of those items.

Let’s say that half of the extra tax revenues gets eaten up – ten per cent per item, plus one or two not listed. The government can bank 20% of what’s left, and still give everyone a 30% tax reduction.

Next, contemplate the industrial benefits of regularly replacing aging industrial resources. Tokyo and West Germany, it has been argued, benefited massively from such replenishment post World War 2 – but don’t take my word for it, do your own research on the subject.

That’s easily another 10% kick along for the economy – because additional government spending always comes back three-fold, if you wait long enough, provided that the spending isn’t going straight into the pockets of some corrupt corporation or politician.

Okay, that’s all just a starting point; you can take it as far as you think you need to. But there’s a lot of good reasons for optimism in that lot, don’t you think?

Modern Pulp

Modern pulp – the Clive Cussler model, for example – takes superheros out of the picture and relies on extraordinary examples of ordinary people rising to the occasion. In general, this straddles both positive and negative tones, and so the surrounding world is not going to be all that different from our own.

What follows, in my opinion, is a more dynamic roller-coaster in terms of the economy – more significant and prominent ups and downs. But instability of this type makes investors more nervous, and is (in itself) a negative impact on the economy.

Once again, then, we need some positive counterbalance – just to sustain the status quo, in this case. What might that be?

It could take any of several forms – a series of medical breakthroughs, for example, or the discovery of friendly aliens (even if they are standoffish, with some version of the Starfleet Non-Interference Directive, the mere fact that there are solutions to problems if we want them badly enough could be enough).

We don’t need an impact on the same scale as superheros provide – a mere 10% should be enough to cover the shortfall, or even less.

Into this environment, we can then add the benefits of altruistic big business – and all the social changes that flow as a consequence – and we find ourselves firmly in the positive frame, in which all problems have solutions, and the good guys and girls always win in the end. Both of these are part of the infrastructure of such campaigns, a necessary assumption – but one that isn’t often enough factored into the broader society.

War Games

Back in the two-genres mold, we find military-based campaigns. These range from WW2 (positive) to Korea (positive but just barely) to Vietnam (negative, and not much fun). But alternate histories provide a more flexible foundation that can occupy any particular space on the map.

For example: at the height of the Korean war, the USSR invades Canada, intending to plant a soviet super-state right on the American doorstep. Already stretched by the Asian conflict, the US (and its allies) can’t spare a huge manpower commitment – so it puts together an elite force – and suddenly we’re back in ‘Modern Pulp’ territory.

Spies & Spy Games

The final genre to be considered is one that goes hand-in-hand with Cold War settings: the solo super-spy or elite counterintelligence force. Variations take place in WW2 settings.

There’s good reason for what many consider ‘the definitive James Bond’ to derive from this era, and that’s where your economic cues should be drawn from – in essence, whatever it takes (within reasonable limits) is available at need; but you always have to look for a less expensive alternative than simply throwing money at a problem.

Go read (or re-read) the original Ian Fleming novels. There’s always enough money to spend on supervillain lairs or fancy gadgets. There’s a limited amount that can be spent on establishing a cover if necessary. Villains make fortunes by being villainous – but that only makes them a target that will eventually become the focus of attention.

They really are the economics of the 60s and 70s, amplified.

Whew – got there at last! It’s been a marathon, but the finish line for this three-part article has now been crossed – and, in the porcess, the series grows to almost 80,000 words!

Next week: something completely different (and, since this part ran for an extra chapter, maybe the week after, as well).

Until then, have fun!

This is literally the second part of the article I posted last week, so I’ll forego all the usual preamble bits and pieces, just as I did the last time this happened, diving straight in from where I left off – well, almost.

Writing like this sometimes has strange confluences and coincidences, and in this case, it means that I need to insert a footnote that should have been part of the previous post, but could not possibly have been included.

Explaining that statement, and giving context to the actual footnote itself, requires a little real-life background. I’ll keep it as brief as I can.

One of the free-to-air TV channels here in Australia is SBS, or the “Special Broadcasting Service”. This channel specializes in multicultural content, sourcing programs from all over the world, often in multiple languages; where these are not subtitled, the channel has its own small-scale translation-and-subtitling operation. This is the channel that has broadcast everything from the original (Japanese) Iron Chef, South Park, Who Do You Think You Are? (British & Australian varieties, and sometimes the US franchise as well), amongst many others (some of them quite odd-ball).

They have also broadcast numerous science documentaries, championed Soccer and Cycling, taking them from virtually non-existent in terms of TV coverage to national prominence, and the channel broadcasts news services from many different countries, from Vietnam to Germany to the US.

I’ve referenced their programming in a number of posts here at Campaign Mastery – from

• A Hint Of Tomorrow: The Future Evolution Of Homo Sapiens
• The Thrill Of The Chase
• The Diversity Of Seasons Pt 3
• Thinking Alien Thoughts: Roleplaying First Contacts
• The Olympian Perspective: Personal Opinions, Fake News, and the GM
• An Amazing Ancestry
• Growing The Perfect Family Tree part 1 and Part 2
• The Miracle Of Wood
• The Inevitability of Extraordinary Characters
• Throw Me A Life-line: A Character Background Planning Tool
• Ask The GMs: The Passage Of Substantial Time
• The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs
• Layers Of Mis-translation: RPGs and Dubbed TV
• And, last but not least, Flavors Of Victory: Why do good GMs fail?
• Plus, of course, a number of the documentaries were referenced in the Pulp Reference Library series (notably shelves 3 and 6).

They also do a lot of history doccos, and somehow the 5-30PM-6:30PM time-slots on Saturday & Sunday have become reserved as a “World War 2” spotlight. They’ve tried other programming then, but this is the subject that they return to, time after time – presumably because that’s what rates best!

So that’s the background, now to the footnote itself:

Blood Money: Inside The Nazi Economy

Over the weekend just past, in the 5:30-6:30 “World War 2” time-slot, SBS broadcast a two-part French documentary, “Blood Money: Inside The Nazi Economy” (link is to the IMDB page for the series). While this is not available (yet!) on DVD, Amazon has it for streaming, free, and the two parts can be found on YouTube (as of this writing: Part 1: A World War on Credit, Part 2: An Economy Of Death).

Had this broadcast taken place a week earlier, I would have referenced it in last week’s post; but at the time I didn’t even know that it existed. So I have to insert it as a post-scripted footnote, instead, because I think it’s worth pointing to (even though I have not yet had time to watch it, myself).

With that piece of old business out of the way, I can get back to business.

Government For The People

It’s a canonical element of the US Declaration Of Independence – “A government of the people, for the people”. From a modern perspective, it seems that the term “people” wasn’t treated anywhere close to universally until the post-war period, and the eventually successful Civil Rights movement – a success that some seem intent on undoing at the moment, but I’ll leave that alone.

The changes wrought by the Civil Rights movement had their roots in the more egalitarian treatment of minorities during World War 2, which paralleled those of Women in World War 1. This treatment was far from demonstrated equality, but it was the thin end of a wedge, paving the way for a gradual process of integration.

Rather than focus on that, which is very well-trodden ground, I’d like to draw reader’s attention to the other end of the relationship, and the effect on the government of accepting this philosophy of equality.

Governing for the people was generally held to mean protecting the populace from threats where the inequalities of power and wealth left them at a disadvantage; it didn’t matter whether or not that disadvantage was systemic or a function of the differences between theory and practical reality. The job of the government – well, one of them – was to stand up for the little guy in the face of corporate greed and excess.

Liberty Vs Social Responsibility

You can’t do that without restraining the liberty of those corporate entities that would or could put profits ahead of the welfare of the people around them.

I’ve read a lot of very bad fiction in which corporate ‘bad guys’ have a revelatory moment and turn from the immoral “dark side” of profits first, last, and at all points in between. While I have no doubt that individuals can experience a Dickensian transformation and re-prioritize the long-term over the immediacy of profits, all these works suffer from the same fallacy of wishful thinking:

As soon as these newly-enlightened CEOs tried to implement their new policies of “corporate responsibility’, the board of directors would vote the CEO out, because their job is to make as much money as possible for the stockholders. And if they didn’t, those shareholders would revolt and force changes in the board’s makeup, because they didn’t invest to be responsible corporate citizens, they invested to make money.

It follows that any corporation that is well-run will always prioritize profits over corporate responsibility, doing the bare minimum required by law (and less if they can get away with it, or think they can). Which puts the burden on responsibility onto the shoulders of those who write those laws.

Economic Protections

There are four primary tranches of protections created by, and enforced by, the government of the time. the first of these is economic – protecting the banks from failure and making sure that profitable businesses pay their fair share of taxes to support the work of government.

The latter function had always been part of the role of government, and often characterized (or mis-characterized) as self-interest on the part of those governments. The exemplar of rebellion against such self-service has always been the Robin Hood myth, but it has become recast as a form of social rebellion – in essence, claiming that if you object to some element of what the government is doing with “your” money, you are entitled to evade the tax obligation as much as you can.

But it was the credit restrictions and other financial reforms that emerged from the Great Depression as part of the New Deal that were the primary economic protection implemented in the course of the Pre-Digital Tech Age.

Extremes of perspective as a tool for GMs

I’ve often found it useful to think of government regulation as ‘defining the perimeters’ within which corporate entities can seek profit-making opportunities. This is a view which completely discounts the costs of compliance, making it an ideological perspective, but it simplifies and exemplifies the government perspective on such matters.

Business interests, on the other hand, live in what they like to think of as ‘the real world’, in which those practicalities have to be taken into account. There is a clear conflict between these interests, creating an ‘us-vs-them’ environment that is extremely useful for storytelling.

Neither of these perspectives are entirely accurate; they both carry their respective philosophies to illogical extremes. Realities can be more nuanced, and this can also be useful grist for RPG plotlines.

It must be remembered that the players (and hence their PCs) will almost always view both from the perspective of the ‘citizen’ caught in the middle, validating plotlines of both corporate greed and government overreach. By painting the extremes so starkly, and allowing gradations of social responsibility in specific cases, and taking this perspective into account, the direction of ‘satisfying’ plotlines can be easily discerned.

Which makes this a useful conceptual tool for the GM.

Personal Protections

Ralph Nader started the personal protections function of government, expanding the policy function from protection against criminal deprivation to a broader mandate with his drive to force the wearing of seat belts in automobiles, balancing the liberty to choose (or risk) of the individual against a policy of protecting people from the consequences of poor personal choices.

He argued, and fought for, the principle that part of the job of government was to protect people from themselves. From this beginning grew the entirety of what is now called “Consumer Protection”, which attempts to force business interests, through government regulation, to ensure that products are (1) safe to use, and (2) able to satisfy the purpose for which they were purchased.

Caveat Emptor

Many don’t realize it, but truth-in-advertising laws derive from this same tenet. Consumer Protection seeks to overturn the old warning of “Caveat Emptor” (Buyer Beware) – but it can only ever do so imperfectly, so that principle still has validity. Interestingly, it was originally a warning against buying stolen goods, and is often now manifested in the proverb, ‘if it seems too good to be true, it probably is’.

Regulation, after all, does a fairly poor job of anticipating potential future needs; it fairs much better when there is a concrete example of misbehavior that it can legislate against, and from which it can generalize.

Acceptance

It took a surprisingly short time for people to come to accept this role of government, and even to expect it to protect them. Nader published “Unsafe At Any Speed” in 1965; a decade later, and many jurisdictions had laws which mandated the wearing of seat-belts (compliance is, as always, imperfect).

The US was a little slower than elsewhere, but not by very much. Compare the details of different national regulations from the table in Wikipedia: Seat Belt Legislation with those of the US from the state-by-state table in Wikipedia: Seat Belt Laws In the United States..

National Attitudes for Characterization

This delay, widely attributed (rightly or wrongly) by the rest of the world to the conflict between personal liberty and consumer protection, has begun to assume mythic proportions and an underpinning perception of the USA held by many. Australians generally believe that they have more rigorous Product Standards and consumer protections than anywhere else in the world (which is sometimes true, but I could not say its definitively accurate in all cases).

Generalized, this provides a valuable touchstone for differentiating characters from different parts of the world – Americans are more likely to accept personal risk, and have shaped their legal protections to accommodate this (hence their gun laws). Non-Americans are more willing to trust their government to patrol and limit their personal risk, and consider the benefits of doing so to be worth the price.

Neither perspective has to be right or wrong, but they are a reality that the GM can employ.

Medical Protections

This gives me the opportunity to wax on about one of my favorite subjects, Snake Oil and Snake Oil Salesmen. I’ve been fascinated by the subject of deceptions and frauds and scams for a long time, covering everything from the manipulative genius of Derren Brown through to the intricacies of mystery plotlines and a long-standing fascination with Optical Illusions.

But I’ve already covered that subject extensively in earlier parts of this series, so I won’t do that; suffice it to say that this is one area of life in which consumer protection was (and is) sorely needed.

The FDA was formed in 1906.

The history of the FDA can be traced to the latter part of the 19th century and the Division of Chemistry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which itself derived from the Copyright and Patent Clause. Under Harvey Washington Wiley, appointed chief chemist in 1883, the Division began conducting research into the adulteration and misbranding of food and drugs on the American market Wiley’s advocacy came at a time when the public had become aroused to hazards in the marketplace by muckraking journalists like Upton Sinclair, and became part of a general trend for increased federal regulations in matters pertinent to public safety during the Progressive Era.

— Wikipedia, Food And Drug Administration

By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products that had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, mascara that could cause blindness, and worthless “cures” for diabetes and tuberculosis.

— Same source

FDR greatly increased the regulatory powers of the FDA as part of the New Deal. These regulations also granted emergency powers to the FDA, which were employed to authorize the mass vaccinations against Polio in the 1950s.

After the Thalidomide Scandal of the 1960s, these powers were significantly enhanced again. Americans were largely spared the horrors of Thalidomide thanks to the refusal of Frances Oldham Kelsey to authorize it for sale in the US because she had concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the drug’s safety, a position for which she came under attack by the manufacturer.

Experts estimate that thalidomide led to the death of approximately 2,000 children and serious birth defects in more than 10,000 children, with over half of them in West Germany. I have to admit to a personal stake in this story – my mother was prescribed Thalidomide but found it to be of little benefit, and so stopped taking it, and so I have no observed defects resulting from the drug; I have always regarded this as a bullet dodged. I have a distant cousin who was not so lucky; his left arm ended at the elbow, and I was constantly amazed by his ability to overcome this limitation.

What none of the articles report is the allegation contained in Arthur Hailey’s Strong Medicine, alleging that even after the Scandal broke and the connection between birth defects and Thalidomide was established, it continued to be sold in various third-world markets as a medication for morning sickness. While some of the criticism of the novel’s flaws is valid, I still regard it as a fairly balanced review of the benefits and potential pitfalls of a for-profit drug manufacturing environment and the regulatory necessity that the environment necessitates. Say what you will about his characters, Hailey did good research for his novels, making them useful reference sources for GMs.

There is, of course, serious downsides to the level of protection provided by these regulatory requirements – delays and expense. Watershed moments in medical regulation that occur outside the scope of this era include the creation of the Generic Drugs industry, which derives from a more streamlined approvals process in the 1980s, the carving out of exceptions in the case of life-threatening health emergencies that derive from the AIDS epidemic, and which led to 21st century reforms which enabled the rapid approval and distribution of Coronavirus Vaccines – despite the claims of some, now the most widely-tested vaccines in existence.

