According to the main rulebook and Rimward the microcorps work like this:
(1) The Plurality votes to grant a new microcorp its charter.
(2) People work for the microcorp. They're paid for this work in kroner.
(3) The only thing you do with a kroner you're paid, however, is to reinvest it into a microcorp. (This is referred to as "tithing" in the core rulebook.)
This system doesn't seem to make any sense.
First, there's a point of confusion: Can you only earn kroner from the microcorp you're working for? Or does earned kroner get supplemented by a government hand-out to every citizen?
If it's the former, then it's a closed system in which everyone is essentially paying their own wage. (Either directly because you're tithing your salary back to the microcorp you're working for which uses it to pay you. Or indirectly because you tithe it to a different microcorp and then your microcorp can't afford to pay you any more unless someone in that microcorp is tithing it back to your microcorp.) If that's the case, then the kroner is irrelevant and serves no purpose. (The decision to tithe your kroner to a given microcorp is indistinguishable from your decision to volunteer to work for a microcorp.)
If it's the latter, then the kroner intrinsically suffers from hyperinflation. That hyperinflation either stabilizes into a system which is indistinguishable from the previous case (in which case the kroner is pointless) or it results in every microcorp having enough capital to hire the entire population of Titan multiple times over (which also results in the kroner being pointless).
But let's assume that there's some explanation for this -- some way in which kroner are actually serving a meaningful function within this economy. This doesn't resolve the other inexplicable aspects of this economic "system".
For example, there are both criminal cartels, interplanetary banks, and Section Three microcorps which somehow convert kroner into PC credits. How, exactly? A currency conversion requires that somebody has Currency A and wants Currency B. But you can't buy anything with kroners. There's no reason that anyone would want them. You might as well exchange your Monopoly money for euros.
The only possible exception to this would be Titanian microcorps looking to buy up extra kroners in order to pay for more labor. But that suggests that the entire Titanian economy rotates around microcorps selling goods to the inner system for credits that they use to buy up kroners which they use to employ more workers (while the workers are selling their kroners in order to stockpile PC credits). That's an economy that fundamentally doesn't make sense.
And we haven't even gotten to the point where the kroner (which explicitly can't be used for anything except maybe labor purchases) is somehow pegged to the price of a terabyte of qubits.
Anyone want to take a stab at explaining how this system is actually supposed to work?
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Titanian Microcorps
Sun, 2013-06-23 20:06
#1
Justin Alexander
Titanian Microcorps
Sun, 2013-06-23 23:51
#2
DivineWrath
From what I understand, the
From what I understand, the Titanians have all their needs met by virtue of advanced technology. If you have a mouth that needs food, you will get food. If you need or want a body, you will (eventually) get a body. However, this means that there are probably a lot of people who would otherwise have nothing to do. This Kroner system is probably part of some sort of system to manage the behavior of people in a meaningful way.
I think a kroner is a kind of a vote. If people want something done, they give it to a company or organization that wants to do it. People then work for them and then get kroners. If they wanted to keep doing that thing or have that thing kept being done, then they reinvest in that organization. If they thought something was a better cause, they might work at someplace that has kroners and later invest those kroners in a different project.
I think that kroners are not supposed to be money, they are supposed to be something to encourage and manage productive behaviors of their citizens (and maybe anyone who shows up with a work visa). The fact the inner system keeps trying to trade money for work is their own misinterpretation of how things work on Titan. Thats not surprising considering thats how things actually works in the inner system (you trade work for money).
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To put things another way, I think that these organizations are a kind of charities. There are people out there that do charity work. However, how do you judge that one charity is better than another? I think the kroner is how they do things. If a microcorp has a noble cause or good rep, then they might get plenty of kroner. These organizations then become a magnet for people who want to do good things. If they agree with the cause, they reinvest; if not, then they invest elsewhere.
In theory, this should work good since you can't buy goods with kroners. Hopefully that would stop people from doing embezzlements or doing harmful things in the name of greed, but as you have pointed out, there are people who do try to trade money for kroner.
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For the record, what I wrote was based upon half remembered stuff, and plenty of thinking on my part. I should re-read stuff on the Titanians before commenting further.
