Economic Stagnation?

[Xeratul]

Oh, if we are talking about responsibility, it would be most responsible to conscript every person in the world, abolish currency and force everyone to either make swords, use them or grow food for the armies. You are talking about the end of the world here, enslave everyone to make sure it doesn't happen.

 

But the world doesn't work that way, you have the whole 'what is the point of saving the world if you have already destroyed it' mentality. So let him build schools founded on unguided research, it is the only way to make truely groundbreaking discoveries.

 

*sigh* Given that Rand isn't the dictator of the entire world,I'm going to ignore your first paragraph. As to your second, the schools will not contribute any groundbreaking discoveries until after the last battle. So don't waste resources creating some system that is really only symbolic.

[Xeratul]

Oh, if we are talking about responsibility, it would be most responsible to conscript every person in the world, abolish currency and force everyone to either make swords, use them or grow food for the armies. You are talking about the end of the world here, enslave everyone to make sure it doesn't happen.

 

But the world doesn't work that way, you have the whole 'what is the point of saving the world if you have already destroyed it' mentality. So let him build schools founded on unguided research, it is the only way to make truely groundbreaking discoveries.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with your 1st paragraph approach to Tarmon Gai'don with regard to the Seanchan. This is a strategy they should utilize.

[Mr Ares]

I apologize for not reading every post, but this technological stagnation (and really economic balance in my opinion) is the premise of a lot of fantasy. I tend to believe that social and technological stagnation is a necessary evil of magic. If you think about it, what reason is there to develop complicated medical science when when our best medical efforts in the real world pale in comparison to those of Nynaeve and the Yellow Ajah.

The Yellow Ajah are not always available. Only 1% of the population can channel at all, not all of them will become channelers, not all of them have great strength, not all of them will have any noteable degree of skill with Healing (some strong AS lack enough Talent in Healing to Heal a bruise). Unless useful magic is readily available, there is an incentive to find non-magical solutions to problems.

 

While I appreciate these points, I don't believe they would matter to the population of the world at large. Almost every single disease has already been conquered. What is the point of more medical advancement. Medicine akin to our in such a world would really only be seen as the advil of the curative world. It would only be useful for a quick fix. Almost every kind of terminal disease is curable with a pilgrimage to the White Tower in the North and Central of the continent. Those in the South can simply go visit a Ring member near them. I believe this would be similar to the doctor shortage we currently have. Because we suffer from a dearth of doctors, to cure most serious recurring disease takes months. But most people don't see too much with it because we know that if we had a truly large problem, we could get it fixed with enough perseverance. This kind of mindset is endemic.

 

I really think that it would affect a magic using world in a serious way causing lethargy and general malaise with regard to technology. The best and easiest way to advance technology is to identify magic users and utilize them to their fullest the way the Seanchan empire does. Why create a bulldozer when you can leash a woman who can do much the same thing and more. Further, this tool won't break down for 300+ years. In the world of the Wheel of Time, I believe that the Seanchan solution is the most likely progression.

How does slavery and human rights abuse advance technology? If we applied that same thinking to our own wolrd, we'd come up with "who needs a tractor, I've got a whip." As for Healing, bear in mind that most people don't have access to channelers. The bulk of Healing is done by wisdoms/wise women/insert local title. While some of them might be wilders, most of them aren't. Now, if you break your leg, does it make more sense to have someone local who knows how to treat a broken leg, or to get in your cart, pulled by your oxen (because clearly neither of these things will be needed on the farm), all the way to Tar Valon. And then wait to get seen, and then make the journey back. It's a hell of a trip, and grossly inefficient. Yes, if a Yellow happens to be wandering by she would be your best bet. But in the absence of Yellows, surely it makes sense to learn how to deal with injuries and illnesses? There is still a need for medical advancement, because most people can't get magic doctors so they have to rely on regular ones. By the same token, if the richest in our own world had access to magic healers, and were the only ones with such access, there would still be a need for hosiptals and doctors of the more mundane variety, because poor people get cancer too. There are not enough Yellows for there to be an excuse for lack of innovation in medical care. There are not enough channelers to solve all the worlds problems. Therefore the reason for technological stagnation does not exist.

 

Rand should make the people at his schools focus on the problem of food spoilage. But like all autocrats, he has little concern for the every day needs of tme people. He sees grand visions of a return to the way things used to be. With greater centralization, we see greater innovation, but this innovation is forced on people. Very few people care about recapturing old technologies when the demands for living day to day are so pressing. The more you remove the individual's desires government, the more government can focus on steam engines and the like.