It is ironic, but a measure of the level of acceptance of medical regulation by the public, that the complaint of many who otherwise oppose government regulation is that these vaccines had not been sufficiently tested.

Environmental Protections

It’s a shame that the same level of respect is not endowed upon the EPA – an agency proposed and created by Richard Nixon in the 1970s after about twenty years of growing demand for environmental regulation.

This is not to suggest that there was no regulation prior to the founding of the EPA; there was, but it was distributed through many agencies, piecemeal, and sometimes contradictory in what it permitted and what it made illegal.

Pesticides, for example, were regulated by both the US Department Of Agriculture and the US Department of the Interior. There may have been some additional regulations regarding its transportation under the Department of Transport, too.

A lot of the modern perception of corporate culture actually stems from the problems attacked by the EPA through the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, and the public perceptions created by popular culture in the 60s and 70s, for example by songs such as “Down By The River” by Albert Hammond.

Throughout the 1970s, there was a growing litany of stories about pollution and contamination of soil and water intruding into the public awareness. But my favorite references from popular culture stem from a later time:

• SIlkwood (1983 film starring Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, and Cher);
• Erin Brockovich (2000 film starring Julia Roberts)
• A Civil Action (1998 film starring John Travolta), and the 1995 book of the same name by Jonathon Harr;
• and The Pelican Brief (1993 film starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington), and the 1992 book of the same name, by John Grisham.

To those references, you can add awareness of the history of Wittenoom in Western Australia (made famous internationally by the Midnight Oil song Blue Sky Mine, and the decades-long fight for compensation by victims of Asbestosis here in Australia plus the broader international lawsuits on the subject (refer Wikipedia – Asbestos and the Law – Litigation). I could also refer to the Ozone layer and current attempts to eliminate single-use plastics – attempts which appear to be failing – but this section is more than sufficiently comprehensive already.

Between them, these paint an almost cartoonish impression of business’ willingness to look the other way when it comes to environmental concerns. When generalized, this impression provides a foundation for environmentally-related plotlines, in much the same way as oversimplifications of the pharmaceuticals industry and consumer protection provide a framework for drama.

Responsibility By Proxy

Citizens have grown so used to the protections provided by these and similar agencies that they have generally forgotten what things were like before they were significantly empowered. There is a general sense in some circles that they don’t have to worry because the government wouldn’t let anything bad happen, and even that excessive regulation can be pared back without risk of significant harm.

Business, too, has grown accustomed to having restrictions placed upon them by such agencies, and while they will continually demand the elimination of regulation as “red tape”, they too have the attitude of “nothing bad will happen”. In general, this stems from a myopic perspective in which only they are able to flout, evade, or escape the protections, rather than considering the cumulative impact of many such acts of contamination.

The economic protections put in place by the New Deal were systematically weakened and watered down by successive governments until history was permitted to repeat itself, resulting in the GFC. New regulations were then put in place, only to be weakened or eliminated by the Trump presidency – which led to the recent banking crisis, and could easily have resulted in another GFC / Great Depression, had not intervention been successful.

Similar stories are emerging about environmental contamination after the weakening of the EPA, and the active undermining of public confidence in the FDA over Coronavirus vaccines and treatments is well-known. But all these lie in the future of this era, when the general perception is that anything can be fixed by an enlightened government – but there is always a question as to whether or not the price of that cure and clean-up is worth it.

Aviation

After making a big deal about how I was saving this subject for this article, even though Aviation was born during the previous age, I managed to completely forget to include it when I initially laid out this article. Fortunately, I remembered before it was too late!

Aviation – specifically, powered heavier-than-air flight – began with the flight at Kitty Hawk by the Wright Brothers, though there were several others who came close, creating many competing claims to the honor.

Clement Ader of France flew 50m in 1890, but failed to achieve sufficient altitude to claim the honor – at least, according to some. Ader claimed in November 1906 that he had made a successful “uninterrupted flight” of around 300m on October 14, 1897, for two officials from the French War Ministry were not convinced – and the test was designated a military secret and not publicly revealed until 1910. This claim was widely believed at the time, but later discredited.

On 14 August 1901, Gustav Whitehead claimed to have carried out a controlled, powered flight in his Number 21 monoplane at Fairfield, Connecticut. An account of the flight appeared in the Bridgeport Sunday Herald and was repeated in newspapers throughout the world.[citation needed] Whitehead claimed two more flights on 17 January 1902, using his Number 22 monoplane.

Whitehead claims are ignored or dismissed by mainstream aviation historians,

— Wikipedia, Early Flying Machines

— though a few consider them to be the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight – with no proof that they actually took place.

On 6 May 1896, Samuel Langley’s Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful sustained flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven heavier-than-air craft of substantial size. It was launched from a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River near Quantico, Virginia.

— Same source

— but these were unpiloted, and attempts to scale the aircraft up to sufficient size to permit the carriage of a pilot failed when the resulting aircraft proved too fragile.

Perhaps the most credible alternative claim belongs to Richard Pearse of New Zealand.

Witnesses interviewed many years afterward describe observing Pearse flying and landing a powered heavier-than-air machine on 31 March 1903, nine months before the Wright brothers flew.:Ambiguous statements made by Pearse himself make it difficult to date the aviation experiments with certainty.

— Wikipedia, Richard Pearse

The problem is that all the evidence is undated. Confusion over the date was enough to deny Pearse credit for being the first – though he still has his champions, even today.

Pearse himself admitted in a 1909 interview, “I did not attempt anything practical with the idea until 1904” – but what he meant by ‘practical’ remains unclear; did he mean that he made his flights in 1904, despite the witness recollections, or that he didn’t take the successful flights seriously until then? Pearse died in 1953, so we can’t seek clarification, but in a 1915 letter to the Evening Star, Pearse wrote,

“The honor of inventing the aeroplane […] is the product of many minds [but] pre-eminence will undoubtedly be given to the Wright brothers […] as they were actually the first to make successful flights with a motor-driven aeroplane.”

— Same source

To his credit, Pearse also described his flights as failing to be sufficiently controlled to qualify; his rudder would not work at speeds of less than 20 mph.

There were a number of other claimants to the honor, but they also fail to attract sufficient credibility either as to the dates, the flight profile, or whether they even took place.

So the Wright Brothers retain the official nod.

Aviation In WWI

Aviation developed in leaps and bounds during WWI, initially for aerial reconnaissance. Specialized variations began to appear, and pioneers pushed the limits of their machines, leading to the development of fighters, bombers, and trench strafers. Arguably, it was in the logistics of coordinating ground activities and aerial action that would be the greatest legacy.

Post-War

After the war, these early aviators began taking contracts for the delivery of mail at premium prices, and – in general – accepting any excuse to take their machinery into the air. But, as yet, they had neither the range nor the cargo capacity to be commercially viable operations.

And this is a series about economics.

Commercial Aviation

Aircraft engineering steadily improved through the post-war years, increasing both range and carrying capacity. To some extent, these were aspects of the same problem – heavier lifting capacity enabled the installation of a larger fuel tank – so it would be more correct to state that engine & fuel efficiency, aerodynamics, controls, and instrumentation steadily improved. Eventually a tipping point was reached at which point a commercially viable aircraft could be manufactured, not as a bespoke custom creation, but as an industrial product.

The Douglas DC-3 was the first commercially-viable aircraft. Capable of profitable operation carrying passengers alone, or of being reconfigured in various ways to make it a cargo aircraft, it was an extremely reliable workhorse.

Everything that commercial aviation became by the time of the oil crisis – the chosen end-point for this historical period – began with the DC-3.

Origins

8 years before the DC-3, Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic, and a year later, Charles Kingsford-Smith flew solo across the pacific. These were harbingers of the impact that commercial aviation would have on the world, proving that it was now possible to get almost anywhere by air.

The DC-3 was preceded by the DC-2, a 14-passenger aircraft that competed with the Boeing 247.

In the early 1930s, fears about the safety of wooden aircraft structures drove the US aviation industry to develop all-metal airliners. United Airlines had exclusive right to the all metal twin-engine Boeing 247; rival TWA issued a specification for an all-metal trimotor.

The Douglas response was more radical. When it flew on July 1, 1933, the prototype DC-1 had a robust tapered wing, retractable landing gear, and two 690 hp (515 kW) Wright radial engines driving variable-pitch propellers. It seated 12 passengers.

— Wikipedia, Douglas DC-2

The year after the debut of the DC-2, Douglas unveiled the DC-3. It was all Boeing’s fault.

TWA’s rival in transcontinental air service, United Airlines, was starting service with the Boeing 247, and Boeing refused to sell any 247s to other airlines until United’s order for 60 aircraft had been filled. TWA asked Douglas to design and build an aircraft that would allow [them] to compete with United. Douglas’ design, the 1933 DC-1, was promising, and led to the DC-2 in 1934. The DC-2 was a success, but with room for improvement.

The DC-3 resulted from a marathon telephone call from American Airlines CEO C. R. Smith to Donald Douglas, when Smith persuaded a reluctant Douglas to design a sleeper aircraft based on the DC-2 to replace American’s Curtiss Condor II biplanes. The DC-2’s cabin was 66 inches (1.7 m) wide, too narrow for side-by-side berths. Douglas agreed to go ahead with development only after Smith informed him of American’s intention to purchase 20 aircraft.

— Wikipedia. Douglas DC-3

Many factors converged to make the DC-3 exceptional – improvements over the capabilities of the DC-2 in virtually every respect were incorporated.

The DC-3 cruised at 207 mph (333 km/h), carried 14 passengers in sleeper configuration or 21-32 passengers with traditional seats, or 6,000 lbs (2700 kg) of cargo, and could carry them 1500 miles (2400 km). It needed shorter airstrips than the DC-2. It was faster, cheaper to run, easier to maintain, more capable in the air, and more reliable.

Let’s put all that into a practical comparison:

Eastbound transcontinental flights could cross the U.S. in about 15 hours with three refueling stops, while westbound trips against the wind took 17½ hours. A few years earlier, such a trip entailed short hops in slower and shorter-range aircraft during the day, coupled with train travel overnight.

— Same source

Faster aircraft were soon developed – that cost a lot more to run and carried a lot less. Transports with greater capacity were developed – but they were slower and more expensive per pound of cargo. More economical aircraft were developed – with a fraction of the capacity, speed, and reliability. The DC-3 seemed to have magically landed on the ‘sweet spot’ of the optimum configuration.

If that were not the case, it is unlikely that it would have had the economic impact that it did; something else would have been the ‘iconic’ aircraft of its era.

Mail

The Universal Postal Union adopted comprehensive rules for airmail at its 1929 Postal Union Congress in London. Since the official language of the Universal Postal Union is French, airmail items worldwide are often marked Par Avion, literally: “by airplane”.

For about the first half century of its existence, transportation of mail via aircraft was usually categorized and sold as a separate service (airmail) from surface mail.

— Wikipedia, Airmail

The impact of air mail is best measured in days. Before the service, there would have been a zone around the poster in which next-day delivery was possible (let’s simplify and assume a single delivery each day, even though many locations had two or more mail deliveries daily).

Beyond this range, there would have extended psuedopod zones along railroad lines, in which overnight delivery might still have been possible, depending on the speed of trains and the terrain over which they had to run. Outside these additions to the ‘next day’ zone would have been another of roughly equal distance in which ‘day after next’ delivery could be achieved, and so on. For coast-to-coast mail, 3-5 days of travel were required.

The DC-3 made next-day delivery to anywhere serviced by air traffic possible. If the postal destination was not in such a location, it might still have been a two-day process – at worst.

For anything truly urgent, cables by telegraph remained faster – but forewent privacy and length. And for most commercial agreements, privacy is essential.

But the greater impact was on personal communications. Before air mail, the speed of communications meant that a letter a month was the most that could be reasonably expected from family members who had moved elsewhere. It might take a week for such mail to be delivered, so there was no sense of immediacy; everything was at a distance. Even when rail transportation improved delivery speeds, occasional long letters remained the norm.

With air mail, everywhere became so much closer that it created a psychological point of difference; people thought about mail differently, even when they weren’t using the service. It became a reasonable expectation to get a (much shorter) letter every week, perhaps containing a photograph or souvenir. People’s lives became far more entwined.

This effect was doubled or more with respect to international mail – instead of three months by ship, it might be a week or two to send a letter by air.

Business Travel

Business travel to somewhere some distance away used to be a major undertaking – one planned to be away for a week or more, and that’s just within the continental US. Significant planning was required. This naturally compromised the scope of business.

Air travel used to be very expensive. If a New Yorker really had a business need to visit (say) San Francisco, three-to-five days rail travel – each way – was involved, plus the duration of stay in the remote city.

If you could afford air travel, that becomes one day each way. It’s still not enough to travel casually, but it is enough to make such travel routine. And, with the shorter time requirements, it becomes more acceptable to travel for just a few hours or for a day. If your schedule worked out, you could even travel and have a business meeting the same day.

Networks of businesses and employees become possible. Instead of needing to contract locally, you could negotiate with suppliers anywhere else in the continent – you might need to factor additional freight costs for the commodities, but with those factored in, you effectively had dozens or hundreds of suppliers competing for your business.

And you, in turn, were competing with dozens or hundreds of rivals who wanted to provide a better deal to your customers.

Air Freight

And that’s without factoring in any impact from air freight. This trades speed for price – but when you absolutely have to have it ASAP, air freight was the answer. Initially expensive, but economies of scale would make mail-order shopping a reality before the 1950s.

For a while, there were even products custom-built to travel by air freight – lighter and flimsier, but cheaper. It soon transpired that unnecessary bulk became a significant negative factor for local customers, too; leaner and cheaper was an effective market division.

Tourism

The price of air travel also yields to economies of scale. At first, something only the rich could afford, but by the 1960s, it was entirely reasonable to pack up the family and fly somewhere for a week’s vacation once a year. In the 70s and 80s, this effect would become international in scope.

Instead of spending four or five days in the car getting somewhere, and then four or five days coming back again, you could be there tonight – and spending six or eight days at your holiday destination.

Travel for tourism would not become casual until after this era was concluded, but non-casual travel for tourism starts now.

Personal

It suddenly becomes possible to travel in order to attend some family function. It’s still a big deal, but it can’t automatically be ruled out. This has two impacts of note.

First, it brings family closer together, breaking down the barrier of distance that made family cohesion so much harder to maintain. This is already underway because of the impact of air mail; personal travel acts as an amplifier.

Second. it reduces the impost of such family functions; instead of something really major (significant anniversary, marriage within the immediate family, parental funeral), it becomes acceptable to travel more regularly, so you need less of an excuse (birthday, graduation, whatever).

Secondary impacts

These are all primary impacts, stemming directly from the economic realities and possibilities of air travel. Secondary ripples are just as significant. Spending and shipping gifts becomes far more normal. Lots more people want to pay for transient accommodations, and food, and entertainment. There’s a wholesale shift in spending patterns for at least part of the year.

In the past, you might have cabled a florist, who fulfilled and delivered your order. Now you could send a cutlery set or nick-knack personally chosen to be valuable to the recipient. Result – store that sells the nick-knack has your money and the florist does not.

This isn’t a complete transformation; florists don’t all close overnight. What changes is personalization; where once, it would have been extremely difficult to arrange, it now becomes possible to include a personal, handwritten, card with a floral delivery without your going anywhere near the city of delivery.

