noblehunter wrote:Dilandu wrote:
Frankly, never noticed any particular sociological improvements in Honorverse... Let's not forget, the series is already relatively old, and became "future past" a bit - including sociology. For example, according to the recent - real-life - experiments, the Basic Living Stipend should not have a destructive effect on Haven's society; modern experiments with guaranteed income demonstrated, that peoples in such systems actually became more economically active, with more desire to invest money, start their own buisness, search for a better job.
My take on the BLS is it was set too high when it was first implemented, which resulted in a burst of inflation (which is line with current thinking about such things). However, instead of letting the system reach equilibrium at the new prices, the government increased the BLS to constantly chase the higher prices. Coupled with other bad decisions about how to deal with the problem resulted in the Dolists, even though it wasn't an inevitable result of the BLS.
That's essentially correct.
Those "bad decisions" weren't part of the original BLS's creation. Rather, they were the result of the fashion in which the BLS was turned into a "bread and circuses" deal between a highly corrupt, entrenched political class and a bunch of "machine politicians" willing and able to deliver whatever votes were needed in return for a piece of the pie. And for a degree of control/influence over income distribution and public services which helped shore up their clout in their "districts" and so allowed them to exert even greater control over those reliable votes they were supposed to produce on cue.
That was the first really "bad decision," because (among other things) it had the effect of requiring the Dolist managers to be able to prove to their clutches of voters that they were constantly making things better . . . or at least providing more
income even if the income had progressively less
buying power. (But pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! We can
always get you a raise when the cost of living kicks up again next quarter!)
The knock-on effect of that was that the public till started running dry and the Legislaturalists found themselves with a binary solution set: either make the reforms needed to restore the internal economy to solvency, or else find another infusion of cash from somewhere
outside the internal ecoonomy. Making the reforms would almost certainly lay bare the cynicism of their deal with the Dolist Managers, which --- in turn --- would almost certainly lead to their losing power
at the least and could have much nastier (and more . . . permanent consequences) if the public got
really pissed. That being the case, they did what corrupt, self-serving politicians always do and chose the other option: conquest, with the added benefit that building the navy they needed would require huge chunks of investment which they could spin at least in part as "public works" investment to try and fix the problems with the sagging economy. Thereby helping to distract attention from the reasons that economy was sagging in the first place. . . including the fact that the military expenditures were putting an even bigger drag on it. At the very least, they should have made a choice between guns or butter; instead, they chose to buy both guns
and butter on the theory (to paraphrase Machiavelli) that while butter may not always get you good guns, good guns can always get you butter.
Unfortunately, what they had embraced was an ultimately self-destroying cycle and, like way too many
Ancien Régimes throughout history, their own tunnel vision --- and self interest, both as individuals and as an entire class --- prevented them from doing anything about it.
I'll admit that I'm not as sold on the "modern experiments with guaranteed income [which] demonstrated, that peoples in such systems actually became more economically active, with more desire to invest money, start their own buisness, search for a better job" as some. I take assertions on both sides of that issue with a certain degree of salt. But the way I built the PRH
never assumed that the BLS made the original RoH's economic collapse inevitable. A lot of people in-universe did, because they were looking at the macro effect --- which was that the RoH
had collapsed --- without access to the internal metric of the deals the Legislaturalists had struck.
Had the story line followed my original projections, readers would have been finding out a lot about the
real internal dynamic in the book which would have followed Honor's death in the originally planned Battle of Manticore. Didn't work out that way, so there may well still be aspects of this which haven't been made fully explicit, although I think I've probably at least touched on all or most of it with the various Nouveau Paris viewpoint scenes since Saint-Just . . . suffered his accident.