Rand's motivation is to leave something positive behind. To not be remembered purely as a conqueror and destroyer. Asking them to help with the problem of food spoilage might help in the short term. Or it might do nothing if they can't find any useful solution for a problem of that scale. Surely best to encourage them to make advances is the fields they understand best.

 

My food spoilage quip was sarcasm. Though it is fair to point out that a grant system would be much more economically feasible than Rand's schools. Most of the research done at Rand's schools is pointless given that the world is poised on the edge of the final battle. It is clearly just a last, desperate effort for Rand to immortalize his short reign. I thing it would be much more fiscally responsible for him to just have a statue built and put the rest of the money towards the war effort.

Short sighted. The world will still exist after TG. Planning for afterwards not a waste.

[Agitel]

Also, with respect to food spoilage, there are instances in the book where the one power and even more mundane efforts such as cold storage (cellars and iceboxes) can slow the food degradation. This is very important given the very finite food resources that must tide the world over up until the final battle and afterwards in the event of victory. I do however think the books focused far too much on this spoilage. At the rate it was supposedly happening half the people in the world should be dead by now anyway.

 

Your talking as if the spoilage is natural. It's not. The wards that keep food (and other things) preserved and in stasis don't even protect against the spoiling anymore.

[DaoineSidhe]

Total Mobilization of a State for War is a very new idea in both politics and warfare. To expect the state-actors of Randland to do so is somewhat outside their entire world-view. The reason is twofold:

 

1) Aristocratic societies had to balance their desire for more military power with the danger of arming the masses. This is the main reason that the armies running around in the beginning of WoT are only four or five thousand strong. You might conscript large masses in emergency situations, but those were always very short term, and in the last gasp effort (ie some of Elayne's recruits during the siege of Caemlyn). One of the reasons Rand's armies have grown so large is that he isn't concerned with arming the masses. Many who consider all bonds to be broken have now taken up arms for the Dragon Reborn, swelling the ranks of armies with people who wouldn't normally be a part of the military.

 

2) The level of central organization necessary for Total Mobilization is HUGE. There is a reason this didn't happen in our world until the invention of modern communication. With Travelling, we are already starting to see a trend towards Total Mobilization, but it isn't quite there yet.

 

Finally, to say that we should enslave the world to get ready for TG? And when people rebel because they hate your side as much as the DO? Mass Turning to the Shadow. War lost.

[Thrasymachus]

What is technology if it's not the means of applying human labor to raw materials to produce some intermediate or final good or service? Slavery and human rights abuses aimed at generating production certainly are technologies, they're just not particularly desirable ones. And one thing we know about human beings is that we use the technology that has the highest production/cost ratio available. Slavery often has the highest production/cost ratio, because it's pretty cheap to keep a human being and keep him/her relatively healthy through their productive lives, and human beings with even just a little bit of experience/education are usually extremely productive. Over the long run, slavery can have a higher production/cost ratio than even the use of competitive wages (and yes, that's a kind of tech as well), because competition will drive the wages below sustainability, which depresses production. Add magic into the mix, and slavery of channelers will certainly have the highest production/cost ratio. The only reason the Westlands don't enslave channelers is because they lack the a'dam, and now that the Seanchan have introduced it, whether they survive or not, ongoing enslavement of channelers for productive purposes is an economic certainty unless the currently free channelers are able to destroy every last a'dam and the means to produce more.

 

This does present an issue for competing technologies, and since we're talking about magic here, that's all technologies, because there's no reason to develop, say, that steam engine that pulls trains of wagons we saw in Tear into the rail system we see in Avi's glass column visions when we've got Elayne's Gateway service provided by the Kin or the same thing provided by legions of collared Seanchan damane. Why bother increasing the efficiency of that engine when you can pay substantially less to the noble or merchant who owns the damane who can make gateways? Why bother applying that engine, or the device that uses animal power to run multiple scythes, or any other such innovation, when you can sing and channel your crops into growing and harvest? The idea that there are too few channelers to do everything that needs doing is an issue, but channelers doing the major heavy-lifting significantly impedes the development of competing technologies.