Although it won’t be expressed in such terms, or even noticed, until the next era, what has happened is that distance has compressed. Faster travel makes the world smaller, makes more people (effectively) neighbors, and more closely connects the world.

But not half as much as the next significant development in this era will – though that will have to wait until the next chapter, I’m out of time!

In the next chapter – Space Flight, Miniaturization, Atomics, and RPG economics!

A word of advice: Each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article.

Welcome & General Introduction

With each part of the series, we find ourselves treading ground that is more and more familiar.

That’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it becomes more and more familiar, a curse because it gets harder to offer something new to readers, and because it gets easier for distinguishing features to get lost and confused.

From A Writing Perspective

This blurring is something that I’m keenly aware of, and will be fighting hard to overcome. But it’s not helped by the fact that right off the bat, there’s a half-truth necessary.

I could have called this ‘the Atomic Age’ – but Atomic Energy never had the impact that SF writers of the era anticipated. Why that was the case is one critical element of this article.

I could have called this the ‘Post-Industrial Age’ – but that implies that Industrial growth isn’t relevant, and that’s completely false-to-fact. The cause of ongoing industrial growth as an economic driver changes in this era, but the growth itself remains as relevant as ever – and that’s another central subject of this part of the series.

It could have been called the ‘Home technology Age’, which is completely accurate – and completely ignores the features that distinguish this age from the one that follows, sending entirely the wrong message. So the growth of Home Technology and its social consequences are a third defining factor of this age that needs examination.

In the end, I’ve titled it the “Pre-Digital Tech Age’ – but that implies that computers and digital technology in general play no part in the economy of the time, and that’s true only in comparison with future time-periods to come (‘The Data Age’ and ‘The Information Age’ – names subject to change!). So the nuances of the role of computers in society and the economy is another focal point that needs to be addressed.

it’s actually fairly rare for the title of one of my articles to drive the delineation of content so profoundly; quite often, the titles are amongst the last things that I fix, having used a working title as a placeholder during the writing – but this time around there is so much depth and nuance buried within the title that this discussion serves as something of a table of contents for the article to come!

Beyond those content elements, there are the four items that I’ve been foreshadowing at the conclusion of previous parts of the series – ‘The Gold Standard’ (again), ‘Resources & Regulation’, ‘Inflation & Hyperinflation’, and ‘Commercialism, Deregulation, Privatization, & Greed’, and there is the relevance in various RPG genres to discuss – fantasy, various sub-genres of Sci-Fi, spies & secret agents, apocalyptic visions, and more.

All this and a (mostly) cold war, too! Which adds up to 73 sections and sub-sections. Fortunately, I don’t have to cover all of this in just one article. – I’ve left myself scope to split it in two or even three. I would have preferred to cover it all in one got, so that I could steal the next for the article that I originally intended to write, before it morphed into this whole series, but that’s probably not possible, with so much to cover – unless I can squeeze most of them down into just a paragraph or two.

I have checked (as I usually do when this is a possibility) and the article does break naturally into both 2 or 3 parts. So we’ll just have to see how I get on!

A disclaimer: I am not an economist and I’m not trying to turn anyone else into an economist. An awful lot of this content will be simplified, possibly even oversimplified. Bear that in mind as you read.

A second disclaimer: I’m Australian with a working understanding, however imperfect and incomplete, of how the US Economy works, and an even more marginal understanding of how the UK economy works (especially in the post-Brexit era). Most of my readers are from the US, and number two are Brits. Canadians and Australians fight over third place on pretty even terms, so those are the contexts in which what I write will be interpreted. And that means that the imperfection can become an issue.

Any commentary that I make comes from my personal perspective. That’s important to remember. Now, sometimes an outside perspective helps see something that’s not obvious to those who are enmeshed in a system, and sometimes it can mean that you aren’t as clued-in as you should be. So I’ll apologize in advance for any errors or offense.

I’ll repeat these disclaimers at the top of each part in this series.

Related articles

This series joins the many other articles on world-building that have been offered here through the years. Part one contained an extremely abbreviated list of these. There are far too many to list here individually; instead check out

the Campaign Creation page of the Blogdex,

especially the sections on

• Divine Power, Religion, & Theology
• Magic, Sorcery, & The Arcane
• Money & Wealth
• Cities & Architecture
• Politics
• Societies & Nations, and
• Organizations, and
• Races.

Where We’re At – repeated from Part 3

Along the way, a number of important principles have been established.

1. Society drives economics – which is perfectly obvious when you think about it, because social patterns and structures define who can earn wealth, the nature of that wealth, and what they can spend it on – and those, by definition, are the fundamentals of an economy.
2. Economics pressure Societies to evolve – economic activity encourages some social behaviors and inhibits others, producing the trends that cause societies to evolve. Again, perfectly obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious at first glance – largely because the changes in society obscure and alter the driving forces and consequences of (1).
3. Existing economic and social trends develop in the context of new developments – this point is a little more subtle and obscure. Another way of looking at it is that the existing social patterns define the initial impact that new developments can have on society, and the results tend to be definitive of the new era.
4. New developments drive new patterns in both economic and social behavior but it takes time for the dominoes to fall – Just because some consequences get a head start, and are more readily assimilated into the society in general, that does not make them the most profound influences; those may take time to develop, but can be so transformative that they define a new social / political / economic / historic era.
5. Each society and its economic infrastructure contains the foundations of the next significant era – this is an obvious consequence of the previous point. But spelling it out like this defines two or perhaps three phases of development, all contained within the envelope of a given social era:
   • There’s the initial phase, in which some arbitrary dividing line demarks transition from one social era to another. Economic development and social change is driven exclusively by existing trends.
   • There’s the secondary phase, in which new conditions derive from the driving social forces that define the era begin to infiltrate and manifest within the scope permitted by the results of the initial phase.
   • Each of the trends in the secondary phase can have an immediate impact or a delayed impact. The first become a part of the unique set of conditions that define the current era, while the second become the seeds of the next social era. There is always a continuity, and you can never really analyze a particular period in history without understanding the foundations that were laid in the preceding era.

The general principles contained within these bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be repeating them in the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in the series.

Beginning & End-Points of the “Pre-Digital Tech Age”

Defining the beginning and end points of these eras grows more complex with each additional part of the series, because these are thematic dividing lines, drawn somewhat arbitrarily; it would be easy to select different start and end points just by tweaking the thematic definitions.

Deciding whether or not make such changes ultimately comes down to whether or not the significance of those themes would be buried, confused, or lost by the change, so there are limits that have to be recognized. I’ve chosen definitions and end-points that I think recognize those limits, but this is subjective to a certain extent.
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Sidebar: A storytelling parallel

When you have a strongly serialized campaign, you can encounter similar questions regarding the points at which one ‘adventure’ ends and the next begins. I use the same basic criteria – thematic content and whether or not those themes become muddied, confused, or lost by expanding the end-point. That’s not the only way of handling the issue, but I think it’s the one that adds the most value to a campaign.

A far more difficult question would be whether or not I have chosen this approach to this article because I’m used to using it in RPG campaigns. I’ll leave that assessment to others, though.

The Rise Of Fascism

The beginning point is easy, because I announced it in discussing the end point of the previous part of the series. Fascism held a great appeal in the early part of the mid-twentieth century, something that I’ll look at as the article proceeds.

The original intent was to set the dividing line at that point in which Fascism began to have influence at an international level, but I soon found that this was much harder to pin down than I had expected – and the earliest possible interpretation of that definition intruded into a time when the previous era had clearly not yet run its course.

Overlap with The Age Of Electrification

This requires a softer boundary between the two eras, in which the transition is slower, more gradual, and more nuanced. A little reflection should have told me this would the case; after all many parts of the US did not achieve electrification until the 50s, and some took twenty years longer than that again.

Either the earlier era didn’t end so much as peter out, or some arbitrary dividing line had to be drawn, beyond which those communities who had not yet achieved full electrical supply were considered pockets of exceptions to the general rule. Ultimately, a hybrid of the two options seemed the best choice, one in which this era gradually becomes dominant over the previous one; priorities change, themes differ, points of distinction morph and shift, and one historical period becomes another.

Local vs National vs International

The dominance of issues on the national scale, rather than a uniform transition nation-wide, became the (rather nuanced) dividing line. So this era starts with the rise of ultra-nationalism in the 1920s and early 30s, first at a local scale and then as a significant national trend, even though the previous era had not yet reached its conclusion.

Beginning Of The End: The 1970s Oil Crisis

A similar problem arises when contemplating the end of the era. It’s not as though there was some watershed moment in which the perceptions of reality shifted; instead, there was a gradual drift from one set of policy priorities and agendas to another.

Thematic definitions make it clear when things started to change – the 1970s Oil Crisis, when suddenly scarcity of available resources intruded upon world consciousness like a bolt from the blue. This is so profound a change relative to the preceding period that it makes a natural demarcation point.

End Of The End: Windows 3.0 or The Fall of The Wall?

But not every thematic element of the era came to an end at the same time. Others persisted, creating another fuzzy boundary. It proved impossible to choose between two quite different end-points for the transition, simply because they had such different spheres of influence.

The two flagship contenders were the rise of personal computing (another somewhat amorphous boundary, represented by the release of Windows 3.0 on May 22, 1990) or the fall of the Berlin Wall (on 9 November 1989), symbolic of the end of the Cold War that had been such a dominant part of international relations and national economics & society through the 1950s and 60s.

Windows 3 began the transition to Graphical User Interfaces, and commercialized computing for the business and personal worlds. It’s easy to draw a straight developmental line from that point to the ubiquitous dominance of the modern smartphone, a thematic connection that is definitive of the era that follows; so that is a strong contender.

And the sudden and completely unexpected (at the time) fall of the Wall was a cultural landmark that sharply divides the Pre-Digital Tech Age from the era that follows it.

As with the beginnings of this era, I decided to answer the question by avoiding it completely. So that six-month period marks the transition between eras that defines the end of this historical period.

A rejected flagship moment: 20 July, 1969

Another watershed moment that, from a whole-of-planet perspective, at least deserves consideration was the first manned landing on the Moon. yet, it took hardly any thought to dismiss it as a contender.

The first moon landing was the culmination of years of effort on an international scale, but it did not mark the end of man’s exploration of space; arguably, the first weather and communications satellites (Vanguard 2, launched February 17, 1959, and Project SCORE, launched 18 December 1958, respectively) were better signposts to the long-term impact on human society.

Moon landings continued until 14 December, 1972, and three more planned missions were canceled. In terms of the cultural big picture, the fact of these cancellations looms just as large as the first success, so it can be seen that the ‘definitive moment’ quickly gets spread out over a substantial time frame.

More telling even than this uncertainty is the fact that social and economic trends already extant continued beyond them all. As a human achievement, Apollo 11 is a globally-significant landmark, but in terms of delineating one historical period from another, it is somewhat lacking.

Sci-fi economic footnotes of significance

There are two scenarios in which the first manned Moon landing would be a valid end-point, and they deserve amplification, however brief:

Scenario 1: Lunar Colonization

Had a successful case been mounted for ramping the Apollo program up rather than shutting it down, the next stage would have been lunar colonization. The case would need to be made that this would have a marked impact on terrestrial problems and cost-effectiveness would need clear demonstration, probably achieved through the opportunities for commercialization of colonial activities. While this scenario seems unlikely, given the existing social trends, it is at least a plausible possibility. The impact on society – technologically, socially, and economically – would have made the first landing a sufficient watershed moment that it would define a new socioeconomic era in human history.

The problem was that NASA was so busy working on achieving success that they never planned beyond it, simply taking it for granted. Had a credible plan for the development of Lunar resources been formulated and presented as taking effect after the initial success (whenever that was to be achieved), and all subsequent missions designed as stepping stones to that development, then the cost to date could have been redefined as an ‘investment in future prosperity’ that could have undercut the harshest criticisms of the Program.

Changes to our history would have to have predated Apollo 11, though they probably would not have attracted public attention. It’s also arguable that the landing difficulties experienced by Apollo 11 would have mandated Apollo 12 proceed as it did, historically, establishing the capacity for precision landing. But from that point on, history would have been increasingly divergent.

Scenario 2: Delayed Lunar Landing

It’s arguable that the Apollo program was a victim of it’s own success, that it took every shortcut to achieve that success because of the Space Race, and that the long-term national interests of the US might have been better served had it taken a different direction – aiming not for the showy Moon Landings but for sophistication in technological capabilities and a 25-year plan that focused on efficiency, reliability, and the development of foundational technologies. Unmanned Satellites / Mercury; Space Platform / Gemini; Space Station / Apollo; Colonization. This would have had the mantra ‘never a backwards step’, with each stage having a clear technological target with planned commercial .spin-offs after the achievement of that target, and each step building on the one before it.

Under this plan, instead of ‘before the end of the decade’, the lunar landings would have come in 1980 or 1985. Personally, I don’t think this scenario is as realistic as the first, failing to fully account for the cold war mentality and imperative; the goal of doing things ‘better’ instead of ‘first’ is a much harder sell. There’s too much hindsight in the mix, in other words, too much that was not obvious at the time.

Setting such criticism aside, however, it makes for a compelling sci-fi foundation. It especially makes sense in an environment in which the US government is receiving advice from non-terrestrials, being a more logical developmental program. A bold move, risking war, to handicap the Russian space program through an act of sabotage would have minimized the fallout from the delays, resulting in an environment well-suited to dramatic adventure in an RPG with just enough plausibility to succeed – as a piece of fiction.

Once again, it is the ongoing economic impact that makes the resulting Lunar Landing a significant-enough event to delineate the end of a socioeconomic era.

Themes Of The Pre-Digital Tech world

Having defined, however loosely, the boundary points of the era, the themes that dominate society and economics in the resulting period can be observed. I have to emphasize that these are not being identified from a perspective of assessing the ‘dominant themes’ of a defined span of history; instead, these themes are what give the era its cohesion, and define those end-points.

There are 12 of these themes to which I want to call attention.

Theme 1: Liberty Vs Collectivism Vs Authoritarianism

A hangover from the previous era is the conflict between the principles of individual liberty, collective welfare / security, and the abdication of liberty to perceived authority. The conflict between Business and Unions is an ongoing aspect of this broader theme; the political conflict between Democracy and Communism (in various forms) is another, that did not really exist prior to this era, and in its most overt form, one that is fully self-contained by it; and, of course, the perception of an authority greater than the will of the populace, to which individual liberty should be sacrificed, is both an element of the Democracy / Communist confrontation and of the earlier Fascism / Rest-of-the-world conflict.

Perhaps less obvious is that any form of ‘planned society’ – including those who abdicate personal liberty to the will of a religious authority, and those who call for a technocratic society – also falls under this heading. Such planned societies were popular concepts among sci-fi writers and futurists, and there was an actual political movement aimed at achieving one in the 1930s as an answer to the Great Depression (see Technocracy Movement.

Theme 2: Golden Hangover: A Mixed Blessing

There was a growing sentiment at the start of the era that the benefits of a Gold Standard or other form of fixed currency were not worth the liabilities. Such standards for national currencies can function reasonably effectively in isolation, but as soon as international trade enters the picture, problems arise. As explained previously, the Gold Standard is now considered responsible (at least in part) for the Great Depression becoming a global phenomenon rather than being confined to the USA. It was also my conjecture that it also played a significant part in creating the economic conditions that led to the rise of Fascism; blaming war reparations for those conditions now seems an oversimplification and superficial.

