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Notes -
You know, I started to write a post but I think my thoughts just boil down to the same old idea I always reach about GDP and economic measures, which is: economic measures have a narrow definition and meaning and are useful when used in a very specific context, but our society overuses them as a measure of societal health and wellbeing because we've lost all moral common ground as a society save for a horror of poverty and physical suffering. And so, because the means to alleviate poverty and physical suffering (wealth) is the only metric we can all agree on, it de facto becomes the sole axis on which to measure the health of a society. Laymen mistakenly think that this is because The Science has proven that GDP is the best metric, but it's really just an accident (or maybe a legacy of Marxist economics, I dunno).
There's no objective definition of "the economy," but people act as though there is. Like many other soft "sciences," (looking at you, social "science"), the common usage of "the economy" smuggles in assumptions about what has value. In a 4x game framework, modern economies would have resources like "oil," "metals," and "information." But in a medieval economy (let's borrow CK2), it might have been "food," "artisanal wares," "piety," and "prestige" or something. If the Duke of Aquitaine's realm produced 9 trillion tapestries a year and had a glut of food, but there were no churches and his family was widely derided, I don't think he would consider his realm fully productive.More options
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