 

The Age of Legends could plausibly be an age of legends because it follows our own age, when technology has been advanced as far as it has in the absence of magic, and where the discovery of magic as a technological innovation takes all the previous innovations, things like automobiles and lasers and skyrise towers and modern agriculture and radically advances them. The steam engine, or more properly, the internal combustion engine, has an economic role to play in the Age of Legends, but only because it had a role to play prior to the discovery of the One Power, and the One Power enhances that role. But in the Third Age, there is no easy role for the steam engine or the i-c engine to play. It'd be cheaper to simply breed channelers so there's not such a dearth of them and teach them to link and Travel.

 

And in fact, economics and demographics is Jordan's weakest point in his world-building, so probably the best thing to do is to not try to justify the economic/demographic decay of the Third Age in some rational sense. Look at it from a purely demographic perspective. Channelers live 4 to 6 times longer than the ordinary person, are vastly more productive/adaptable/valuable than an ordinary person, and apparently remain fertile for 4 to 6 times longer than an ordinary person as well. It shouldn't take more than a few hundred generations for Channelers to dominate the population if Channeling is at all hereditary, and the books heavily imply that it is. Instead, even at the end of the AoL, channies make up only at most 3%. Jordan didn't understand demographic dynamics and he didn't understand economics very well either and all but admits it in the scene where Rand starts worrying about the poor in Tear and the idiocy of the nobles, and Lews Therin is depicted as maundering on about taxes and jobs and public works and things Rand didn't understand. Rand's lack of understanding is Jordan's lack of understanding. So basically, the economy/population fell because that's what the plot requires.

Edited July 5, 2012 by Thrasymachus

[DaoineSidhe]

So basically, the economy/population fell because that's what the plot requires.

 

Too true, Thrasymachus, too true.

 

Demographically speaking, especially in regards to population growth, he makes big mistakes that are close to unarguable. While a highly advanced civilization may have a low to negative birth rate (ie Industrialized Western World except USA because of immigration), over 3,000 years, it is highly unlikely that breeding habbits of those humans wouldn't change an adapt to the more room to grow, higher economic gain of children. After all, they have changed significantly in the Western Industrialized World in less than 200 years.

 

The number of children that a family has is directly related to economics of having those children. In a situation like Randland, most people would be having lots of children. You are looking at an agricultural based economic civilization, with lots of fertile land that is currently unused. The more children a family has, the more help that family has in working the farm, and the less they may have to depend on paying someone to help work the fields. In addition, with all of the fertile unused land available, the parents don't have to worry overly much over how to distribute their wealth among their children. There is plenty of land to go around. Just move there, and begin a family yourself. The United States during the first 120 years of its existence is a great example of this.

 

Move to 20th Century Industrialized Western World: Children are now an economic burden. That isn't to say you don't love your children, but in today's society, there is little to no economic gain by having children, yet extensive costs if you want them to be able to be successful adults. From activities to education (especially college) to healthcare, kids require many costs to be paid by the parents.

 

The change in population growth between these societies all boils down to the economics of those societies. In Randland society, economics dictate that the population should be booming, and yet its not. Its as Thrasymachus said, these things happened because that is what the plot needed to happen.

[Agitel]

What is technology if it's not the means of applying human labor to raw materials to produce some intermediate or final good or service? Slavery and human rights abuses aimed at generating production certainly are technologies, they're just not particularly desirable ones. And one thing we know about human beings is that we use the technology that has the highest production/cost ratio available. Slavery often has the highest production/cost ratio, because it's pretty cheap to keep a human being and keep him/her relatively healthy through their productive lives, and human beings with even just a little bit of experience/education are usually extremely productive. Over the long run, slavery can have a higher production/cost ratio than even the use of competitive wages (and yes, that's a kind of tech as well), because competition will drive the wages below sustainability, which depresses production. Add magic into the mix, and slavery of channelers will certainly have the highest production/cost ratio. The only reason the Westlands don't enslave channelers is because they lack the a'dam, and now that the Seanchan have introduced it, whether they survive or not, ongoing enslavement of channelers for productive purposes is an economic certainty unless the currently free channelers are able to destroy every last a'dam and the means to produce more.

 

This does present an issue for competing technologies, and since we're talking about magic here, that's all technologies, because there's no reason to develop, say, that steam engine that pulls trains of wagons we saw in Tear into the rail system we see in Avi's glass column visions when we've got Elayne's Gateway service provided by the Kin or the same thing provided by legions of collared Seanchan damane. Why bother increasing the efficiency of that engine when you can pay substantially less to the noble or merchant who owns the damane who can make gateways? Why bother applying that engine, or the device that uses animal power to run multiple scythes, or any other such innovation, when you can sing and channel your crops into growing and harvest? The idea that there are too few channelers to do everything that needs doing is an issue, but channelers doing the major heavy-lifting significantly impedes the development of competing technologies.