Throughout the early part of the era, governments would flirt with the concept of floating currencies as fixed valuations of currency came and went. By its end, the jury had made its call, and fixed currencies were largely relegated to the dustbin of history. The repeated turbulence of that transition would be another hallmark of the era.

In particular, World War II showed the extent to which industrial productivity was hamstrung by a fixed currency; in order to afford the war, without the now-evident problems of reparations, the US abandoned the Gold Standard (only to restore it at War’s end), but the writing was now on the wall for the concept.

That’s not to pretend that a floating currency doesn’t have its own problems, amongst them the temptation to run a deficit economy, spending tomorrow’s money to better one’s political today. When justifications for such spending are economic in nature – smoothng over rough economic waters, for example, by taking the top off anticipated future prosperity, or investing in creating the conditions necessary for such future prosperity – they can be justified; as soon as rationales move beyond these limits, however, cracks begin to show.

Currency controls are a hybrid option that has become more widely known of late, but ‘managed economies’ were largely viewed as a pipe-dream capturing the weaknesses of both systems through this period of time. Even now, the jury is still out on that front. During the era in question, a ‘responsive’ floating currency became the dominant choice, globally, despite the shortcomings.

Theme 3: Unlimited Resources

Although some were sounding warnings about limited natural resources through the latter part of the era, if not sooner, they were mostly ignored; both populations and governments operated under the presumption that there were unlimited resources waiting to be found.

No-one was so foolish as to deny that commercial quantities were clustered and concentrated in different parts of the world; this was viewed as the very foundation of international trade, and the basis of an ever-increasing standard of living.

Theme 4: Unlimited Opportunities

It followed that there were unlimited opportunities for those willing to seek them out, and this also colors international relations throughout the period. In particular, diplomacy became perceived as a means of achieving those opportunities in the post-war world.

Theme 5: Unbounded Optimism

The combination of the two meant that there was a perception that mankind was heading for a golden age, if only the horrors of extreme nationalism and atomic annihilation could be avoided. Much of the appeal of this era lies rooted in this perception, and it is still often viewed through rose-colored glasses because of it. This nostalgic preference for simpler times continues to be a political factor to this day; this lies at the heart of the MAGA movement, for example.

Theme 6: Legacy of the New Deal: Big Government

Throughout the preceding Age Of Electrification, the influence of Government had been waning, blamed for all sorts of social shortcomings. In particular, the failure of social engineering programs like Prohibition had highlighted the limitations of government. The Great Depression, and the need for government regulation, and the New Deal, combined to redefine the value of Government to the lives of the ordinary citizen.

Ongoing manifestations of this theme include the regulation / deregulation principles of many opposing political forces throughout this era, often characterized as Big vs Small government, and anti- vs pro- business conflicts. These competing social movements had existed long before this era began, and would continue long after it ended; what changed was the way in which they were perceived, both politically and by society at large.

In particular, progressive movements embraced the regulatory principle and conservative movements, the deregulatory principle. This is true not only of the Republicans and Democrats of US Politics; it manifests in the policies of many political parties in many countries around the world, and has become largely definitive of what those parties represent.

During the Pre-Digital Tech Age, Big Government and progressive movements dominate in the US, with conservative governments largely restricted to a social pattern of ‘two steps forward, one step back’. Many of the institutions and principles established in this era, and in the preceding Age Of Electrification, are still present and relevant today, though many have come under direct attack recently. The responsibilities accepted by governments and the institutions created to discharge them are characteristic elements of the era.

Theme 7: Delegated Responsibility

Are American readers familiar with the term “Nanny State“? It is more widely applied, and has many more interpretations in different parts of the world, than most readers will recognize, but in general it is held to describe a government that is perceived as overprotective of some segment of the nation under its authority. None can argue that there have been instances of overreach by governments in the past – Prohibition is the red-letter example. In general, the term is over-used, in my opinion – but there is a truth at the heart of it that manifests in the Pre-Digital Tech Age: the abdication of personal responsibility because the Government is there to act like a protective parent.

It can be argued that there is a line beyond which government protection should not extend, so that people are forced to stumble and fall and learn for themselves. The alternative is just as authoritarian as Fascism, albeit with a greater concern for the welfare of the citizens at its heart – a genuine Nanny State. I’m not going to try to debate that argument, or even take a stand on the issue, at least not in the course of this article; what matters in this context is not political philosophy, it is simply that the practice of delegating responsibility for personal safety of citizens begins in this era, and is characteristic of it.

Theme 8: The Power of Greed

Frequently cast as in opposition to protection of its citizens by Government is the ability of business, and individuals, to profit. In particular, the conservative position is to support business in an alleged environment in which that ability is constrained by excessive regulation. I think that this is a particularly short-sighted interpretation of Government regulation; you can’t get blood from a stone, and a smaller profit sustained over a much longer time-span will accumulate to a vastly greater sum. The real problem is impatience, the demand for immediate profit-gratification; make your money as quickly as possible, sell up, and hook your sleigh up to the next cometary rising star.

But that’s neither here nor there. In the context of this article, it is sufficient to note that shortsighted governments erode long-term protections to facilitate short-term satisfaction of greed; or, at least, that such satisfaction is the objective of short-sighted corporate executives, creating a perception – rightly or wrongly (probably both, depending on which example is drawn upon) – that a dominant social force is a conflict between business and the individual (which includes the customer). This perception is fostered throughout the era by politicians of all stripes for political advantage.

Theme 9: The Restraint of Greed

There is a principle in contract law that states that no agreement is legally-valid if there is an inequity in power between the parties. Thus, an agreement obtained under duress is legally invalid. This principle is frequently forced to apply well outside the boundaries of contract law, however – there are those who apply it to “Big Government” (implying that there is an inequality of power between government and those who elect them), and those who apply it to “Big Business” (implying that no contract with a commercial operation of any scale can ever be equitable). These interpretations give rise to “Sovereign Citizen” nonsense, but also give rise – through the delegation of protective responsibility of citizens to government authority – to the premise that it is a function of government to restrain the rapacious greed of large corporations.

This is the source of power of the belief that there is a conflict of interest between profits and customers, and that the maximizing of one must be detrimental to the other. This perception is at its height in this era, at least in some circles.

Theme 10: Regulation and Deregulation

These perceived tensions, often artificial in nature, give rise to the ongoing cycles of regulation and deregulation that have already been mentioned.

In this historical era, the forces of regulation are dominant, as already explained; short-term profiteering by corporations with no sense of responsibility to the public create a need for regulation that is hard to argue with. The problems generally arise through the implementation of regulation, and the inherent decrease in efficiency that results.

The forces advocating deregulation generally throw the baby out with the bathwater; rather than advocating the efficiency of regulation (not a very ‘sexy’ political position, but a responsible one), they favor complete deregulation because of the business and social costs of inefficient regulatory mechanisms.

Theme 11: Socialism Vs Authority

One can never completely ignore the lure of naked power, either; there are those who advocate against the welfare of others simply because it creates a pathway to power. When generalized into easy-to-digest soundbites, this becomes a conflict between Authority and Socialism, with the latter generally conflated with other political systems such as Communism. The polarizing effect of the Cold War pushes extremists into positions with respect to this perceived conflict. Although this line of argument had little impact in this era, because the focus was on the direct conflict of the Cold War, it has since become more tenable and overt as a political stratagem. But that didn’t stop politicians from trying, throughout this era, to paint any policy of which they didn’t approve as ‘socialist’, however accurate or inaccurate the characterization.

This frequently pushed their opponents into a position of being perceived as supporting policies and doctrines that they actually opposed, giving rise to the term “spin”. There were also times when public messaging would be subjected to “spin” as a defensive move. While this is a minor and secondary theme of this era, it starts here and will only grow worse in subsequent historical periods.

Theme 12: Anti-Fascist Hangover: Privatization

Finally, another minor theme that would become far more widely-applicable in subsequent eras is Privatization – the sale of a public utility or service contract to an outside entity that can be operated for a profit. In Australia, where the sugar rush of deficit economics was deemed by the culture to be unacceptable, this became a way of infusing treasuries with sizable chunks of cash; more importantly, by estimating the proceeds of such sales, even though they had not yet taken place, governments could spend the money in advance. This is deficit economics behind the curtain.

Citizens were rarely given advance notice or the ability to veto such sales; at best, some sort of guarantee of service standards could be demanded, for whatever they were worth.

It is noticeable, though, that many of the institutions privatized by various Australian governments were always in private hands in other nations. Locally, the attitude was that this guaranteed service delivery at the most affordable price; the anticipation was that service standards would slip, or the costs of those services would increase, or both. At first, there was little evidence of this, but those success stories were followed in time by others that were not so well-received, and still more that lived down to expectations. Those still lie in the future, beyond this era.

That is not to say that there were no examples of privatization elsewhere; there were. Because of the Big Government flavor of the era, though, I have a sense that most of them occurred afterwards: National carriers (airlines, train services), banks both central and not, telecommunications providers, city bus lines and metro rail services, health services, even prisons and energy grids. While the majority of these fall outside the extent of this era, there are some notable exceptions that demonstrate that this economic practice was as much a part of this era.

Fascist Germany privatized almost everything, in direct opposition to the public perception of the policies of the regime.

“It is a fact that the government of the National Socialist Party sold off public ownership in several state-owned firms in the middle of the 1930s. The firms belonged to a wide range of sectors: steel, mining, banking, local public utilities, shipyard, ship-lines, railways, etc. In addition to this, delivery of some public services produced by public administrations prior to the 1930s, especially social services and services related to work, was transferred to the private sector, mainly to several organizations within the Nazi Party.”

— Germa Bel, “Against The Mainstream: Privatization in 1930s Germany 1”, The Economic History Review, quoted by Wikipedia – Privatization.

Great Britain privatized its steel industry in the 1950s, and the West German government embarked on large-scale privatization, including sale of the majority stake in Volkswagen to small investors in public share offerings in 1961.

— Wikipedia, same page

Perhaps more than the actual practice, though, the era was characterized by ongoing threats of privatization. Governments through the era of electrification were increasingly perceived as the neutral power-broker forging balanced agreements between business owners and unions, and there was an ongoing perception of bias when the government itself was one of the parties to labor disputes, for obvious reasons; privatization was seen as a way to cut this Gordian knot. Other motivations would dominate the argument in the 1980s, and that might be one reason why so many acts of Privatization too place then.

It was also seen by some as a way to “shrink” Big Government, placing regulatory powers ‘where they belonged’ (in the hands of industry players), but in a broader context, the privatization debate was all about expectations of government, which were changing throughout this era.

Twelve themes, not all equal in impact or scope, but all characteristic of the era in one way or another.

Having erected the goal-posts and tied the backdrop to those pillars, we’re now in a position to see how those themes impacted history, and how history shaped those themes.

World War 2: Economics

Fascism was seen by many as the path of the economic future, so successful did it appear through the 1930s.

By late 1923, the Wiemar Republic of Germany was issuing two-trillion mark banknotes and postage stamps with a face value of fifty billion marks. The highest value banknote issued by the Wiemar government’s Reichsbank had a face value of 100 trillion marks (10^14; 100,000,000,000,000; 100 million million). At the height of the inflation, one US dollar was worth 4 trillion German marks. One of the firms printing these notes submitted an invoice for the work to the Reichsbank for 32,776,899,763,734,490,417.05 (3.28 × 10^19, roughly 33 quintillion) marks.

— Wikipedia, Hyperinflation

The history of this period in the Wiemar Republic is replete with stories of people turning up to buy a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full of banknotes; while these may be an exaggeration, they are close enough to characterize the impact of the Great Depression on the German economy. In 1923, prices of goods were doubling every two days because the purchasing power of the currency was devaluing so quickly.

Eventually, the currency was replaced with a new one that sliced twelve zeroes off the value and indexed the value of the new currency to the value of gold at the same rate as the old currency prior to the period of inflation; while there was some slippage of value, in general, the new currency held.

That alone wasn’t enough to restore prosperity, though, just to stop the slide. The period of ill-will toward the government that followed was instrumental in bringing the Nazi Party to power.

The fascists set about restoring economic vigor by selling off a range of significant publicly-owned utilities, and reinvesting the proceeds – a lot of it in military equipment, much of which was supposedly banned by the Versailles Treaty, but some of it in engineering and industrialization. And it worked, or seemed to – and that was what caught the attention of the rest of the world.

The Economic Truth of Fascism

What wasn’t appreciated at the time – in fact, was completely unknown until relatively recently, because the Nazis burnt almost all the records (for reasons that will become obvious) – was that the reality was a house of cards. While there is no doubt that Hitler and his fascists had ideological grounds for their repressive actions against various population segments, the money generated by the seizure or assets were enough to keep the regime’s economic heads above water, at least for a while.

But they were spending money that they didn’t have, and hiding the fact with every dirty bookkeeping trick under sun (and then hiding that fact by literally burning the books and issuing blanket statements of economic vitality with no substance behind them). Having spent big on a significant military, as much for the economic benefits of funneling cash into the industrial base as for any other reason, they now had no option but to use it.

Initial attacks were carried out with an ulterior motive: the banks were seized and any wealth within, confiscated. One source estimated that at the time of the invasion of Poland, the Reich had liquidity to pay its civil servants for no more than three weeks.

Once on the treadmill, every act of conquest had to be paid for with another, though each enlarged the industrial and economic base, slowly stabilizing the system.

So well-hidden was this economic reality that a myth of stolen / hidden Nazi gold remains in vogue even today; assuming that the economy was stable meant that all the stolen wealth had to have been hidden away somewhere, just like the stolen art and cultural artifacts. In reality, it was spent almost as fast as it rolled through the door of the counting-house, the ultimate game of economic smoke-and-mirrors.

World War 2: Nationalism

The war had many impacts and repercussions. Most of this is already well-known, so I’ll only hit a few high-points and connect a few inobvious dots that may have escaped popular perception.

The first of these was a profound impact on a sense of nationalism. Every nation affected by this experienced it a little differently. Malta resisted conquest with grit and determination that remained unmatched until the invasion of Ukraine a little over a year ago, and this remains a unifying point of pride to the entire small country. England pulled together to resist the Blitz; rationing persisted into the 1950s as a consequence of the war, and these were as responsible as any other factor for the downfall of the Churchill government, post-war. Notably, the damage inflicted on their manufacturing capacity permitted modernization that helped bring prosperity back. Denmark’s covert resistance and France’s more overt resistance movements became points of national pride, too, and helped stitch these countries back into unity far more quickly and resolutely than anyone could have predicted. Germany was flattened by the combined militaries of the allied powers, necessitating almost total refurbishment post-war; this investment eventually made West Germany prosperous enough to enable it to stand alone, post-War, and even to absorb East Germany. A new wave of modernization there made Germany the economic powerhouse that it is today.

Cold War

With the conclusion of the War, Russia went its own way, abrogating just about every agreement that Stalin had made at the Malta Conference. Russia created a web of puppets around itself that became the USSR. But everyone else was accustomed to thinking of the collective over parochial national interests – or, more correctly, perceived that without unity as a backdrop, those parochial interests were under threat. So they were strongly invested in the United Nations and NATO, when the latter arose in response to the Eastern Bloc. Subjugation vs Internationalism – the first brought a forced conformity, the latter brought the freedom to have national interests within the scope of the larger picture.

