Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)
- Thread starter yrsillar
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- Original Fantasy
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Most likely it operates on taxes.
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
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Well, the quote I said is from a PM and thus can't be proven, but it is open market value: it takes years of saving to buy what can be taken in several days work at the sect.
Lots of things DO operate at a loss.... and getting people to work for you for 8 years in your military does help, too
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That's actually fairly recent.
The current empress has been buffing the sects, but that has not always been the case.
Do you think colleges run 100% on taxes?
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Even if they did, they wouldn't give out more then their budget/income.
@Arkeus
So, probably fairy dust and magic then.
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In most parts of the world universities are heavily subsidised though? Which is what people are saying here?
The market value of a one-time teaching an art is difficult to quantify- but I'd assume the Sect would offer it at a massive discount regardless.
First, because it's likely something with a decently high fixed cost, and almost zero marginal cost, like an ebook.
Second, the Sect is actually an educational institution in addition to it's internal security and national defense functions, so it makes sense that it would offer educational resources, especially educational resources with a very low marginal cost, at a steep discount.
First, because it's likely something with a decently high fixed cost, and almost zero marginal cost, like an ebook.
Second, the Sect is actually an educational institution in addition to it's internal security and national defense functions, so it makes sense that it would offer educational resources, especially educational resources with a very low marginal cost, at a steep discount.
The prologue did have the farmer who would have had to pay to get his totems repaired.
I assume the sect accepts fees for such services, almost like a Ninja Village.
Also, the fact the Ling Qi has to provide 8 years of military service implies that the noble children pay tuition. A hefty tuition, it seems
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Yeah, that and grants (but those are mostly for research). Here in Germany (with our sane education system), the semester fee is a few hundred euros (varies on the city, I paid a bit more than a hundred this year). Most of that is the bus ticket. The rest is the student union. The university doesn't really get anything.
Mind, the sects do have a hefty tuition fee. We just don't have the money for that, and pay in military service instead.
It also charges tuition, part of which is eight years of military service.
The sect isnt just a school, it's also a military institution. that's got to be expensive.
even a subsidized school operates on a budget they can't go over. The teachers don't work for free, the supply's don't buy themselves, and someone is still paying the bills
A fortune for even a half decent cultivator and mortal are very decent things. We have not reached half decent yet, and we still throw around hundreds of stones. The handout is way, way less.
The economics of a xianxia setting are pretty intriguing. You've got a consumable currency. It's not just consumable, but consumed rapidly.
The only real analogue I can think of is medieval Japan and the Koku. But my impression is the the Koku is still just a measure of value, and they still used gold, silver and copper for transactions. There's also salt in the Roman Empire, though again they also used gold, silver and copper.
You'd need a massive amount of spirit stones in circulation-like vastly more than the amount being consumed on a weekly basis in order for the economy to have any sort of liquidity.
The only real analogue I can think of is medieval Japan and the Koku. But my impression is the the Koku is still just a measure of value, and they still used gold, silver and copper for transactions. There's also salt in the Roman Empire, though again they also used gold, silver and copper.
You'd need a massive amount of spirit stones in circulation-like vastly more than the amount being consumed on a weekly basis in order for the economy to have any sort of liquidity.
Definitely charges tuition.
I think that can put to rest the idea that taxes completely pay for the sect.
That is a good point.
Starting to think I shouldn't have opened this can of worms
Eh, you can use stone symbols. You end up with a normal monetary system, just on the spirit stone standard, instead of the gold standard.
I've always really liked the fact that in the Cultivation world the currency is cultivation resources.
Xianxia is all about power. Having it. Lacking it. The many well defined and discrete degrees of power (red/yellow/green/ect... , early/mid/late/peak). The way protagonists tend to start out as powerless "ordinary" people, and the catharsis of seeing them fight their way through an endless succession of smug nobles and aristocrats born into wealth/power. The Darwinian, hyper-capitalist, meritocratic ethos that every person unconsciously holds, and that the genre as a whole explores. The way every person's worth, as a human being, is almost entirely dependent on their power.
In Xianxia wealth is power and power is wealth, both metaphorically and literally, in the sense that you can devour your spirit stones/pills/treasures and immediately start punching harder.
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Yeah, I was thinking that you could set up a banking system where people deposit their spirit stones, and exchange certificates or proof that they deposited spirit stones rather than the stones themselves. And then the banks can lend out phantom spirit stones and pretty soon you can have fiat currency.
It falls apart once you realize that, unlike gold, people will be withdrawing their deposits of spirit stones on a frequent basis.
The number of red stones that a cultivator can consume is limited though. And higher level cultivators can't use them at all. Compared to people with balances worth thousands of spirit stones, the stones used by a cultivator don't represent much of a drain. There's also selling stone-futures from the mines, which are valuable latter but can't be consumed now, and other, more arcane financial implements. That said, I don't get the impression the empire actually uses paper currency. Letters of credit likely exist, but it was noted that certain stones are only seen at high-level transactions, like real estate, so even high finance mostly uses specie. Most of the empire uses silver, of course.
