Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Economic Collapse

[Kobajagrande]

Concerning the economy:

1. You should definately go with the energy crisis. Sudden economic expansion brought by new technologies caused expenditure of fossil fuels; renewable energy sources are limited and usage of biofuel to sustain economic growth caused food prices to go up.

2. The first sign of economic meltdown would be rampart inflation, leading into hyperinflation. The world government solution (them being not that creative) would be a return to the gold standard. And then you could just as well have a unified world currency, and call it credits, or banknor, or whateer. Money gets further concentrated in megacorps.

3. One of the consequences of weakening of states would be loss of the agriculture subsidies. As raw materials raise in price, food and clothing (cotton alone becomes 2-5 times more expensive) become even more expensive. This could mean more profits for Africa and Asia, but megacorps are quick to buy their agricultural production.

4. With all that in mind, and with unemployment rate going through the roof, it should be considered how do the majority of the people survive. They can't count on any sort of social aid from the governments. In the developing world today, most of the poor survive by having some homemade goods - a small farm where they produce food for personal use - which supplements their income (if any). That's not likely to be an option if you live in megapolises. Scavaging and recycling should be the primary means of survival for the largest percentage of population.

[K]

Concerning the economy:

1. You should definately go with the energy crisis. Sudden economic expansion brought by new technologies caused expenditure of fossil fuels; renewable energy sources are limited and usage of biofuel to sustain economic growth caused food prices to go up.

Fuel prices going up cause all prices to go up since everything is put on a truck or boat to be shipped. Enemy action to shatter power supplies and roads can lead to food riots as foodstuffs rot in the warehouses, further driving up prices.

4. With all that in mind, and with unemployment rate going through the roof, it should be considered how do the majority of the people survive. They can't count on any sort of social aid from the governments. In the developing world today, most of the poor survive by having some homemade goods - a small farm where they produce food for personal use - which supplements their income (if any). That's not likely to be an option if you live in megapolises. Scavaging and recycling should be the primary means of survival for the largest percentage of population.

I expect it will be a lot like Russia where people do things micro-local like drop a car engine into the river to generate power for their apartment building. With emerging tech like 3-d printers, micro-manufacturing can fill the gap where globalization fails.

Once micro-local commerce channels for goods and foodstuffs are in place, the market for anything except certain goods becomes harder to do. I expect only things which require materials like rare earths will be the fodder for mega-corps. That, and things that require massive collaboration like OSs.

[Kobajagrande]

Fuel prices going up cause all prices to go up since everything is put on a truck or boat to be shipped. Enemy action to shatter power supplies and roads can lead to food riots as foodstuffs rot in the warehouses, further driving up prices.

Oh, sure, that's a given, but food needs to get a special mention in an energy crisis scenario, because the price will be influenced by so many factors.

I expect it will be a lot like Russia where people do things micro-local like drop a car engine into the river to generate power for their apartment building. With emerging tech like 3-d printers, micro-manufacturing can fill the gap where globalization fails.

I'm sceptical toward using tech as a solution to a problem in an energy crisis scenario, since well... Everything becomes defined by the lack of energy. Energy becomes a bottleneck. Suddenly, you can no longer produce more of it, but you hit an upper limit and start redistributing it according to some list of priorities. And I suppose megacorps' facilities and high-level appartment buildings would be rather highly-placed on such lists, where the "3d printer a random anon uses to build his furniture for his shitty slums appartment" would be rather low on the list.

Not to say you have a serious lack of other resources as well. The raw materials still have to come out of somewhere.

[K]

I expect it will be a lot like Russia where people do things micro-local like drop a car engine into the river to generate power for their apartment building. With emerging tech like 3-d printers, micro-manufacturing can fill the gap where globalization fails.

I'm sceptical toward using tech as a solution to a problem in an energy crisis scenario, since well... Everything becomes defined by the lack of energy. Energy becomes a bottleneck. Suddenly, you can no longer produce more of it, but you hit an upper limit and start redistributing it according to some list of priorities. And I suppose megacorps' facilities and high-level appartment buildings would be rather highly-placed on such lists, where the "3d printer a random anon uses to build his furniture for his shitty slums appartment" would be rather low on the list.

Not to say you have a serious lack of other resources as well. The raw materials still have to come out of somewhere.

This is why I mentioned the apartment power-generation scenario(which is a real-life thing I read about). If you aren't worried about being efficient and are just worried about generating any power at all, all kinds of power-generation become possible. People can reinvent the steam engine for power generation and burn trash if it comes down to it.

Resources are also not an issue if you simply use whatever is available. Current 3-d printers use things like iron dust, and in a decaying post-industrial society that crap is so common you can't even sell it.

Toss in things like plastics made out of plants (also currently available) and you can set up a micro-economy easily.