The cold war was as much about post-war unity and reactions to the Fascist Regime of Nazi Germany as British pride at having weathered the Blitz.

World War 2: Industrialization

I’ve touched on this already, but it’s worth adding to the discussion – war damages forced rebuilding of industrial infrastructure throughout Europe and Japan. This was never like-for-like; modernization was at least as cost-effective as simple replacement.

But the country that industrialized the most during the war was, arguably, the US, and it lost virtually nothing of its pre-existing industrial capability. What it discarded was a lot of its economic and social preconceptions and assumptions. At the height of the war, tanks and aircraft were rolling off production lines faster than anyone would have believed possible at the start of the conflict. In part, this was because people pulled together in a way that would never happen outside wartime; in part, it was because national pride had been deeply wounded by the affront of Pearl Harbor.

In 1939, total aircraft production for the US military was less than 3,000 planes. By the end of the war, America produced 300,000 planes. No war was more industrialized than World War II. It was a war won as much by machine shops as by machine guns.

Aircraft companies went from building a handful of planes at a time to building them by the thousands on assembly lines. Aircraft manufacturing went from a distant 41st place among American industries to first place in less than five years.

— Wikipedia, United States aircraft production during World War II.

Similar scales of production were achieved in the production of armored vehicles (see Wikipedia – American armored fighting vehicle production during World War II) and Naval production (refer Wikipedia – Naval history of World War II).

Post-war, the awareness of what was possible in terms of industrial production underpinned both expectations and policies for business, government, and workers. Neither of the first two groups listed made sufficient allowance for the unwillingness of workers to shoulder the economic burdens that had been acceptable during wartime; the coalition that had brought about the conditions that had achieved so much production quickly fell apart, eventually leading to confrontations. In time, more balanced positions were found on the key issues and more realistic targets were adopted, but even at the resulting diminished scale, the US was the world’s largest manufacturer and economy for the remainder of the era.

World War 2: Technology

There was a perception that technology advanced by leaps and bounds during World War I, but in that respect, the earlier conflict was blown out of the water by developments during WW2.

In the five years (or so) prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, there was FM radio, Nylon, the Z1 (the first freely programmable computer), Nuclear Fission and the Defibrillator.

During the war, the cavity magnetron (the root technology of both Radar and the Microwave Oven), Polyester, the V-2 rocket, the non-infectious viral vaccine, the Jet Engine and the Atomic Bomb. There were developments in all forms of armament, in tanks and armored vehicles, in troop transportation, in devices for remote sensing, navigation, communications, cryptography, surgical techniques, chemical medications, naval vessels, aircraft design, engines, small arms, anti-tank weaponry, bomb design, and engine technologies – and that list is not exhaustive. You can throw in everything from artificial fuels and fuel additives through to aerodynamics on top of that, and literally hundreds more – most of them little things that made some existing product or process just that little bit better or more efficient to use or manufacture..

While a few of these had only military applications, most of these developments would play prominent roles in the post-war world, both directly and as the foundations of technologies to come.

Post-war: Industry

Every time a technology was refined into a domestic application, it needed a manufacturing plant to deliver the resulting product to the customers waiting for it. While the industrial boom that may have been expected after the standards st during wartime may not have eventuated, the diversification that followed made up for it. This was another aspect of the ‘golden age’ perception of the 1950s.

Cold War Tech & Secrecy

Technological advance didn’t stop with the end of the war, of course. Fueled by the Cold War that officially started in 1947 but whose origins could be traced to late February 1946 and George F Kennan’s Long Telegram, discussion of which was instrumental in formulating post-war strategy against the Soviet Union.

Aside from the general drive to out-produce and out-advance the perceived enemy, there were continual efforts to safeguard existing secrets – and for the US, that started with Atomic Weapons and ended with anything else that could be obtained, or delivered, by espionage. Ongoing efforts were invested into protecting such secrets and developing technologies that could assist in the pursuit..

Paranoia in Nationalism

It was very easy to slip over the mark into paranoia in the intensity of the cold war environment. In the US, this led to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and Joseph McCarthy.

In England, they did their best not to fall into that rabbit hole, and – arguably – tried a little too hard; the exposure of the Cambridge Five struck their intelligence services like a thunderbolt, and – internally, at least – they became even more paranoid than the Americans, as shown by the extraordinary lengths to which they went during the Spycatcher incidents.

Once again, the manifestations may vary from nation to nation, but most were touched by cold war paranoia in one way or another.

Post-war Personal Prosperity

The more of something you make, the lower the unit price tends to become; there are all sorts of efficiencies that become possible through scale.

The lower the unit price of many things become, the more individuals from any given economic class can afford without significant increase in payment beyond compensating for inflation, of course.

The technology / industrial boom that followed the war thus manifested in a steadily-rising standard of living even for those in the lower rungs of the economy.

New Products: Home Tech

Of course, the higher your income bracket, the sooner you could afford the latest must-haves and the better the toys that you could afford, so there were distinct phases of technological adoption.

Non-portable Color TVs, for example, started off $500-$750 in the 1970s (when the technology was new). By the mid-80s, a decade later, a price somewhere in between those two would not only buy you a comparable TV, it would buy you one with stereo sound – despite the shrinkage of the dollar with inflation. These days, for a comparable unit, we’re talking USD $85 to $120 – and you can get a lot bigger and better, again despite all the shrinkage in the size of the dollar over the last 40 years and the massive improvement in display quality. In fact, if I correct for inflation, the price of a modern TV in 1985-dollars is $30-$40.

If it’s new, it costs a lot more. If it’s been around for a while, a new one costs a lot less, in relative terms.

That means that standard of living was rising faster than wages were, and that was a source of consumer confidence. Again, golden age, right?

The God Of Convenience

Somewhere along the line, somewhere in the 1950s, Convenience and comfort became the new Gods of home life. The scene in Back To The Future in which Alex’s grandfather puts the TV on wheels so that the family can watch Jackie Gleason while they eat will always exemplify this development to me, but there were many more manifestations – everything from remote controls to air-conditioning to auto-changing turntables to TV dinners.

This was another manifestation of the conspicuous rise in standard of living; simply having a capability was no longer enough, you had to have its usage or operation that little bit more convenient than it might have been, even if that cost a little more.

New Markets: Rise Of The Teenager

Those factors alone would have been enough to create prosperity for the business owner, but the 1940s also saw the rise of a newly-invented market – the teenager, initially characterized as a Bobby soxer (a female teenage fan of then-contemporary pop music, especially that of Frank Sinatra.

It wasn’t long before teenaged subcultures flourished. The concept that these subcultures might have their own product preferences and could be marketed to directly with products designed to appeal to them, not to children or to adults, took a little while to develop, but by the 1950s it was in full swing, both in retail and in society in general.

In order for a subculture to become a viable market, they have to have some earning capacity. There were two viable choices for teens looking to earn coin of the realm – they could work in the new Supermarkets, or they could work in a fast-food franchise, both of which boomed in the 1950s.

Supermarkets

Supermarkets evolved from the grocery stores of the 1930s and 40s. The primary point of differentiation was that customers took products directly from the shelves rather than interacting with a shopkeeper who could advise on product choice. The purchase was then completed by a cashier who totaled the payment owed, usually accompanied by a packer who placed purchases in bags to make them more convenient to carry.

The fact that product knowledge and judgment was not required made these roles tailor-made for teenagers, who cost a lot less to employ than an experienced grocer would demand in earnings. The speed and ease of shopping (and lack of waiting) also made them attractive in the new convenience-first environment. This also permitted a sharp rise in the variety of products on offer, so they were soon outperforming grocery stores on almost every front.

Fast Food

Fast food had been a ‘coming thing’ since 1916, or perhaps 1912, or maybe 1902, or even 1896 – but it didn’t really arrive until the first White Castle in 1921 or the first McDonald Brothers restaurants in the 1940s. And the milk bars of the 1950s swamped both – for a while, at least.

Being served food prepared by someone of similar age (and presumably tastes) proved a powerful marketing tool, but not a recognized one – teens were hired because they had to be paid less. Anything else was just a bonus!

Retail Outlets

A comparatively minor source of teen employment that should not be overlooked is working in the retail outlets that catered to the teen market. These were people who spoke the same language as the customers, with whom those customers could identify, and the marketing benefits were far more strongly recognized (if still not the dominant employment factor).

It’s an interesting question whether or not the teen market would have arisen spontaneously anyway, given the combination of factors that created the employment opportunities for the age group. The more cynical could suggest that, given a subculture (however unidentified) with cash in their pockets, people trying all kinds of methods of extracting that wealth would have arisen, and inevitably, one of them would have stumbled across the magic formula.

I’m not sure of the answer, but I’m completely confident that once stumbled across, the teenage market would be just as thoroughly and permanently embedded into the culture.

Distribution

The final factor that is needed for an economic boom is some method to convey product from maker to potential customer – mass distribution, in other words. This is where the New Deal paid unexpected post-war dividends; rail is constrained in its destination, and expensive to lay; it needs those costs to be amortized (“spread over”) multiple customers over a substantial period of time to recoup those expenses. On top of that, the motive power units were also expensive and took time to earn back the investment – but they were absolutely essential to earning anything from a railroad.

Roads are comparatively cheap (and come in a variety of standards with different price points), can be constructed relatively quickly, create a web or network of destinations, all of which are equally-accessible, and can be used by a basic vehicle that the road-builder doesn’t even need to supply!

While the major cities could be serviced more cheaply by rail, and a subsidiary road transport network, and a few places could be serviced by river traffic, road freight was the obvious solution then, as it largely is now.

Air freight was a restricted choice back then, though unit costs have come down with increasing services; but rising costs have begun to bite, and its my impression that air freight is right on the cusp of becoming less economic than road transit once again, save only internationally.

Okay, that gets me to the 1/3 mark, and about 40 minutes past deadline – which becomes an hour and 40 minutes once I allow for edits, spellchecking, etc. So the decision is made to split this article into three parts….

“Show, don’t tell” is a common maxim when it comes to literary entertainments, and something that has been gleefully expropriated as good advice for other media.

That includes TV, Movies, and, of course, Roleplaying Games.

I was thinking about that during the last week, and noting how much easier it was for the other two modern media that I mentioned.

After all, they can proceed from the premise that there is no one-to-one identification between star characters and the audience, permitting producers to put audiences in a privileged position with a flashback sequence, or a prologue sequence.

In the past, I have stolen this leaf out of the TV/Movie playbook to great effect, and have recommended the same to readers here at Campaign Mastery.

I’ve also built entire campaign infrastructures around the concept of “Show, don’t tell”, going so far as to give villains an initial appearance in-campaign purely to establish who they are and what they can do, and discussing the impact on campaign pacing at length.

Today, I’d like to take a fresh look at the whole question of “Show, don’t tell,” offering up some alternative techniques that may not be quite as obvious, and even showing that following the maxim is something that a GM can occasionally get away with not doing – if it’s done properly.

Buckle up, it might be a bumpy ride.

Flashback From Tomorrow

Imagine a crystal ball, a magic item that does nothing but show PCs what the GM wants them to see. What it shows has to be accurate and truthful, mind, but illusions and deceptions are capable of deceiving it, and so are player misinterpretations.

Or perhaps, it’s a one-off – a magic pool or portal that reveals “the past”.

There are two approaches to this technique: the first is to make it an intentional and recurring part of the plot structure within your campaign, and perhaps an entire phase of the campaign might be dedicated to obtaining the item.

The second is to have it be only intermittently available, or available regularly but with a severe cost attached (name me a mage who is prepared to sacrifice a point of INT to power the device, even occasionally), or as a singular one-off. Heck, you could even have a Deity drop by just to show the PCs what they need to know (for plot purposes), so long as you can provide a reasonable in-game justification for them doing so (“I’ve a substantial bet riding on this…”)

I actually got this idea from a Superman comic that I must have read back in the 60s or 70s – Supes heads back in time because, while their game rules won’t permit him to change history, they will permit him to observe it.

Narrative shifts to third person

So you have an eyewitness, or someone who has been able to reconstruct the events (even if only theoretically) who is an excellent storyteller, start to relate the story, but after an introductory paragraph or two, you throw in, “so clearly does [X] describe the scene that you can almost imagine you are there…”.

You then shift to a third person narrative, and start off by mentioning a sensory impression or two that are clearly not visual, but are more visceral, just to lend truth and gravitas to that statement, and describe the past events (complete with errors and distortions) as though the PCs were actually there – even to the point of permitting them to ask questions. They can interact with you, as GM, but not with any participants in the scene.

For fun, there have been a time or two in which a delusional or paranoid NPC has used this technique to give the PCs a front-row seat to moonbeams. Once, the players were not fooled, on a second time, they were completely taken in.

The Prologue Encounter

Once again, this comes in two flavors, the major and the minor.

The minor variant is an encounter added to the plot simply to give a critical character (probably but not necessarily the villain) a foundation.

The major variant is an entire adventure whose sole campaign-level function is to achieve that same end, of providing a foundation for the character in preparation for their role in the ‘main’ adventure.

In terms of building a consistent and comprehensive campaign, this often seems like the perfect solution – you create and display the building blocks and then start assembling them into structures and plotlines. But there are potential drawbacks that have to be considered.

First. the prologue encounter may not unfold as expected, or may go further than expected. This is what happened when I introduced Mortus in my superhero campaign – I had planned a short-term solution that would leave him around as a building block, but the players rejected that because it was only a short-term solution and found a more difficult solution that actually resolved the character’s main driving plotline. The resulting character is still floating around out there, and will still be able to participate in the main plot when it comes around, but in a significantly-different role – essentially, as an ally, and not an enemy. As explained at the time, I could have blocked their solution, but had no good reasons to do so, and realized (before it was too late) that the main plotline could survive the change – and so accepted the change in campaign plan.

But that was all fortuitous – it could just as easily have meant that the character could not play his part in the big picture that I intended to paint, and that would have placed the campaign in a far more precarious position. It would have left me with a difficult choice: block PC agency in an unreasonable way, or find a replacement for that building block, one that was inevitably going to be second-rate because this character had been deliberately designed to tick all the right boxes.

Second, the prologue may go beyond foreshadowing into ‘giving the game away’. Surprises and plot twists are an integral part of any campaign, and the suspense from not knowing what is going to happen is essential. The better a prologue establishes a character, the more that suspense can be undermined, especially once imaginative players start speculating. You can evade that problem by having the PCs present for only part of the ‘origin story’ of the building block, with a key transformative experience taking place behind the curtain in between character appearances – but you can pull that trick only so often before it becomes predictable and boring, and starts to undermine your credibility, and the credibility of the prologue, defeating the entire point of its existence.

Third, there is a pronounced impact on campaign pacing. Creating building blocks takes time, and its time in which the players can feel that they are simply treading water and not getting anywhere. If you need a slowdown in the pacing, that can be fine – for a little while. But it does need to be counterbalanced by definite and visible progress in other areas, and that won’t happen by accident. It can even reach the point where you need to introduce problems for the PCs to solve that are intended to play no part in the main campaign plotline, simply so that they have a sense of achieving something along the way. But that stretches a campaign out, too.

Finally, what do you do if the prologue adventure, and the character at its heart, falls flat? It’s happened to all of us from time to time. If their one-and-only appearance were to be in the main plotline which justifies their existence within the campaign, you can get away with this, though the results will be less than optimal; if it happens in a prologue, you may be forewarned in time to do something about the problem, but if your solution fails, the ultimate plotline – the important bit – will suffer.