 

The Age of Legends could plausibly be an age of legends because it follows our own age, when technology has been advanced as far as it has in the absence of magic, and where the discovery of magic as a technological innovation takes all the previous innovations, things like automobiles and lasers and skyrise towers and modern agriculture and radically advances them. The steam engine, or more properly, the internal combustion engine, has an economic role to play in the Age of Legends, but only because it had a role to play prior to the discovery of the One Power, and the One Power enhances that role. But in the Third Age, there is no easy role for the steam engine or the i-c engine to play. It'd be cheaper to simply breed channelers so there's not such a dearth of them and teach them to link and Travel.

 

And in fact, economics and demographics is Jordan's weakest point in his world-building, so probably the best thing to do is to not try to justify the economic/demographic decay of the Third Age in some rational sense. Look at it from a purely demographic perspective. Channelers live 4 to 6 times longer than the ordinary person, are vastly more productive/adaptable/valuable than an ordinary person, and apparently remain fertile for 4 to 6 times longer than an ordinary person as well. It shouldn't take more than a few hundred generations for Channelers to dominate the population if Channeling is at all hereditary, and the books heavily imply that it is. Instead, even at the end of the AoL, channies make up only at most 3%. Jordan didn't understand demographic dynamics and he didn't understand economics very well either and all but admits it in the scene where Rand starts worrying about the poor in Tear and the idiocy of the nobles, and Lews Therin is depicted as maundering on about taxes and jobs and public works and things Rand didn't understand. Rand's lack of understanding is Jordan's lack of understanding. So basically, the economy/population fell because that's what the plot requires.

 

Tear's class stratification is abysmal, even compared to the rest of the Westlands. To some degree it reminds me of France in the 1700s. I'm not saying Jordan's spot on with his economics or demographics, but I'm not sure how Rand's thoughts on worrying about the poor really sheds light on anything in this context.

 

As for the decrease in population, that's odd. Even if we assume a lower fertility rate due to the empowerment of women, the population should still be increasing. The "best" explanation may very well be "the dark one did it".

 

As for the slave commentary, really, just stop. There are plenty of civilizations that banned slavery because they found it abhorrent before modern machinery replaced it.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline

 

And there are labor intensive industries still where slaves would be more cost-effective than paid labor.

[Thrasymachus]

But that's exactly my point. Jordan picked and chose and blended and sometimes invented cool things from history to create his nations, and he wanted the world to look a certain way, and have a certain back-story, so he pretty much invoked his world in the way he wanted and didn't pay much attention to the way real people tend to produce and consume real goods and services, including more people. He paid some attention to it, by putting in three big devastating wars in its history, and I think he was aware enough of it to put that section where Rand displays confusion at and banishes Lews Therin's maundering about taxes and jobs and such as a subtle admission that he didn't pay a whole lot of attention to economic, demographic, cultural and social dynamics when he made up his world.

 

He picked parts of cultures and features of economies/societies from history that he thought should stay together when he made his world, and it was the character of the world he wanted to create that was more important to him than accurately reflecting the "truth" of economic, cultural and social development. And the parts that he picked and kept together are relatively insightful, even if he's not all that convincing in justifying how his world ended up the way it did, without appealing to the Dark One and imperfect seals. But at the end of the day, that's just suspension of disbelief, and I'm more than willing to grant it in this case because it's still a cool story, even if I don't think a world like what Robert Jordan paints as Randland could ever have really developed after something like the Breaking.

 

As for the slavery commentary, I'm not passing judgement on the morality or lack thereof, in fact, I thought I was pretty clear that slavery, as a production technique, is undesirable, but it is not undesirable for economic reasons. And don't kid yourself that people would stop practicing slavery when it's still more profitable than paying wages. Even now, a significant percentage of consumer products available for sale in the developed nations are produced by slaves, and a particularly nasty, unregulated form of slavery at that. Your slavery timeline is a joke, btw. Two of the three ancient abolitions were overturned within 5 years of being invoked, and the third was widely ignored. People haven't made significant efforts to abolish slavery for moral reasons until about a thousand years ago, and only begin making serious efforts to not benefit from slavery in the last 500 years. We've had civilization for over 10 thousand years and only three cultures in the first 9 thousand of those years make notable efforts to abolish slavery to be worth mentioning in wikipedia and every one of them is either very ineffectual or very transient. Only the innovation of paid wages in a socially accepted currency made any real in-roads against slavery historically and that is only because paid wages can offer superior production/cost ratios to slavery in the short to medium terms.