The things you can't do is things like semiconductors or complex things that require factories and experts to make like teflon.

[Korwin]

More musings on the virus did it.

So the Sun got more Active an accelerated the global warning. People got displaced, New York is under water, etc.

The increases radiation created an new Virus. It doesnt kill people, but alters the brain chemistry. Deliriums, delusions, paranoia, etc.
Some people got into a symbiotic relationship with the virus and with it they got powers ie. Magic. But its still dangerous, to much magic and it still causes insanity.

They tried to cure it, but the Virus causes an deadly allergic reaction to antibiotica in bis host.

The President of the USA tried an atomic first strike against China, but got gunned down at the last moment by his security. Some of the smaller A-Powers fired their Arsenal at other countries under Command of their insane leaders.

Now there

[A Man In Black]

The mints are in the places they actually are: Washington DC; Philadelphia, Fort Knox, Kentucky; West Point, New York; San Francisco; and Denver. These are the sources of money and the default capitals of the new organizational regions.

Fort Knox and the DC Mint headquarters don't actually print/coin money in the real world.

[Korwin]

Now here aren't any alive who don't have some control over the virus.
Some do have more control, the mages. But everyone has the virus. And sometimes the ones who use the virus to much, still goes crazy.

[A Man In Black]

More musings on the virus did it.

So the Sun got more Active an accelerated the global warning. People got displaced, New York is under water, etc.

The increases radiation created an new Virus. It doesnt kill people, but alters the brain chemistry. Deliriums, delusions, paranoia, etc.
Some people got into a symbiotic relationship with the virus and with it they got powers ie. Magic. But its still dangerous, to much magic and it still causes insanity.

This is basically the premise of Cybergeneration.

[Username17]

Fort Knox and the DC Mint headquarters don't actually print/coin money in the real world.

Yes, but they have the capability to do so, which means that in a post-federal government world where Chicago needed some kind of currency, they would draft Fort Knox into actually minting something for them to use.

2. The first sign of economic meltdown would be rampart inflation, leading into hyperinflation. The world government solution (them being not that creative) would be a return to the gold standard. And then you could just as well have a unified world currency, and call it credits, or banknor, or whateer. Money gets further concentrated in megacorps.

This is a frequently asserted idea, but it's totally wrong. Many economic meltdowns don't get to hyperinflation for a long time, if ever. When you have an economic downturn (for whatever reason), less people are employed. Less employed people means less demand, which means less competition for goods and services - causing price stagnation or even deflation. Hyperinflation comes from a lack of confidence in the government to continue existing or a lack of confidence in the government to pay its own debts in the foreseeable future coupled with a belief that the government in question is going to voluntarily radically devalue in order to rectify its accounts.

Greece is insolvent, but their currency is spiraling up in value. Check it out. The prostrate position of the economy and round after round of grinding, contractionary austerity have left their GDP shrinking even in nominal terms almost every quarter. And that makes the currency more expensive, because it is harder to get. Supply and demand still apply, so when the economy shrinks and it is hard to find currency, that increases the cost of currency. Which manifests itself as stagnant or lower costs of goods and services.

So while eventually you hit a point of no return and a bout of hyperinflation followed by an actual voiding of the currency, that doesn't happen until the consensus is that the government is done for and not coming back. So if political gridlock sinks the federal government's ability to act or even pay its bills, there is no hyper inflation at that point. Even when new elections happen and the federal government's finances can't be reconciled by the incoming politicians (or the election is contested and things fizzle around without a mandate), hyper inflation still wouldn't be on the table.

Indeed, grinding poverty and deflationary debt spirals would be on the table for 8 or 10 years before people actually noticed that the American federal government wasn't coming back and greenbacks weren't going to be backed by anything in the future. And that is the point at which dollars would transition rapidly to worthless paper through the intermediary of ten million percent inflation. But the transition wouldn't even be that long, since by the time dollars started becoming worthless, the Federal Reserve would have been off its mandate for a solid decade, making actual dollars pretty rare. So there wouldn't really be a time when a hamburger cost $3,000,000 r something, because there wouldn't be any $10,000 notes printed at any point in the process.

So there would be years and years of rising unemployment during which dollars would become more and more scarce, and more and more people would be doing bullshit odd jobs for barter. And during that period, prices would barely move. And then when the "run" started, it would be incredibly quick, where a smaller and smaller number of people would be betting on longer and longer odds that the dollars would regain value and charging stupidly ridiculous amounts of "money" for things. And then it would be over and people would go a mixture of full barter and foreign currency (at very low prices, since foreign currency would be so hard to get), and then local governments would start getting the regional mints to make new currencies backed by regional authorities.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

Now as for Miami merging with Cuba and getting Puerto Rico thrown into the mix, why not? Miami has been trying to conquer Cuba for forty years, the moment that governments in Washington and Havana stopped being able to stop them from doing that, they'd just go through with it.