So this is far from an absolute solution.

Tell without Show

Until this week, I never considered this a viable option. But here’s the thing: an RPG is not a TV show or a Movie or a book; it’s a medium that in some respects resembles those, but in other ways, is absolutely unique.

The players are used to information coming from the GM. Whether he puts that information into an interactive format like an encounter, or pretends to be someone else providing the information in a dialogue, or simple narrates the relevant backstory (assuming one of the PCs knows it), it still boils down to the GM talking and the PCs listening – at a metagame level.

As much as that can be seen as a handicap, a barrier to immersion, it can also be a liberating realization.

Simple Foreshadowing

Another technique that can be used is to foreshadow without demonstration.

The PCs come across a village whose central shrine or temple has exploded. No explanation given. No backstory, no warnings, no prophecies, nothing. They are asked to help out in relief efforts, they rescue a trapped NPC and make a quick side-trip to a neighboring hamlet to buy supplies, they maybe beat off an attack by bandits who want to take advantage of the situation, and they are on their way.

In the next major town, the same thing has happened, but relief efforts are well in hand. They haven’t heard about the first incident though, and think this is purely a local problem.

This primes the PCs for an encounter / adventure that confronts the agency responsible,and introduces that agency through its handiwork,without it ever making a direct appearance until the Main Event. It’s very old-school in a number of ways.

This approach definitely has it’s virtues, but it also comes with significant shortcomings. It’s relatively superficial, and that can be at odds with the importance to the campaign that the GM attaches to the villain. It can undermine verisimilitude. It applies a blowtorch to campaign pacing, turning it up to 11. And it bets the farm on the integrity of concept and the excellence of realization of the villain in question.

While it’s undoubtedly the easiest technique to employ, it’s quite possibly the hardest technique to do well.

Techniques in context

How does one select amongst the different techniques? Well, my general philosophy is always to base the decision on the pacing desired, but to mix it up. It’s better, in terms of realism, to slow the campaign a little and then have it lurch forward, only to slow again. All possible techniques are on the table, and the decision should be based on whatever is best for the campaign at that point in time.

Always take into account the player response – if they are expecting to make a big step forward in terms of the overall plotline, any slowing will only frustrate them. It’s better in this situation to give them a step forward and then a more significant slowdown – achieving the same overall pacing while giving them time to come to terms with the changes in circumstances.

The way you handle any given encounter will therefore vary significantly depending on when in the campaign it takes place – your pacing needs will be different in the start than in the middle, or the end.

Some plotlines / encounters / building blocks lend themselves more strongly to one particular technique than another, and that forces a choice on the GM: tolerate or integrate the incompatible pacing element, schedule the encounter for a time when the pacing element is compatible with the overall plan, or force the introduction into a non-optimal pattern that fits the overall campaign better at that time.

I’ve often said that there is an artistry to campaign planning that is poorly understood and under-appreciated, especially by those who do little or no planning. When you have multiple options, the choice between them can be sometimes made on logical grounds, but sometimes it will come down to instinct; put hundreds or thousands of such decisions together and you end up with a distinctly different ‘picture’. What is highlighted and what is hidden in shadows?

It Doesn’t End There: Elements Of Mysteries

Initially, that’s where I intended to end this article – a nice, snappy couple of thousand words, done and dusted. But then I happened to watch an episode of a TV Crime procedural (which one doesn’t matter), and was struck by the similarity between the problems faced by the RPG GM and those of the director of such a TV episode.

They often don’t have the luxury of lengthy prologues – indeed, some formats stipulate no prologues at all (and others stipulate no flashbacks, which are essentially ‘a prologue shifted to later in time’ in this context). They have critical information being delivered by a character telling, not showing. Those may not be the only similarities, but they are enough to be going on with, for now, because it means that the solutions employed by the TV shows may have validity when applied to an RPG.

Anatomy Of A Mystery Plot

Before getting into that, though, I think that a little homework is in order – a different way of looking at the components of a mystery plot that might be useful both to readers and to the analysis of the TV Detective solutions.

Above, we have a quick infographic that I threw together this morning that – properly analyzed – tells you almost everything you need to know about the successful execution of a mystery plot in an RPG.

Solution Layer

We start on the left-hand side, where layers of content are described. The second layer is the primary plot – it could be called the “Mystery Layer” but the mystery itself is frequently less important than the solution, so I chose “Solution Layer” instead.

Action Layer

On top of that, there is the “Action Layer”. Characters need to “do” something in the course of the plot, in fact, every PC should have some active role to play in addition to contributions to the solution of the mystery.

Personality Layer

On the other side is the Personality Layer, which comprises both reactions by the characters participating to events and circumstances (and the opportunity to express same), and personality / character -driven content that is completely unrelated to the mystery.

Note that this content often cherry-picks aspects of the personality of the character, and that’s fine; no-one expects the entire personality to be on-show.

Background Layer

At the bottom, appropriately, is the most fundamental layer of them all – the background layer, which consists of any layers of the game world or its past (including past events surrounding the PCs) that other layers reference. As with the personality layer, content from this layer referenced during the adventure is heavily cherry-picked, and should only contain material that is, or appears, relevant to the plot or the character aspects on display.

Connective Sub-layers

These layers are all bound together by a web of connective sub-layers, usually implied rather than stated outright (usually because the connections are obvious at the time). If a character is distrustful of charity (personality layer) and this drives his behavior in the plot (solution layer), the association – the relevance – between the two is self-evident. And any history that explains that character trait is similarly bound to the other two datums by obvious connections.

The Solution Layer is dissected to the right.

Conundrum

Starting from the bottom, we have the initial conundrum – the puzzle or mystery that is to drive the plotline. There is usually only one of these, but there can be exceptions to that rule. As soon as you introduce a second one, though, the players will immediately suspect a hidden connection between the two, and will strive mightily to force the solution into a mold that creates such a connection, even if none actually exists.

Leads and Investigations

That initial mystery leads to some preliminary leads, and the investigation of same. These, in turn, lead to more substantial leads, the investigation of which leads to actual pieces of the solution. In most Detective shows, these have to be provable in court; and there can be no illegalities along the way; these constraints are an opposition force as significant as the actual target of the investigation.

Solution Pieces

These are the provable facts that bind one solution to the initial conundrum together, and only one solution. Any facts that dispute that solution have been explained away, leaving a proven solution, however unlikely that solution may have initially appeared.

Outlining a Mystery

There’s a reason Detective TV shows are called “Police Procedurals” – they are as much or more about the process of following a lead to a piece of the solution as about anything else.

The trick is making those procedures and processes interesting, even if they lead to dead ends, despite their being repeated every – single – time in every – single – episode.

There are four components to such investigations – there’s the starting point, the circumstances, the technique, and the outcome.

The Starting Point

NCIS is great for starting points that are unusual or distinctive enough to create interest that can be sustained through the course of an investigation. The more unusual or impossible the starting point, the more interesting the mystery. That’s the whole reason that locked room mysteries are an ongoing sub-genre of mystery!

The Circumstances

No investigation takes place in isolation – they all happen somewhere, and often involve interactions with the people who populate that somewhere. On top of that, the method of investigation can often be dictated by the circumstances, and may involve the potential for random encounters with the public, and those can be made more ‘entertaining’ at the GM’s whim.

I love dropping localities into my campaigns where (by the standards of the campaign) everyone is a ‘weirdo’ in some way or another. Whenever a plotline or an investigation leads into that locality, it’s an open license to have fun with it.

And sometimes, those plot threads can be significant, too.

The Technique

I commented above that the nature of the circumstances can often dictate the investigative technique, and that’s true, up to a point. Beyond that point, the entire choice of technique belongs to the PCs; the GM has no say in it.

This can pose a problem insofar as the PCs choose a technique that doesn’t lead to the desired (from a plot perspective) outcome. The GM has two basic options when this happens – he can compound up some plot thread that takes the PCs to the outcome desired by some indirect route; or he can use die rolls to lead the PCs to an alternate technique.

The latter is rarely, if ever, the best choice. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, though.

This problem usually results from the players either having some fixed notion of what they ultimate solution is going to be and shaping their investigation to suit, or from the players failing to think of the more appropriate technique (or dismissing the appropriate technique when they shouldn’t).

Recognizing the cause is important; if the first, confirmation bias can set in if the GM goes along with the ‘preliminary theory’ of the players. If the latter, then this isn’t an issue, but time pressure can be (under some circumstances). The decision of what to do about this choice of technique has to derive from the cause, and the urgency of implementing that decision is also dictated by its origins.

The Outcome

Finally, even a straightforward procedural step (perhaps dressed up by interactions with an interesting and colorful NPC – “circumstances” again) is forgiven if the outcome of the investigation is interesting enough.

As a general rule of thumb, the more boring the outcome is going to be, the more effort I put into dressing up the circumstances or injecting something “fun” into the mix – just to sustain interest in the plot.

Ideally, the outcome will be the most significant element, followed by the investigative process, followed by either of the other elements.

Preliminary Step

In creating a mystery plotline, the GM usually has the initial conundrum and the solution, and needs to plot a pathway that leads from start to finish in an interesting way. The fact that you don’t need to lead to the final answer all in one hit, just to a piece of that solution makes things easier.

That solution must include any attempt to cover-up their guilt or the crime by the guilty party or by a third party (and why, in that case) and how that obstruction can be overcome.

The first step is to spell out these key pieces of the solution, and the initial conundrum.

Investigation Structure

I next list the preliminary leads – the things that the characters will know they can investigate purely from the initial conundrum and any relevant background.

I order these in the sequence that they seem most likely to be followed up on by the PCs, allowing for the possibility of them splitting up to tackle the problem in multiple directions at once.

I then list, separately, the pieces of the final solution – who did what, to whom, when, how, and why, and why this wasn’t obvious from the start.

This permits me to construct sequences – a preliminary lead to a substantial lead to a piece of the solution. I continue until either every piece of the solution has been achieved, or I run out of preliminary leads.

Those sequences are often someone telling a PC something, and that means that “Show, Don’t Tell” is engaged as an operative principle. So now is the time to select an appropriate technique to impart the information.

There’s a song from the 1970s that just came up on my playlist that’s relevant: The Kursaal Flyers Little Does She Know, the chorus of which goes:

“Little does she know
That I know
That she knows
That she’s cheating on me.”

Think about that for a moment. There’s an action (cheating) with a reaction (she knows) that the singer has observed. That reaction is a mystery, one that he has solved by deducing the cause, and observing the behavior of the cheating partner. It’s not big enough or complicated enough to be an RPG plotline on its own, but as a connection from preliminary lead through investigation to solution, it’s a valid example of the sort of plot thread that binds the elements of investigating a mystery together.

If I have solution pieces left over

If this happens, then I need more leads. There are three possible sources: spin-offs from other leads, unrelated sources coming forward, or active developments.

Spin-offs from other leads

This is often the best source to employ, because it creates a plausible coincidence. Too often, coincidence is not plausible in an RPG or literary construct, however realistic it might be.

As a consequence, there is often a fatalistic element to RPGs in which everyone and everything has a purpose or a destiny.

Once the players decide that’s the case, it doesn’t matter what the GM does, he will be perceived as running a plot train in service of that purpose or destiny (I know, I’ve been there).

So the injection of a little obvious coincidence like this helps balance the ‘books’ and avoid that problem.

Unrelated Sources coming forward

Someone goes to the media or the police or whoever and makes a statement that deepens the mystery or complicates the circumstances, but inherently creates new preliminary leads for the investigators to follow.

This is the other side of ‘plausible coincidence’ – a coincidence of timing that (at least initially) can be viewed as working against the investigators but which ultimately leads to the solution to the mystery.

One such preliminary lead is always “How do they know what they claim to know?” and another is “Is what they claim to know accurate?” Those two are always part of such package deals. “How do they know [the victim] / [the accused]” is often a third – and those are all on top of anything they actually have to say.

Active Developments

Finally, it’s all too common to have criminals who just sit pat during an investigation and wait to get caught.

No, no, no! The environment and investigation should be dynamic and changing as the plot unfolds. At the very least, the criminals should try to keep tabs on the status of the investigation (‘Columbo’ uses this all the time – the ‘most helpful’ person is usually the criminal, being helpful so as to keep themselves close to the investigation).

But they should also undertake a clean-up of loose ends, and take advantage of any opportunity to obscure their involvement.

All of these activities have the potential to open up new leads for the investigators to follow. The most likely suspects after the most helpful NPCs are always those doing the most to obstruct the investigation, or someone connected to them.

By the time I have gone through the leads that I already have listed and added any secondary ones that seem interesting or reasonable, the mystery can often swing from having insufficient leads to having too many!

If I have preliminary leads left over

There are two courses of action to take with respect to excess preliminary leads: first, have them be dead ends, or second, use them as alternate paths to substantial leads or even other preliminary leads.

I always prefer the latter, because it means that there’s an alternative set of pathways for the PCs to follow without my resorting to “Make an INT Roll” (or, in the Heroes system, a “Deduction” roll) in order to get a clue that the PC should be able to see, but that the player can’t.

An alternative to that “Make A Roll” is to have an NPC associated with the PCs make a suggestion, or puncture an invalid assumption that is blocking the solution path from the player’s vision. But I’m also careful to have some of these lead to dead ends, so that the players never treat NPC pronouncements as “Ex Cathedra” pronouncements.

Action Sequences

Next, I go through the investigation and look for action sequences that I can insert. Most of these don’t have to happen; some of them can provide the link between ‘preliminary leads’ and ‘substantial leads’. I make sure that every PC has some occasion when they have to either do something or make some important decision, and the ramifications.

Personality Layer

There are two different aspects of the personality layer of plot to take into account. The first is personal plotlines, and the second is personality reactions.

Personal Plotlines

These are less common in fantasy campaigns, but not unheard of even there. If you have PC plotlines that are entirely separate from those of the collective group, then you should look to advance one for each PC in the course of the adventure. That frequently means that the start or finish of the adventure, but I look hard for opportunities to break out of that restriction.

A status check for the PCs in the Adventurer’s Club is illustrative:

• Dr Hawke: is renovating a disused hospital in New York into a Sanatorium, while dodging attempts by the City’s Coroner to appoint Hawke as his successor, and managing his relationship with Honeydew Halliday, an NPC.
• Steffan Bednarczic: raising his daughter, Anya, trying to keep her out of trouble, while navigating his relationship with Melanie Chen (an NPC) and her family while keeping a low profile. Other members of the Club have ‘adopted’ Anya and are training her in various disciplines, and one is pushing her to try out for the Olympic Pistol team, she’s so good a shot.
• Fr O’Malley: Beset by impending changes in his circumstances as the New York archbishop hands the diocese formerly serviced by O’Malley and his recently-deceased friend Fr Donelly over to a new priest, a firebrand named Fr Alvarez, while engaging in the lives of his regular parishioners and supporting the charities that help them.

There’s one other, but the player hasn’t been in contact for a year now, so we’re preparing to write them out of the ongoing campaign.

Personality Reactions

It’s so much easier with the Hero System because the things that a character cares about are spelled out by the owner during character construction. But, even without that, a GM can learn a lot by observation of the PCs and listening to the players talk about them.

There are always going to be plot developments and circumstances and interactions that a character cares more about than others – things that will push one or more of their ‘buttons’, causing them to become more engaged and enmeshed in the plot.