Edited July 5, 2012 by Thrasymachus

[Maleshub]

Thrasymachus is totally right. Randland's population decline is there only because the plot requires it; and it is there because the interviews and literature prove it. Trying to apply medieval demography and sociology to the issue will lead to confusion and contradiction.

[Luckers]

Thrasymachus is totally right. Randland's population decline is there only because the plot requires it; and it is there because the interviews and literature prove it. Trying to apply medieval demography and sociology to the issue will lead to confusion and contradiction.

 

You say that as if the population decline is presented in the text as being a natural occurence that RJ eyewinked away because he needed a small population, when in fact everything about it screams unnatural and caused by the Dark One. It's not a plot convenience, its part of the colouring of the world.

[Thrasymachus]

The problem with that is that it allows the Dark One much more widespread influence in a very subtle but powerful way, outside of the Blight and independent of Ishy's machinations. Don't get me wrong, it's a plausible explanation, but it paints a picture of the Dark One's power that can appear inconsistent. If he's able to cause economies and populations to fall and fail in this way while still Sealed in the Bore, it's hard to see how it took 100 years for the people of the Age of Legends to recognize that the Dark One posed an existential threat that had to be met with force of arms with the Bore wide open. Now, I think that that's the explanation that Jordan would appeal to if he were able to be questioned on this issue specifically, but I also think that Jordan wanted his world to be a certain way and have a certain history, and the use of the Dark One is a hand-wave to do away with any objections on the basis of realistic economics and population dynamics. At the end of the day, it's a matter of suspension of disbelief, which I'm more than willing to grant. I accept, for the purposes of enjoying the story, that the Dark One's the reason Randland economies and populations have failed. But I also believe that the history and current status of the world was "invented" first, and the justification for the world having that history and status (the DO's influence) came ad hoc, and that Jordan himself recognized the ad hoc nature of that explanation and knew that it was necessary because he lacked the sociological/economic chops to describe the evolution of his world naturally.

[Luckers]

Given the effects of naming him remained throughout the world despite the sealing, suggesting that a pervasive subtle influence across the world is not unprecedented. No, this was just colouring--a world in decline is a common theme in fantasy.

[Thrasymachus]

What effects? I see a superstition surrounding naming him, but I don't recall reading any actual consequences to anybody that were unambiguously the result of naming him, or even consequences that all the characters in the books agreed were the results of naming him.

[Luckers]

There is a very clear, very distinct feeling upon naming the Dark One.

 

"Shai'tan is dead," he said harshly, and abruptly the room seemed to lurch. He grabbed his head as waves of dizziness sloshed through him.

 

"You fool! You pure, blind, idiotic fool! Naming the Dark One, bringing his attention down on you! Don't you have enough trouble?"

 

"He's dead," Rand muttered, rubbing his head. He swallowed. The dizziness was already fading. "All right, all right. Ba'alzamon, if you want. But he's dead; I saw him die, saw him burn."

 

"And I wasn't watching you when the Dark One's eye fell on you just now? Don't tell me you felt nothing, or I'll box your ears; I saw your face."

 

I agree that there have been superstitions built around this which are just that, yet nonetheless this effect is, in itself, pervasive...

 

"Old Bill named the Dark One. I'll bet you didn't know that."

 

"Light!" Rand breathed. Mat's grin broadened. "It was last spring, just before the cutworm got into his fields and nobody else's. Right before everybody in his house came down with yellow eye fever. I heard him do it. He still says he doesn't believe, but whenever I ask him to name the Dark One now, he throws something at me."

 

Whether the Yellow Eye Fever was the result or not, which is debatable, it seems clear that the incident had an effect on Old Bill, just the same as Rand.