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This is incoherent. A sect point is worth one sect point. It can be traded in for a known menu of things. One of those things is 5 red spirit stones. This sets a floor on the value of a sect point when the value of a sect point is calculated in terms of red spirit stones.
If the other things we can get for sect points are worth even more than 5 red spirit stones per sect point, all that this means is that trading in sect points for red spirit stones is a bad idea. It absolutely does not mean that earning sect points is a bad idea. Quite the opposite.
This is some labor theory of value nonsense. It also badly misapprehends where people get ripped off in a company town type of situation.
The value of a pill is what it can be sold for in the open market. The cost of resources put into the pill hardly matter, except that if they are too high compared to what people are willing to pay for the pill then a market in the pill will not form. It also has nothing to do with the value of currency.
Look, suppose you're offered a job under the current system. You can accept a payment of 15 sect points or 75 red spirit stones in exchange for doing the job. Which one should you take? The sect points, one hundred percent. You can trade them in for 75 red spirit stones if you want to, and you can also use the sect points to buy things that spirit stones can't buy. The only reason to avoid the sect points would be if you thought that the sect would be unable or unwilling to meet its promise to pay out 5 red spirit stones per sect point. In other words, you would have to believe that the sect will declare bankruptcy in order to bilk its disciples of some number of red spirit stones within the next two years.
If the job is too much work for 75 red spirit stones then you would want to avoid the job whether the payment is denominated in sect points or red spirit stones. In that case the offer is just inadequate, not fraudulent.
A company that wants to screw its employees using company scrip will never allow a direct conversion of company scrip into hard currency. Doing so allows for a very easy calculation of the value of the scrip. It makes it obvious when the company is trying to rip people off by changing the exchange rate, and it provides a rallying point for pissed off employees. Instead what you do is you force your employees to conduct all of their transactions in company scrip. Then you gradually bump up the prices. It's not obvious that bumping somebody's rent from $800 googlebux to $1000 googlebux is the same as a cut in pay, even though that's how the math works out (while knocking the value of a googlebuck fom $1 to $.80 is extremely obvious, and will piss people off a lot more). This is of course not what the sect is doing, as most day to day provisions are free and most other transactions are denominated in red spirit stones rather than sect points.
If the sect is gouging its outer disciples in order to secure pocket change for itself (unlikely), it's probably doing this by establishing and abusing a monopoly position in pill sales. It looks like the sect might not be willing to certify pills for sale direct to consumers, but rather only indicates pills are safe by buying them from producers itself for resale. In that situation the sect is effectively the only buyer for producers and only seller for consumers, so it can squeeze disciples on both ends. We could investigate this pretty easily by talking to Su Ling. If it is happening, we could avoid the negative effects by purchasing directly from trusted producers, but it's unlikely that the savings would be remotely worth the effort. Unless you wanted to set us up as a pill reseller and undercut the sect in a xianxia mogul quest or something.
I assume there's some sort of fungibility between different stone grades- like you can merge them old split them with a relatively inexpensive ritual. They seem to have a stable exchange rate that corresponds to their relative bonuses, so it wouldn't make sense otherwise.
But even if they don't, the implications for empire-wide monetary policy are broadly the same:
To maintain a stable currency supply, the empire has to mine spirit stones at a rate roughly equal to or slightly greater than the rate at which they are consumed. too little and you get deflation, and too much and you hyperinflation. In this case, hyperinflation isn't necessarily a bad thing since it means most cultivators can progress at a faster rate.
I have no way of estimating how many stones are consumed. Do mature cultivators regularly consume stones? Are stones used to power contraptions like flying machines? Either the empire has a very sophisticated bureaucracy to figure this all out, or they sort of backed into the right mine output by luck.
I disagree, especially given that the ability to mine a trickle of violet/prism stones is one of the foundations of the imperial house's power.
Who said there was a stable supply?
Which they do, being not!China, after all. That's why the Bureaucracy skill exists in a medieval setting.
It doesn't work as a currency otherwise.
I mean, it can take some amount of instability, but if the stock of spirit stones in circulation is consistently, and quickly decreasing, then there's no way people would trade spirit stones for anything. They'd only be hoarding them. If the stock were consistently and quickly increasing, then people would be able to hand them out like candy.
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This is true. That said, this is at least somewhat a holdover from exalted, where the laws of metaphysics run on paperwork. And finally, Beauracracy (the skill) also encompasses business sense and financial know how, not just literal paper-pushing.
And if the stock oscillated from year to year, like most commodities?
Oscillations in supply are more destabilizing when the commodity also serves as currency, but it's still workable because it's long run stable.
And oscillating supply is probably as stable as you would expect a bureaucracy without computers or an instant communication network to get. Though there are probably certain arts and formations that can substitute for those.
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Notably, commodity =/= currency, outside of barter (or Xianxia, as it happens). Would gold have functioned as a currency if it was gradually consumed over time?