Mon, 2013-06-24 02:13
#3
Justin Alexander
Actually, that begins to make
Actually, that begins to make sense.
You might think that, say, a scientific project to develop better anti-agapics is a totally worthwhile thing but that doesn't mean you've actually got the skills to contribute to that project. You do, however, have the skills to contribute to Microcorp B... so you do that, get paid in kroner, and then invest that kroner in the Anti-Agapic Microcorp so that they'll be able to woo scientists to work for them.
On the flip-side, if you're someone with a skill set in high demand by a lot of different microcorp projects, then you can demand more kroner for your work. The additional kroner, by extension, gives you a much bigger say in what types of projects will be pursued by other microcorps.
That, at least, lets me understand what the purpose of the kroner is: It genericizes the social value of your volunteer labor.
But I'm still hazy on why anyone would want to convert credits-to-kroners. On the micro-level; I can potentially see why people leaving Titan to visit the inner system would want to be able to convert their kroners into credits. But I can't see anyone with credits being interested in spending them on kroners; they're specifically designed to have no traditional value to the person holding them. And neither make sense on the kind of macro-scale that currency exchanges operate on.
I'm also still hazy on what benefit the Section Three microcorps are supposedly gaining from being Section Three. Rimward also frequently talks about how massively "profitable" the Section Three microcorps are... but it's unclear what that means in a society where there's nothing to measure your profit in.
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The Alexandrian
Mon, 2013-06-24 05:34
#4
DivineWrath
I think buying kroner with
I think buying kroner with credits is like bribing politicians. Having kroner gives you some measure of leverage in Titanian society. However, buying kroner to influence a society probably not as efficient as bribing politicians (I don't think that the Titanians would want such things to be that easy). I think it would be the equivalent of bribing individual citizens instead of politicians (more work). Figuring out how to manipulate Titanian society could be thought as an art or science in its infancy (probably no one knows how to do that effectively yet).
I think what you could do is use bought kroner to fund projects or organizations that will either act in favor of something you like or to fund something that would be antagonistic to something you don't like.
Let me provide a few examples:
1. A random Jovian important guys decides he really doesn't like the Titanians. In order to destabilize the Titanians, he arranges for a number of spies to don the disguise as citizens who managed to "escape" to Titanian territory (or they could have false citizenship from elsewhere). They make their way to Titan and work their way into citizenship as part their efforts to infiltrate Titanian society. If they succeed, this Jovian guy can arrange for the spies to receive kroner at regular intervals (or something equivalent) so they have a means to influence Titanian society with inside knowledge. They might be able to form their own microcorp to do things.
2. There are some "natives" (born there I think) on Titan who have been seduced by the glitter and ways of the inner system. They keep insisting on turning Titanian society into a money based system where people can get ridiculously wealthy. Why they haven't moved out yet probably has many reasons (probably because they would be poor in the inner system), but they are likely to cause trouble so long as they stay. If an outsider wanted them to be more wasteful or destructive, they could give them donations of kroners to help them cause more trouble. Maybe they will think a project (using our societies examples) that will produce bigger louder cars is better than a project that looks for the Higgs Boson.
3. A paranoid Hypercorp owner is afraid of another fall happening. During the fall, only a fraction of the population survived and a great many became indentures. He doesn't want to die, nor does he want to ever become an indenture. To improve his odds of survival in such a disaster, he becomes an active buyer of kroner and donates them to organizations who are actively building remote backup facilities that are designed to receive massive amounts of infugees and bring them out of cold storage quickly.
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I'm working on half remembered stuff, so I don't remeber what a section three microcorp is, so I can't really comment on it.
Mon, 2013-06-24 06:34
#5
Decivre
Justin Alexander wrote:But I
To an extent the Kroner is still a form of currency, it just isn't a consumer-level currency. Microcorps use them as a resource for their projects and actions between microcorps and as a means to get resources from the government, much as hypercorps use credits. It's just that people don't use them in their day-to-day lives, because Titan assumes that everyone can get what they need without cost.
Remember that microcorps are still, in the end, bureaus created by the plurality. They are government programs. So the best way to think of Kroner is individual units of government budgeting. When you receive Kroner, you are essentially getting a voice in how the government budgets its resources. The microcorp you give your Kroner to has more resources with which to get things done, and in turn pays its employees Kroner so that they may once more determine governmental resources.