Totally reasonable. I like the despicable idea of Miami running plantations and whatever the hell else is dehumanizing out on the islands and immigrating the lucky Carribeans out of those hellholes to go work in Floridian mansions, because Florida is a despicable place.

I had just read, "Caribbean League" and assumed it was some all-for-one-and-one-for-all scenario, which didn't make sense to me with Florida and Miami thrown into the mix.

[fectin]

K is totally right about laying down the wasteland tiles. That should be done fairly early in the process. However, I can't condone "global cooling" or anything else done that is "wildly counterintuitive for no purpose other than irony" because you're already stretching suspension of disbelief really hard by having magic and cyberpunk. If you throw in contrarion events just to fuck with the reader's expectations, you're spending suspension of belief that you can't afford for a joke that won't be funny for very long.

Irony is why cooling is attractive, not why it's necessary.

1) You need some emergent event which screws with the entire world. Otherwise, you have a world which is exactly like today + magic.
2) Global cooling has many benefits. Not all of them are unique (you could get similar effects from having the atmosphere be toxic from pollution), but it's a nice set:
- Need to be near civilization for heat
- Company enclaves make sense
- Currency makes sense
- punker setting (not grimdark though)
- etc.
3) Good intentions is a much more believable reason for catastrophe than mustache twirling or bad luck.
4) This messes up the globe all at once, without making any one superpower the villain, but destroys faith in all of them.
5) You don't have to argue about how far global warming has progressed, or whether there's an ocean in Kansas.
6) Delicious irony makes this solution attractive.[/img]

[A Man In Black]

Greece is insolvent, but their currency is spiraling up in value. Check it out.

I don't know a lot about economics, but I don't think Greece has any power to inflate the euro, so I don't think that's a very good example.

[Josh_Kablack]

And people will regard currency from Kentucky as foreign or even counterfeit if you try to spend it in the Denver zone.

I doubt that.

The obvious post-collapse currency of Kentucky will still be widely accepted.

[sabs]

I believe http://mbrdistillery.com/products.aspx
is a much more appropriate currency

[Username17]

Greece is insolvent, but their currency is spiraling up in value. Check it out.

I don't know a lot about economics, but I don't think Greece has any power to inflate the euro, so I don't think that's a very good example.

Actually, that's exactly why it's such a great example. Greece doesn't have the power to set its own monetary policy, which means that it can't flood its people with currency to fight unemployment. Then you see the natural effects of economic downturns on currency prices: an increase in currency value. The opposite of hyperinflation.

If they had control of their printing presses, they would be tempted to flood currency markets wit drachmas in order to reduce unemployment and spike inflation (thereby reducing the real value of their debt). But they can't do that, so the price of their currency keeps rising as the crisis continues.

This is an extremely analogous situation to a "temporarily" dissolved federal government. No federal monetary policy (because you have no federal government) is pretty similar to having no federal monetary policy (because you ceded control over your currency to a bunch of Germans).

The people wringing their hands about how we turned into Greece or are going to turn into Greece or something are factually wrong about today. But if the government was actually paralyzed and couldn't pass a budget for several years running, then we really would be Helenistic.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

I believe http://mbrdistillery.com/products.aspx
is a much more appropriate currency

Wouldn't know. That stuff is impossible to get around here, at least before the PA LCB collapses in a massive corporate-privatization scam.

[sabs]

Fucking Pennsylvania Liquor Board.
BYOB causes people to drink more, not less.

[TheFlatline]

Similarly, in magic-cyberpunk-land, I'd know most of the magic for controlling the planet's weather. I'd just need several billion dollars to actually buy the foci, build and close a gigantic magic circle, assemble all the ritual components, and cast the thing. It's not a problem that I'd know that because I'd need a major government behind me to fund it.

Sigh...

I repeat. If magic is so fucking powerful that it can control the weather over the entire planet, why bother with technology? The bang for the buck for magic is *so* much more than what technology can offer, if I'm sitting on a billion dollars, and I have a choice between tech and magic, I'll choose magic every time. It's simply better in this scenario.

And I'm sick of magic wank syndrome. We already have Shadowrun sucking on the magic cock. We're supposed to be avoiding the problems that Shadowrun introduces, and right now a big problem is "why bother with technology? Magic is better." You're starting at that problem and going downhill from there.

Also: Magical fucking the world up isn't cool. It's cliche.

[fectin]

I repeat. If magic is so fucking powerful that it can control the weather over the entire planet, why bother with technology?
Also: Magical fucking the world up isn't cool. It's cliche.