[Thrasymachus]

Rand's reaction to naming Shai'tan isn't exactly persuasive evidence given his unique relationship with the Dark One and the Pattern in general, and given that he was already under the effect of the taint. And the stuff with Old Bill just reeks of post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking. But, as I say, all this is really just quibbling. The "Dark One did it" explanation is fine, as long as you don't push it too far in terms of providing a detailed explanation for everything going wrong. And in a meta-sense, I think it's a mistake to think that RJ developed his world chronologically. What I mean by that is that he didn't say, "Ok, the Dark One's imperfectly Sealed, and the Breaking seriously re-arranged the continents and landscapes and reduced the population to maybe 1% of it's AoL peak. Now I need to chart how that world would realistically evolve, given the Dark One's influence with my knowledge of the specific mechanism of that influence, over the next 3000 years, so I know what kind of world the Dragon Reborn and his compatriots will be living, working and fighting in." Rather, I think RJ developed his world something like saying, "Here's the state of the world I want the DR and his companions to be living in, and here's the kind of history I want that world to have, going back 3000 years to the Sealing and the Breaking. Anything about that world and it's history that doesn't comport with what some really smart people know or may discover about how people really develop economically and socially can be dealt with by appealing to the Dark One and his imperfect Seal, if I can't figure out how to blame it on Ishy."

[Maleshub]

Thrasymachus is totally right. Randland's population decline is there only because the plot requires it; and it is there because the interviews and literature prove it. Trying to apply medieval demography and sociology to the issue will lead to confusion and contradiction.

 

You say that as if the population decline is presented in the text as being a natural occurence that RJ eyewinked away because he needed a small population, when in fact everything about it screams unnatural and caused by the Dark One. It's not a plot convenience, its part of the colouring of the world.

 

I don't have the BWB and don't know if there are references there about the impact of the Breaking. How many nations were destroyed in the Breaking? What was the Randland's population? And how many survived the 3-4 centuries of madness and male Aes Sedai destruction (cities destroyed, mountains sent to the bottom of the ocean, new mountain ranges raised, famine, disease, etc.)? Has the population been in constant decline since the Breaking? If not, when did the decline start?

 

My impression of Rand's Rhuidean visions is that the Cairhienin started out as small bands and then developed into a kingdom; and so did Andorans. Is this development attributed more to refugee movement than fertility?

 

If refugee movements were the main "human resource" source, why are there still clear cut and long-standing national borders and genetic variations in Randland?

 

Why didn't the DO's touch affect the Aiel? Is it because the have "caressing the child" weave that allows their genetics to be top-notch? Or is it something else?

 

Applying the DO reason puts a cause to the problem; but it isn't very convincing as it would give the DO sustained and continued power to affect the world over three thousand years. It is as if the Seals only partially succeeded.

Edited July 9, 2012 by Theodril

[XoMeltdownoX]

Most authors of fiction have a very weak grasp of economic principles. It is really obvious with fantasy and sci fi, due to the nature of world building in the stories. RJ is no worse than most. As regards to population decline you can speculate all you want, but there are no hard figures to back up theories. I think what is obvious and is what RJ was trying to show, is that civilisation in the Westlands is in decline. Nations are loosing control with some totally disappearing. Some reasons:

1. As others have pointed out, DF's have made an impact here. A prime example is the fall of Malkier. DF's can impact life in much smaller ways, sewing distrust, infiltrating the nobility and so on.

2. The seal on the DO's prison was infact imperfect. Ishmael was allowed partial access to the world. He created the BA and orchestrated large wars, which resulted in the loss of knowledge.

3. The WT is partially to blame. There are many things that can be said here, but they have been highlighted many times in other topics, so I will not start it again. Let's just say that between the BA and WT politics, society as a whole has not gained as much as it should have.

4. I would like to mention a small trait that has had an impact on the decline of civilisation. Small causes can add up to have big effects however. The prime trait that the DO prizes above all others in his minions is selfishness. The general population, as well as, nobles and royals can be very selfish without becoming DF's and still end up serving the dark cause. Sounds fairly weak, but think about in a larger sense. By the noble classes selfishly serving themselves over the needs of the people (Carhien is a good example), society is weakened. Resources (which are scarce by definition in economics) are squandered on things which do not benefit society, while most peasants are poor and may be hungry.

 

I think for the moment that is enough. It is not easy to post via phone.

[Agitel]

It is as if the Seals only partially succeeded.

 

They did only partially succeed. That's part of the foundation for the plot.