I go over everything that I have in the plot so far and look for such triggers, and what impact they might have. I also look for circumstances that might frustrate the player (more than the character) and give them an opportunity to vent or calm down, as necessary.

Background Layer

Most of the background should already be available but there’s always something that needs more detail because it’s appearing for the first time in this adventure and is relevant to one of the cast of NPCs involved in the mystery.

Often, the biggest problem is distilling everything that you could talk about into just those background elements that you need to impart, or to remind the players of. Hint: You can almost always be more ruthless than your first instincts when culling irrelevancies.

A logical topology

The results are a logical topology, a view of the structure of the adventure. There’s always a temptation to translate that into a sequential structure, which is easier to play because it simply runs from A to B to C, but your players will often void any such script.

Thus, while you can and should package isolated elements together so that you can run them efficiently, with sufficient color and personality, but let the players decide how they are going to navigate the maze.

Wrap-up

It seems that I’ve imparted most of the tips that I’ve gleaned from Police Procedurals as I’ve traveled through this topological perspective on mysteries. That’s fine, and a consequence of the relatively unstructured approach taken to this article.

A mystery adventure is like a campaign in miniature; all the elements of a campaign are present, like timing, and sequence, and player agency, and an awareness of pacing and how to manipulate it.

That means that campaigns are good for practicing the structural processes that you need to employ for the creation of a satisfying mystery, and a mystery plotline can be a useful small-scale rehearsal for the processes that you need to construct a successful campaign.

So pay particular attention to the problems and solutions that you encounter in running mystery plotlines, and in particular to how the different techniques of “Show, Don’t Tell” impact the pace, and you’ll get better at creating (and running) both adventures of this type and campaigns overall!

Because this is literally the second half of the article I posted last week, I’ll forego all the usual introductory bits and pieces and dive straight in from where I left off.

Industrial Economics III: War & Depression

Many of the economic influences that defined the era came together in the First World War, and the consequences of that conflict combined with the rest to create the Great Depression. Even in hindsight, it is hard to see how the Depression could have been avoided, though it was far deeper and more severe than it had to be. And, in between, there were the roaring twenties and prohibition.

The links that bind these events together are both tenuous and inescapable, and we met almost all of them in the previous part of this article.

Internationalism

There is one major exception to that statement which needs mention before proceeding. Even though the Empires of the 19th century had experienced ripple effects from local or national events or trends, as a general rule the problems of one location were largely compartmentalized.

It was only really with the advent of the 20th century that international relations became so entangled and intertwined that local or regional issues could become multinational and international in scope, spreading beyond those directly involved.

Because these links were seen as heightening prosperity for all during the good times, the downsides were not fully recognized until it was too late to avoid them; and even had that not been the case, the fact that the overall trend was positive probably made the trade-off too attractive to resist.

There was also the widespread belief that intermingling made serious wars less likely, by attacking directly the perceived root causes of wider conflict. The transition from British Empire to British Commonwealth, and from a colonial mindset to one in which it was entirely acceptable for mature ‘colonies’ like Australia to transition to independence within a broader political union added to, and accentuated, the perception that the world had found solutions to problems that would have previously only been resolved with wars of independence.

In truth, despite the numerous wars since, this belief persists as an undercurrent attitude even into modern times. This is demonstrated by the widespread criticism of Russia over the current invasion of Ukraine; there is an element of shock at the barbarity of an invasion, so at odds with the spirit of Glasnost that was embraced in the 1980s. This has fueled much of the outrage over the invasion.

Pre-War

The first 13 years of the 20th century did little to dispel the optimism described above. The biggest conflict of the first decade of the century was the Russo-Japanese war, and it had little impact outside of the participants. The other great Empires were competitive, especially in terms of the scramble for Africa; again, while there were numerous local conflicts as a result of these imperial ambitions, for those in less remote parts of the Empires, they were little more than news headlines in terms of their impact on personal lives.

In modern times, it was the 1905 Russian Revolution that would come to be viewed as the most significant conflict of the era, but disasters – both natural and man-made – would have the greater impact on ordinary lives, and even those would be overshadowed by more positive effects from the spread of new technologies and the rise of mass literature.

When the 1910s began, there was no real indication that this decade would not be ‘more of the same’ from start to finish.

World War I

The First World War is widely regarded as starting with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but there had been a period of rising tension prior to that triggering event. The assassination was carried out in pursuit of Serbian independence, which was a cause that the Archduke was known to favor; it is entirely possible that, had he survived to assume the Imperial Throne, he would have overseen a transition to a Commonwealth-style political umbrella that granted independence to many of the nations within the Empire, but that’s just empty speculation.

Forgotten Nobility

In many nations, Nobility had long been extracted from the day-to-day political decisions, and there were conversations from time to time as to whether they were even necessary in the ‘modern day’. The usual consensus reached by such discussions was that they provided a valuable continuity of institution from one government to another, functioned as a brake against over-ambitious national authorities, and were still valuable in diplomatic terms.

It was widely held that the nobility had little day-to-day impact on the lives of the citizens of their empires, at least in comparison to the Kings and Rulers of past eras. Even Napoleon Bonaparte had greater direct impact on his citizens, his reign introducing legal precepts that are still widely accepted.

To most citizens, Nobility was like a natural feature of the landscape, like a mountain, or like the weather – just there, but of little relevance beyond the occasional inconvenience. To those who saw deeper, the Nobility was an abstract vessel into which people poured their trust and ideals, which they then expected to see reflected back on a grander scale; touchstones of national or Imperial unity of huge symbolic import, but forgotten except when the Nobility failed this test in some way.

This truth was laid more bare than ever before when treaties and alliances flowed through diplomatic channels following the Archduke’s assassination like dominoes. Russia was drawn into the conflict almost immediately, followed by Germany, France, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, and only grew from there.

And yet, ironically, the ultimate trigger belied this attitude; it was the assassination of a member of this ruling social class, deemed so irrelevant to daily life, that would so profoundly reshape the lives of so many people around the world.

Revolutionary Science

War is widely regarded as a hotbed for technological advancement, a perception that started in the First World War and was driven home by the Second.

And, in a way, this is justified – but my personal impression is that the biggest impact of war on technological progress is that money is directed into R&D at a furious rate, a ‘cold-war-within-a-war’ that drives this advance.

At every point, in such conflicts, it is sought to nullify an enemies’ advantages while taking maximum benefit of their vulnerabilities. Where those advantages are technological in nature, so must the response be (or so it was deemed at the time); and that only made it natural to look for technological answers to the other questions, too.

It was also perceived that tactical problems were susceptible to technological solution that could not be resolved in any other way. The stalemate of the Western Front and its trenches gave rise to Tanks and Poison Gas, for example.

The biggest impact of technology is not on the battlefield, in my opinion; it is in the economic infrastructure that supports the warring parties, both as technologies are developed that will manifest in other forms within the economy, and in the logistics of their deployment, and indirectly by growing that economy to include the research, design, manufacture, and distribution of the new technology. In particular, there is the impact post-war of examining the newly developed technologies and searching for ‘peacetime applications’ (assuming that such were not inherently obvious to begin with).

Mass-produced Soldiers

Although early deployments, especially of conscripts, can be characterized as amateur and even shambolic, one of the most significant technological impacts that transpired during the course of the war is often unheralded – the application of mass-production techniques to the training of soldiers.

Initially, training was just as shambolic; I can never forget the naive enthusiasm with which the early British soldiers embarked, believing that the war would be over in just a few months, and the contrast this makes with the gruesome realities of trench warfare in an age of machine guns, landmines, and artillery.

Harsh realities and brutal lessons soon began to bite, and practicalities became the driver of innovations in training content and processes. The US, when it entered the war, started with a more theoretical approach, disregarding many of those harsh lessons in the arrogant light of assumed American superiority. They, too, had to be schooled by the practical realities when they got to the front lines – but, to their credit, I think they learned those lessons better and faster than the other participants, perhaps because distance imparted a greater objectivity, perhaps because the weight of tradition did not bear down on them quite so heavily.

Post-war, the training methods concerned would be used to revolutionize education and skills training. Sometimes, this infiltration and assimilation would be rapid, sometimes it would be slow, but the general principles would become universal by the time of the Second world war.

Wartime Finances

I spent quite a bit of time examining the consequences, advantages, and liabilities of a Gold Standard in Part 4 of this series, but that was written from a peace-time perspective, focusing on supply-side economic consequences.

Everything in an economy – both strengths and weaknesses – gets amplified by a war, even without direct and indirect war effects on the economy.

A gold standard means that a government has a fixed amount that it can spend without changing monetary policy – raising taxes, or issuing debt instruments. The latter are only useful if someone both wants to buy them and can afford to do so.

It’s not entirely inaccurate to describe WWI as a holding action fought until the economic investment by one side exceeded that of the enemy by enough to resolve the conflict.

The entry of the US into the war didn’t just deliver a mass of new men to the Western front; it added the mammoth US Economy and its manufacturing capability to the resources being marshaled by the Allies. There was nothing close to equivalent that the Central Powers could deploy as a counterbalance; barring stupid mistakes and sheer bad luck on a protracted scale, victory became eventually inevitable from that moment onward.

Personally, I think this perception is an oversimplified, but nevertheless captures an often-overlooked aspect of the story of the war. As soon as the US entered the war, the conduct of that war became about negotiating positions in the eventual peace talks, and what the ultimate price of victory – or loss – would be.

War Reparations

The fact that the participants all had to go into debt – to near ruinous levels – in order to finance the Great War is often overlooked as a factor in the scale and timetable of War Reparations demanded by the Allies in the Treaty Of Versailles.

Another factor was an assumption that the economies of the world – even those of the defeated enemies – could return to a peacetime prosperity without experiencing any consequences of note. And, if that had been the case, the reparations demanded might even have been affordable.

The role played by these reparations as the seeds of the next great conflict is well-known; not enough attention is paid to the reasons for the harshness of the demands.

Note that these reasons don’t have to have been correct; those participating in the peace treaty negotiations believed them, and that is enough.

In a nutshell, the allies wanted to be fully reimbursed for the expenses incurred in fighting the war, and were less concerned with bleeding the losers white than in restoring their own economic foundations. As a short-term position, this is hard to argue with; in the longer term, the attitude was short-sighted at best.

The Roaring Twenties

The post-war attitude was so optimistic that it made the pre-war enthusiasm seem quite lukewarm in comparison. America, in particular, thought itself saviors of the world, infallible and wise. The war outcome showed that there was at least some merit to this attitude, but not as much as was thought at the time.

And, in their hubris and pie-eyed optimism, they enacted the largest social reform intervention the world had ever seen – Prohibition.

The pages on Organized Crime linked to in the first part of this article tell the story of the consequences. America’s government may have been ready to embrace sobriety; America’s populace were not, with the exception of a handful of optimists.

Smuggling and distribution of illegal alcohol became insanely profitable, and money creates power. Rivalries exploded.

It’s a truism that people with power change; their tolerance for slights and offenses, real or perceived, thins, and their reflex responses to such affronts are amplified by their power. If you’ve been carefully educated in the effects of power and the reality of consequences, these problems can be overcome; but the latest band of Nouveau Riche not only had all the elements of the trope down pat, they punctuated them with automatic weapons.

By the time the Prohibition experiment wound down, Organized Crime had established itself in many nooks and corners of the American economy, from which they would be extremely difficult to dislodge. The smartest mob bosses took their wealth and turned (mostly) legitimate; others fled to Cuba, from where they could not be extradited; and, one by one, Federal authorities or gang violence got the rest.

The Seeds of Depression

If World War I brought many preconceptions crashing down, the Great Depression was no less traumatic.

The first thing that you have to learn about the Depression is that it was felt almost everywhere; the second is that the depth, duration, and dates of those effects vary from one country to another.

The actual downturn in the United States was only three or four years in duration, but the consequences and resulting pain was experienced until 1939, a full decade.

Causes

There are two classic explanations and several alternative theories that attempt to describe the causes of the Great Depression.

The current consensus of the Keynesian (demand-driven) hypothesis is that a large-scale loss of confidence led to a sudden reduction in consumption and investment spending. This theory suggests that the stock market crash of X was more of a symptom than a cause.

Monetarist theories agree, up to a point, but hold that the Depression started as an ordinary Recession, but the shrinking money supply deepened the short-term emergency into a deeper crisis. In other words, they see it as a banking crisis which caused a general reduction of available credit and a string of bankruptcies.

My Take

I’m not wedded to any one theory. I think they are all simplifications of a crisis that had many stages and knock-on effects.

In my view, it starts prior to the infamous stock market crash with stock instability over several months following a small crash on March 25th, 1929. This was made worse by the sale of shares to small investors over the preceding decade, and the issuing of loans to fund these purchases. Credit laws, fueled by boundless optimism and greed, meant that borrowed money was easier to come by than it had ever been, and the steady growth of the stock market made it seem like anyone who didn’t borrow to invest had economic rocks in their heads.

In mid-October, nervous investors began to liquidate their assets, driving the stock market lower; this convinced them that they were doing the right thing, and the demands to sell entered a state of positive feedback. Finally, on Friday, October 4th, the market crashed 11% at the opening bell.

The opportunity to restore confidence over the weekend was lost as more people became convinced that sticking it out might be the right thing to do in theory, but they couldn’t afford to do so. On Monday, there was another 12% drop and on Tuesday, another 11% fall.

Thousands of investors were ruined, and billions of dollars had been lost; many stocks could not be sold at any price.

The market recovered 12% on Wednesday, but the damage had been done.

— Wikipedia, The Great Depression

There was a period of recovery from mid-November 1929 until April 17 of 1930, but then a fresh decline began.

Thousands of businesses would close over the next few months even if they had survived the initial disruption, throwing millions out of work. This made the banks nervous, and so they began tightening up on credit practices, and pursuing those who who already owed them money – who, of course, no longer had the money to repay their debts.

Smoot-Hawley

But that took time to have an impact. In the meantime, the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in June, 1930.

Ostensibly aimed at protecting the American economy as the Depression began to take root, it backfired enormously.

— Wikipedia, same source page

Some even think that the Depression was caused by this backfire. Two thirds of economists in 1995 agreed that at the very least, it made matters worse. It caused a sharp decline in international trade and retaliatory tariffs, import quotas, and exchange controls.

Normally, International trade would have shielded participating economies from the worst effects of a local downturn by giving investors something about which they could be confident – the result might have been stock market turbulence, but some stocks would have gone up, helping to stabilize the system.

Instead, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act exported the pain of the depression to other countries around the world, and took away the last prop holding up the US economy.

Bank Failures

In December, 1930, the crisis hit a new panic point as a run began on the Bank of United States (a private operation that had no connection to the US Government). A run happens when depositors grow concerned that the bank doesn’t, or will not, have the money to pay them if they withdraw their money.

This causes many of them to withdraw their money, and the resulting loss of liquidity takes a bank that may have been financially sound and puts it under dire threat of collapse.

The rising number of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and unrepayed loans resulting from people losing both incomes and ‘nest eggs’ were the obvious cause of the belief in this particular case.

Unable to pay out to all its creditors, the bank failed. It wasn’t the only one; over the last two months of 1930, no less than 608 banks closed. But it was the largest; one third of the $550 million in deposits were lost, deepening the financial crisis.

The Gold Standard

The Gold Standard only made things worse, as Gold Prices in directly-affected countries caused Gold holdings to be moved to countries that were not directly affected.