Your labor, in effect, gives you a voice in how things are spent. The more you work, the bigger a voice you get.
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Mon, 2013-06-24 15:21
#6
Justin Alexander
Decivre wrote:Remember that
Sure. But even if we go with that interpretation it still doesn't explain why anyone outside of Titanian society would be interested in buying kroner on any sort of significant scale: The only thing you can do with a kroner if you're not a microcorp is give it to a microcorp.
I guess we could assume that the entire credit-to-kroner exchange rate is entirely internal to the microcorps: Microcorp A sells goods to the inner system and gets paid in credits; then they can sell those credits to other microcorps in exchange for kroner. The microcorps buying the credits can then use them to buy goods or resources from the inner system that they need. It's just difficult to imagine that there's a sufficient value of traders to sustain a proper currency exchange.
Which I guess explains why Titan needs to peg the currency to the current market price of a terabyte of qubits.
Could be interesting to interpret that as a literal "qubit standard" in which the Titanian central bank is expected to maintain a supply of qubits that can be exchanged with kroner on demand. Titan could even increase the value of "kroner qubits" by pre-seeding their distribution throughout the solar system. So you'd find Titanian qubit stations or banking ships here and there throughout the system. Insert daring raids by a Bond villain named Qubitfinger and salt to your taste.
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The Alexandrian
Mon, 2013-06-24 15:52
#7
Decivre
Justin Alexander wrote:Sure.
My guess would be that various outside groups would want kroner to gain influence over the Titanian economy. I imagine that hypercorps would love that sort of power, to sit on kroner and try to influence Titanians to create a microcorp with inner-system ideologies, then use said kroner to give them more clout than they would otherwise have. It's actually a pretty ingenious scam.
Alternatively, it's a great method for outsiders to get access to the Titanian economy much like you referenced, and creates incentive for microcorps to do backdoor deals with outside groups.
One nice thing about pegging the value of kroner to qubits is that, unlike gold, qubits can be manufactured. One could theoretically exchange a kroner and have their qubits produced on-demand, unlike a gold supply.
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Wed, 2013-06-26 20:31
#8
jackgraham
The main organization
The main organization involved in exchanging kroners for cred are the Kron Karetelyei, who're criminal organizations. So yeah, most of the people trading for kroner from outside are somehow up to no good.
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Wed, 2013-07-10 08:08
#9
BOMherren
Titanian Good-Old-Boys' Club?
Those two examples seem plausible. Alternatively, if you want a bit of a curve ball...
What if MCs use automation to replace most low- and medium-skilled workers with automation, so that the only people who acquire any significant amount of kroner a) have high-value skills and b) are strongly enough motivated by altruism and considerations of status to spend a lot of time working?
This group will then be a fairly small, fairly elite subset of the general society, exercising a large degree of control over the Plurality's budget. Because of condition b), I would expect their preferences to veer towards the subtle and esoteric, as opposed to crass consumerism. I would also expect this preference to be culturally reinforced by the relatively small size of the group, and by the popular ideology of Titan, which seems to assign low status to the trappings of popular consumerism.
So even though the democratic Plurality decides which projects get started, it's the deeply invested men of subtle tastes and deep pocketbooks who allocate resources between these projects.
In the shadow of that economy, common Titanians might well choose to conduct an informal economy of Consortium Credits, to sponsor small projects, to trade with the outside world, and to ration among one another such things as are in perpetual high demand and low supply. Or, they might be more tempted to use the Reputation economy, depending on your interpretation of how that works.
Speaking of, I'm not sure how the reputation economies would affect that. Maybe the masses might discipline the wealthy by dinging them for donating to niché projects, either putting the breaks on the whole thing, or else causing the high income earners to kind of splinter off from the Reputation economy and accept low @-Rep as a common trait among their group. Or, maybe income in kroner correlates roughly with positive Rep score, which would further reinforce the gap.
Maybe Hypercorps wouldn't wage memetic warfare against Titan by introducing loud music and gas-guzzling cars. Maybe they'd use Inner System avant-garde artists, classical musicians and the longstanding divide between transcognitivist neopostmodernism and transfeminist hypermodern postcognitivism.
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