Technology already controls the weather, today. Nukes, CO2 emissions, all the cool propellants, heck, even contrails. If magic is unable to even affect the weather, magic is objectively inferior.

[Vebyast]

I repeat. If magic is so fucking powerful that it can control the weather over the entire planet, why bother with technology? The bang for the buck for magic is *so* much more than what technology can offer, if I'm sitting on a billion dollars, and I have a choice between tech and magic, I'll choose magic every time. It's simply better in this scenario.

And I'm sick of magic wank syndrome. We already have Shadowrun sucking on the magic cock. We're supposed to be avoiding the problems that Shadowrun introduces, and right now a big problem is "why bother with technology? Magic is better." You're starting at that problem and going downhill from there.

Also: Magical fucking the world up isn't cool. It's cliche.

Ok, I see what you mean now. My only exposure to shadowrun is what's on this board, and arguments don't make sense to me when they're based on prior knowledge that I don't have.

Magic can be anywhere we want compared to technology, especially if we have nanofabs and genetic engineering. For one quick example, Neal Stephenson wrote a book (Zodiac) that explored the accidental release of industrial bacteria; they were designed to manufacture some nasty but useful chlorine compounds under controlled conditions, but ended up turning the NY harbor into a toxic waste dump after hitching a ride out in someone's digestive system. Similarly, some kid up in Canada grew bugs that ate plastic grocery bags a few years ago, and if those got out of control all of our stuff would start dissolving.

We need wastelands, if only for there to be places for outlaws and PCs to tool around. We need large geographic regions which are so hostile to mankind that they are no longer inhabited. That means that we're going to be pulling in nukes, advanced technology, or magic, and it really doesn't matter which one we pick because they're all stupendously cliche. I picked the one that got the most objectives done at once.

---

Ok, brainstorming more ways to trigger global economic and political collapse.

GitS-style braincases are developed early on. All of the politicians and military commanders get them first, because they're in charge. Someone cracks the US president, the Chinese premiere, and a few other heads of state, and subtly dicks around with public policy until the whole thing falls apart.

Democracy in the US falls apart after media manipulation by one of the parties gives them enough power to start messing with the constitution. By the time the population convinces the military to put things back in order, faith in the government has completely failed, the economy is on an irreversible path into the crapper, and international relations are strained. The US collapses and defaults on everything, and the rest of the civilized world follows suit.

Small gamma-ray burst fries every satellite in orbit, then causes a huge solar flare that lights the world's power lines on fire. Every government in the world bankrupts itself fixing its electrical grid and telecoms.

[Antumbra]

Small gamma-ray burst fries every satellite in orbit, then causes a huge solar flare that lights the world's power lines on fire. Every government in the world bankrupts itself fixing its electrical grid and telecoms.

How about this: they actually solved the hell out of the Energy Crisis. Which is why the world gets fucked up so bad.

Because it's solved by Orbital Solar (or Fusion or whatever) Satellites that transmit the power to earth via massive microwave beams. They're hardened against solar flares, but in the same way that Fukushima was hardened against earthquakes and flooding. Some survive, but losing +60% of your satellites and power production in one go is an apocalypse by any measure. Perhaps one gets the Cowboy Bebop plotline of getting creative with its maser.

It might give a good reason for an inter-corporate organisation like the CC - to manage the remaining microwave satellites and occasionally Thor Shot an upstart.

[Username17]

We have different currency regions, and you can even take it upon yourself to crash the value of one currency or another. But we still need an international "Reserve Currency" that prices in the book can actually be in.

Are there any objections to using the IMF's shadow currency: the Special Drawing Right?

It has the advantage that the acronym is "SpDR" so people can call them "Spiders". Also, it starts with an S, so the symbol can be a "$", which makes it easy to type on an American keyboard.

-Username17

[kzt]

Grams of gold?

[Username17]

Grams of gold?

Impractical for any of a number of reasons. A gram of gold is a lot of money - over forty dollars last I checked - so it's a big bill and it's hard to buy a sandwich with it. But a gram of paper money is one bill, so for really large purchases, the gram of gold is too small. You still need hundreds for stuff, an gold grams can't do it.

And then there's the niggling problem where there isn't enough gold. Like, in the world. That is solvable. We could have El Dorado flood the market with tonnes and tonnes of gold, or we could have the "Steinberg Process" that alchemizes Lead into Gold, or any of a number of things that would put the amount of gold up to where it would need to be in order to work as a reserve currency for nine billion people. But then gold's scarcity would be questioned, and people wouldn't trust gold as a reserve currency any more.

Gold is basically a currency that only comes in $44 bills. People would certainly trade in it, but the default currency is never going to be gAus.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

What about going from global warming to global cooling?
Glaciers growing down north america again, closing off oil and gas fields in the region for example . . and you'd get barren tundra like wastelands too . .