This caused the value of their currencies to crash, inflicting the Depression upon their economies via a different mechanism – but the end result was the same.

The only way to prevent this was to inflict your own damage to your economy, in effect masking a healthy underlying economy with an overlay of confidence-sapping monetary policy.

But the worst effects were felt in the US. From April 17, 1930, until July 8, 1932, the market lost 89% of its value. By 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%.

(Further details are far too complicated to fit within the scope of this article).

In Germany & Britain

The depression was especially harsh in Germany, where entire industries began to close down, triggering bank failures despite propping up from international sources.

Part of the problem were the ongoing reparations, which some other countries (notably France) were relying on to boost their own economies out of trouble.

The crisis spread from Germany to Romania and Hungary even as it worsened domestically.

The world financial crisis next began to overwhelm Britain as investors from around the world began to withdraw their gold from London at a rate of 2.5 million pounds sterling worth per day. Credits from the Bank of France and Federal Reserve Bank of New York slowed but didn’t arrest the decay.

A political crisis arose as a result, one which almost brought down the MacDonald government. MacDonald himself wanted to resign, but King George V insisted that he remain and head up a new all-party coalition government. Most of the opposition parties signed up for the coalition, along with a handful of the elected government, but the majority of MacDonald’s party denounced him as a traitor for his involvement. The coalition took Britain off the Gold Standard, and consequently, Britain suffered less than the other major countries from the effects of the Depression.

You can read more about these events at this Wikipedia link.

Recovery

In most countries, recovery from the Great Depression started in 1933, but in many, it was a slow process. Unemployment in the US was still 15% in 1940, for example.

There is no consensus as to the cause of the recovery, and in particular, the role played by the New Deal. As with the cause of the crisis, I suspect that analysis are seeking a simple, “pure” explanation, when the reality is more nuanced.

The New Deal

The New Deal was basically the US government spending a lot of money on infrastructure, creating jobs in the process, and acting to support people in the meantime. Some of the jobs were undoubtedly mere placeholders, but many were more substantial.

At the same time, temporary policies were established to reinflate the economy, and reforms instituted to protect from the vulnerability in the banking sector that had made everything so much worse. Those temporary policies caused a small recession in their own right when they were wound up, and so did the Banking Act of 1935 which forced the banks to retain greater reserves.

There were a lot of measures in the New Deal, but some general principles stand out.

In Service Of The People

The government was firmly established as being in the service of the people as a whole. Republicans and Business lobbyists have been attempting to undo this, ever since; they have succeeded in some areas, but have failed in others. In particular, attempts to wind back Social Security have been doomed to failure. It’s also worth noting that systematic dilution of the credit protections put in place by the New Deal are considered responsible for the GFC, because what took place in that financial crisis was exactly what the policies weakened were supposed to protect against.

In Service Of Business

The government also established itself as being in the business of regulating business, but beyond protecting the populace from side effects of business, and regulating the labor market, staying out of the way as much as possible.

Bread & Circuses

FDR’s fireside chats were a key component of the New Deal, the means by which he buoyed spirits and restored confidence. But they also used new Technology (radio) to bypass the Newspapers and speak directly to the American people.

This also acknowledged the rise of the media as a new industry, one that would be hugely influential in the decades to come, though that is unlikely to have formed part of his motivation.

The New Demographic II: The Black Vote

The 15th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibited denying a black male citizen the right to vote based on ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude’ in 1870. In theory, this was extended to Black Women in 1920, but effectively were blocked from exercising this right until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The new voters had an immediate impact in many jurisdictions, especially in the South, where black voters turned out in numbers to elect non-whites to positions in state legislatures. Records show that these new representatives made positive contributions, and several economic and social indicators began to improve.

As a direct response, various forms of voting restriction were gradually implemented at a state level over the next several decades. Within a generation, usually a decade or less, these progressive elements had been effectively barred by restricting the Black Vote, and the progress that had been made was regressing.

In United States v. Reese (1876), the Court upheld voting requirements, such as literacy tests, which do not explicitly discriminate on the basis of race. Jim Crow laws enforcing legal racial segregation at the state and local level in the Southern United States were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by Black people during the Reconstruction Era.

— Wikipedia, Black Suffrage in the United States

Civil Rights movements started in 1905 with the formation of the Niagara Movement by a group of Black Activists. Other such groups followed, but the Civil Rights movement would not come to full effect until the 1950s.

In the meantime, a series of small victories, defeats, and legal skirmishes were fought.

In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court struck down a grandfather clause that functionally exempted only white people from literacy tests.

The Court ruled against white primaries in Nixon v. Herndon (1927) and Nixon v. Condon (1932), upheld [them]in Grovey v. Townsend (1935), and finally banned them with Smith v. Allwright (1944) and Terry v. Adams (1953).

In Breedlove v. Suttles (1937), the Court upheld the constitutionality of a poll tax requirement for voting.

— Wikipedia, same source page

The resulting laws would remain on the books until the 24th Amendment banned poll tax requirements for Federal elections, and the Supreme Court ruled against state Poll Tax requirements at the State level in Harper v Virginia State Board Of Elections (1966)..

A plan to redraw the political boundary lines of Tuskegee, Alabama was struck down by the Supreme Court in Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960).

The struggle for electoral rights would be ongoing through the rest of this era, culminating many years later, as the above landmarks show. This, of course, is another representation of the principle of individual powers overriding those of the Government, a theme throughout the era.

In-Game Economics: Pulp (continued)

The Great Depression had several repercussions, among them the forfeiture of prestige by the Entrepreneurs and descendants of Robber Barons.

This doesn’t really fit with the ethos and atmosphere of a Pulp campaign, so one of the critical historical changes made in setting the Adventurer’s Club in the 1930s was to weaken the impact of the Depression significantly, while not throwing away the entirety of what had taken place.

But history is not this isolated narrative thread and that; we are continually confronted by questions of the domino effects of that change.

For example, in our history, labor unions get started in 1935; without the stimulus to business necessitated by the Depression, would that have been delayed or would the stronger sense of optimism have accelerated the process?

We had already established the presence of a very strong Teamster’s Union in New York City, with implied connections to Organized Crime (but nothing proven). So that argues in favor of answer #2, but it might have been just a local phenomenon, so it didn’t answer the question definitively.

As usual, we obfuscated and deferred the question until an adventure made the answer clear through the needs of a pulp plot. We are currently working on a plotline that will probably commence later in the year that contains a definitive answer.

The Needs Of Adventure

That’s an important principle to note – don’t decide on consequences until you need them, and then choose the answer that best fits your adventure needs.

Another example, because I can: The Depression was instrumental in the Nazi Party coming to power in Germany. We wanted the Nazis to be around because they make such dandy Villains in a Pulp campaign. So we needed the Depression in Germany to be (almost) as bad as in our world despite its causation being reduced in intensity.

So we made the French more upset over their losses during WWI, demanding reparations be maintained as much for spite as for economic need; and we decided that because the Depression was not as severe, a shortsighted USA might not offer the assistance noted above.

Since Depressions are as much a psychological phenomena as they are economic, we decided that this would be enough.

But this gives rise to a serious follow-up question: would the timeline of World War II be slowed or accelerated by these changes?

After some serious discussion, we decided that it was probably going to be delayed a little, because there would be less urgency. Weakening the Depression impacts in Germany as much as possible while still bringing the Nazis to power results in a more powerful German industrialist group, who would need to be won over – and who could supply us with the occasional non-Nazi German villain (or hero) in the meantime. We’ve never done anything with that concept yet, but it’s just waiting for the right adventure idea to present itself.

The Room To Adventure

If there’s no immediate plot need to dictate terms, and you can’t defer the question (perhaps because it will impact on the background of a PC or important NPC), we let ourselves make the choice that provides the maximum scope for adventure going forward.

Dark Spots

Finally, blanket statements like “The Depression was not as severe, and so the concept of ‘the Person with enough wealth and resources to go adventuring’ is more viable” are all well and good, but we always try to reserve the right to have ‘dark spots’ and ‘spot fires’ where circumstances were worse – possibly even worse than our history relates, if that is more useful.

General Principles

The above examples also reveal a couple of other broad principles.

• As a general rule, you can’t make things much better without impacting on the backgrounds of PCs, and you can’t make things too much worse, either.
• A general guide is to make things just bad enough to create the environment you need for adventurousness to be optimized, and no worse.
• A number of circumstances can swing either way, so if there’s something that particularly offends you, you can do something about it. For example, we decided that the Supreme Court had been a lot more proactive in striking down Black suffrage restrictions, significantly weakening discrimination in the American South – but pushing the KKK into more ‘Pulp Villainous’ responses. Don’t make knee-jerk assumptions, consider both alternatives carefully.
• Finally, look very hard at the underlying assumptions of your game world. If Weird Tech works, contemplate the economic and social impacts, and what you might need to put in place to restrict those impacts to manageable scales.

In-Game Economics: Sci-Fi

Some people date Sci-Fi to Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. My preference is an earlier story that some may have heard of by the unprepossessing Mary Shelley.

None of those early SF archetypes work well as Sci-Fi in an RPG-campaign sense. Frankenstein can work in a horror-genre campaign, and they can all work in a Pulp campaign

But this era saw the rise of Space Opera, back when there were no limitations to what was technologically possible in the imagination. Later eras would have more accurate information to work with, but would also be constrained by the technology that had been proven to work.

Such campaigns aren’t for every player or GM – they demand a certain level of freewheeling but controlled imagination. But if the mixture is right, such campaigns can be a wonderland.

A handful of general principles to keep in mind:

Laws are made to be broken

Forget what physics says is possible or not possible. Forget what established engineering practice tells you is required in order to achieve something.

That does not mean that there will not be restrictions or consequences; there will be, and they should be logical, given the assumptions your technology is making.

Go re-read the Lensman series, or the Skylark Of Space series, or just about any E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, for that matter. Watch Star Wars again.

The Wikipedia page on Space Opera may be helpful, but I disagree with elements of it (especially parts of their list of representative examples), so take the contents with a grain of salt, and use your own imagination. Keep your internal ‘game physics’ self-consistent, and above all, have fun.

This sort of game should be about the problems and opportunities of the era, writ impossibly large, not about the solutions to those problems and the consequences of taking the opportunities that we know.

Money Is Infinite

No-one ever runs out of money in a Space Opera. They will run out of Rhodium or Tantalum first.

But that doesn’t mean that it grows on trees, or that it can buy you anything you want; generally, it’s so freely available because it can’t solve every problem or satisfy every need.

There is an exception to the above principles – money is freely available for one of everything, but extremely hard to come by for two.

Resources are plentiful

Another truism is that there’s plenty of everything out there somewhere, you just have to go out and find it. Bigger and Better are only ever limited by your imagination.

In fact, “Bigger” and “Better” are almost always synonymous. “Bigger” may not be “Better” necessarily, but “Better” is almost always “Bigger”.

There are plenty of people, there’s plenty of money, and there are plenty of resources out there for the taking/earning. The decisive limitation is skill and the ability to use it – not everyone should or will have what it takes, while some (on both sides) have a surfeit.

The Trend To Tomorrow

Don’t take your eyes off the bigger picture. Read anything you can get your hands on regarding how people from the era (through to the 1960s/70s) saw the future – not the science fiction, but the serious speculation.

When I was in high school, I had a book, “The Next 10,000 Years” by Adrian Berry (it’s fairly hard to come by now). I don’t know what happened to my copy, it vanished at some point, probably lent to someone, but it massively fired my imagination at the time. Would it still have the same impact?
I don’t know, I haven’t read it in more than 40 years – but I think it says something that I still remember it!

In-Game Economics: Steampunk

You may be wondering what Steampunk is doing here. After all, the previous age was “The Age Of Steam”.

Well, I was thinking about it when outlining this section and it occurred to me that in most Steampunk settings that I have heard about, the steam-based technology was already well-developed and ubiquitous- In fact, it’s everywhere.

And that doesn’t describe the Age of Steam – it described the period just after it, the early days of electrification – and that’s this era.

Besides that point, I have a couple of tips that I think worth offering for the genre.

The Ubiquity of Steam

The first one leads directly from the point already made – look around at the technology of the 1920s-30s, and try to think of a way to emulate it using “steam”-tech. Early Heinlein, where spaceships are controlled by mechanical cams (described in detail in Rocketship Galileo, for example) will help.

Look at anything you can find on the limitations of steam technology – why the internal combustion engine is more suited to motor vehicles, for example – and then ‘invent’ a way to overcome the critical limitations.

Non-humans for Humans

Something that I used when the PCs in my superhero campaign were in “Steampunk Mexico” a while back – replace people in ordinary roles with a blend of non-humans and steampunk-tech-enhanced humans. Find ways to turn the resulting advantages (natural or artificial) into achieving a better performance at their job, whatever it might be.

Inventors are Unstable Geniuses

There should also be a small infusion from Cyberpunk – the people who develop the Tech will have the latest and greatest. And they will be driven to make it better, if not downright obsessive.

Furthermore, there’s usually a reason for them being so driven. The inventor that I featured in “Steampunk Mexico” had survived a skiing accident in which she almost died, and had been maimed. She found the ‘replacement parts’ available to be inadequate, so she studied and experimented and started to design better. Along the way, she realized that some of her discarded ideas could be useful for others, and a new career was born.

Strange Tech

Weirdness should also be commonplace, usually attached to some myth or legend. The people in a Steampunk environment should think outside the box at every opportunity, and that should lead to weird solutions to commonplace problems.

The End Of An Era: The rise of fascism

As I said at the very outset, there are so many possible endpoints for this era that it’s almost impossible to pick one that is absolutely, definitively, correct.

After trying (and being unsatisfied) with a couple of possibilities, I decided that it was best to have this era and the next overlap to a certain extent.

That being the case, the chosen end-point of this era doesn’t especially matter – the transition to the next will be gradual, but eventually complete.

So the next era deals with World War 2 and the rise and fall of Fascism. But first, I’ll take some time to write something different next week.

Join me then!

In part 1:

1. Introduction
2. General Concepts and A Model Economy
3. The Economics of an Absolute Monarchy (The Early Medieval)

In part 2:

4. The Economics of Limited Monarchies (The Later Medieval & Renaissance)
5. In-Game Economics: Fantasy Games

In Part 3:

6. The Renaissance, revisited
7. Pre-Industrial Economics I: The Age of Exploration
8. Pre-Industrial Economics II: The Age of Sail

In Part 4

9. Industrial Economies I: The Age Of Steam
10. In-game Economics: Gaslight-era

In this part:

11. Industrial Economics II: The Age Of Electrification (last week)
12. Industrial Economics III: War & Depression
13. In-Game Economics: Pulp
14. In-Game Economics: Sci-fi
15. In-Game Economics: Steampunk

Planned for parts 6-7:

16. Tech Economics I: The Gold Standard
17. Tech Economics II: Resources & Regulation
18. Tech Economics III: Inflation & Hyper-inflation
19. Tech Economics IV: Commercialism, Deregulation, Privatization, & Greed

Planned for parts 8-10:

21. Digital Economics
22. Post-Pandemic Economics
23. In-Game Economics: Modern
24. Future Economics I: Dystopian
25. In-Game Economics: Dystopian Futures
26. Future Economics I: Utopian
27. In-Game Economics: Utopian Futures
28. In-Game Economics: Space Opera