[Thrasymachus]

Since we're gonna be sticklers for realism, realistically, no one should have survived the Breaking at all. The Wheel of Time world is supposed to be our own, so it's reasonable to assume that the continents of the AoL looked fairly close to what our continents look like today. If the Seanchan continents are the remnants of the Americas, and that big crater in the northwestern corner is the former site of the Yellowstone supervolcano, given the size of that crater and the fact that it blew deep enough to create a sea, that eruption by itself would be an extinction level event for nearly all land-based multi-cellular life. And if you figure out how much energy it would take to move and alter the continents in 300 years to resemble Randland's continents, the surface temperature of the planet should be approaching, or possibly be beyond the surface temperature of Venus, which is enough to melt lead. Which is, needless to say, not conducive to life as we know it at all.

 

Granted, the Breaking was caused by magic, so thermodynamics as we know them probably don't apply. However, even ruling out planetary temperature increase from the waste heat involved in moving about the continents to the extent they've been altered, I have a hard time seeing how more than 1-2% of the population could have possibly survived. With a starting population of 10 billion people, that leaves 100-200 million people left, roughly a third to a bit more than half the total population of the U.S. alone. And I think a realistic estimate of world-wide population at the end of the Third Age prior to A New Spring is probably 1-2 billion people, and it may well have reached 1 to 1.5 billion by the time of Hawkwing's Empire. I see no evidence or reason to believe that there were more people alive during the eras of the Ten Nations, or even during the time of Hawkwing's Empire than there are now, aside from historical accounts of dubious accuracy of standing armies hundreds of thousands of men strong.

 

The economic development of Randland from the Breaking on appears to be one of slow development to a "golden age," interrupted every thousand years by a major calamitous war. Randland should now be in the midst of such a "golden age" similar to the eras of the Ten Nations prior to the Trolloc Wars, or Hawkwing's Empire, but it's not. The Aiel war and Whitecloak war probably share some of the blame, but neither were extensive nor destructive enough to account for the stagnation or degradation people are noticing. Of course, recently, the Seals have been weakened to a greater extent than previously, so the effect of the Dark One's touch can probably be blamed for the current stagnation. And it should be mentioned that after each of the major calamitous wars, civilization rebuilt and regrew, even after the fall of Hawkwing's Empire. The overall economic stagnation really only seems to me to be "unrealistic" in the last few generations or so. So blaming it on the Dark One is perfectly fine, if a bit of a cop-out.

[Alric]

If it wasn't so obvious that our age is the 1st Age, the continents could easily be explained by several Breakings, and not just one. Then it suddenly makes sense that people would survive them without catching fire. But that Mercedes hood ornament and those stories are very unlikely to have survived for several more cycles.

[TristanWebb]

The 'our world' isn't our world from a physics point of view, since all of astrophysics is wrong, geology is mostly wrong, evolutionary biology is wrong, all of natural history prior to humans is wrong. It is more that the world of the 20th century is the same as one of the turnings of the wheel rather than a religous doctrine of the creation of the universe. The same way as the 'our world' in any fiction isn't the real world, just an easy starting point that means you don't have to say they sky is blue and grass is green and people have 2 arms and legs and a head.

[Thrasymachus]

Well, let me put it like this. The same physics that describes how the steam engine works also tells us how much the temperature of the planet's surface would heat up by moving the continents around to the extent they've been re-arranged. If the physics of the latter is wrong, then the physics of the former would have to be wrong too, which means that steam engines wouldn't work, or at least, they wouldn't work the way we expect them to. And that's just the physical inconsistency most easily seen. If Randland has steam engines, then their thermodynamics works pretty much the same as our thermodynamics, which means that from a physical energy/work/heat perspective, the Breaking should not have been survivable by any life whatsoever. But at the end of the day, you're right, it's fiction. It involves the willing suspension of disbelief. One thing you're wrong about though is that the fiction itself stipulates that our world is Randland in an earlier Age. The point of such a stipulation is not just to create a sense of familiarity, but a sense of continuity. Jordan could have chosen to have his world be some sort of parallel universe or fantasy world not necessarily connected to or a part of our world at all and still maintained familiarity with the setting. The continuity stipulated between our world and the Third Age is ultimately the source of the physical/economic/sociological/biological inconsistencies people notice, because it implies that the physical laws that govern our world are continuous with the physical laws that govern Randland.

[jwood01]

How does the DO's touch on the world lead to a declining population in relatively stable times?

 

MoRe failed crops?

More misscariages?

More fluke deaths?

Etc

 

Kind of like what happened around Dark Rand but more subtle?

Edited July 9, 2012 by Ruthan Gudd

[jwood01]

Do we know if the years between the Trolloc wars and Hawkwing were also characterized by declining population?