JH: Well, I never said that the golem would be able to equally replace all forms of human labor, only that it would be very good at some of them.
And in fact, while it is true that for some tasks the golem wouldn't have quite the efficiency of 28 men, for other tasks it would have greater than the efficiency of 28 men. As you mentioned, it would be excellent for moving things that are really heavy - especially UP!. For very large loads, even if an object can in theory be lifted by 28 individuals, it usually can't be. I don't know how much heavy lifting you've done, but hopefully you've tried moving pianos or some other really heavy object before. Up above a certain level, you get huge complications with heavy weights. If the object is dence, you can't get enough hands on it or enough hands in optimal lifting position to leverage it no matter how many poeple you have. So, you need cradles and poles and what not. As the number of people involved increased, the more any unbalance in the load effects a single person. If the object weighs 500 kg, four strong men can lift it, but moving it with just four men is almost impossible, because a fluctuation of a few percent in the weight bourn by any individual increases the load beyond thier capacity quite quickly. In theory, 20 men could hoist 2,500 kg, but in practice one person would end up with 200 kg in his hands, the load would slide in thier direction, and people would get killed.
Note that in terms of s.p., my analysis is even more conservative than yours, ei 2010 g.p. per year. Even at that rate, I think it is something of a bargin, however, I can defend my claim that the DMG is wrong (and always has been since 1st edition). Given the prices for goods and services and the abundance of wealth in an average setting, it is impossible that the common laborer can only demand for his wages 1 s.p. per day, or that common laborer could live on 1 s.p. per day. The economics of that claim don't make any sense. For example, the average high level character could leverage all the labor of very large areas (given the unhistorical low populations of D&D worlds) for very long periods of time. In fact, it was this labor leveraging (hiring away entire populaces) that first caused me to question the D&D economic model. Either the cost of goods and services must go down, or the cost of wages must go up.
Gygax's original choices in economics were a mixture of historical basis and game balance. On one hand, he had a wealth of historical knowledge about the medieval period, and on the other he had the desire to control the players ability to control his world while still giving out large and impressive rewards that would keep them coming back for more. So, the cost of weapons in the PH was explicitly overinflated from 'hyperinflation', and the cost of expert hirelings like Sages and Alchemists was also hyperinflated, were other things like income from taxes, wages of peasants, and so forth were based on more or less reasonable historical assumptions.
Yes, it is true that throughout much of the ancient world the silver coin was the daily wage of a common laborer, but the prices given in the various sources are inflated. In some cases it is clear that prices were chosen for Diablo like game balance rather than any reason having to do with realism. And in other aspects, 3 rd. edition has obviously moved FURTHER from historical realism, so why bother with this one disfunctional element? For instance, essentially from the dawn of antiquity until the end of the 19th century, the value of gold held steady at about 1:20 compared to silver. So, in first edition, gold was valued at 1:20 compared to silver. But in third edition, to keep things simple, gold is valued at 1:10 compared to silver. And from the description of the Profession skill, we know that anyone with even the slightest training in a Profession (including profession (farmer)!!!) can make roughly 1 g.p. per day in income. (Of course, the profession skill is broken in its own ways as well.)
Anyhow, that is the basics. The details are lying around somewhere, and I can keep this up if you aren't somewhat convinced.
I don't know about the medieval period, but in modern times a 4% return on investment (after inflation) is considered good.
"You say it's a logistics problem - I say it's an opportunity to get some of the wages back. Just make sure that the workers can only get food and shelter at "company stores" and company houses, and you can drive them permanently into debt. In effect, your wages will be even less than 1 sp..."
*sigh*
No. It may be that the food you give them is part of thier pay, but the total cost of thier labor won't go under 1 s.p.
Whatever the wage standard of a substitance economy is, be it 1 s.p. or 1 g.p. or 1 shilling or 1 denira or whatever, it is impossible to pay your worker much less than that. If you do, they die. Before they die, they generally go into revolt and try to kill you.
The whole purpose of slavery, sweat shops, share cropping, company stores, serfdom and so forth is to try to insure that locally or with some percentage of the population, you continue to pay workers substitance wages when they might otherwise be able to demand slightly more than that. Even that doesn't work to well in the long run or for large percentages of the population, because it is very difficult to keep wages below the market demand.
Now, you might argue that substitance level is somewhat significantly below 1 s.p., but if you did, then you'd have an even bigger problem with the cost of food and other necessities, and from that the cost of everything (and from that the cost of peasant wages in the first place).
Don't get me wrong, you _could_ have a society in which laborers of some category were forced to accept substitance wages even though market forces left to themselves would award them more because the demand for thier labor is high, but such a situation would have huge social consequences. I'd expect such societies to be highly unstable. And in any event, D&D has never dwelt upon such highly oppressive societies, nor does history leave much in the way of evidence that any attempt to do so resulted in significant increase in the wealth of anyone. I see it as alot like an owner embezelling his own company. Sure, he can line his pockets in the short term, but in the long term the money he steals isn't invested in the company, doesn't return a profit for him, and eventually the company goes broke.
"In fact, paying lots of people for menial labor might make sense from a social POV as well"
This is a valid point. The Greeks rejected labor saving devices not because they weren't aware of them, but because they could not foresee past the immediate problem of what the slaves would do when you put them out of work. Since you had all these slaves anyway, you might as well use them.
Of course, ultimately this decision is directly responcible for the Northern European ascendancy. Had the engineers of Rhodes said, 'Once we put the slaves out of work, we can put them to work creating some other form of wealth', probably Rome would have put the first man on the moon.
Nonetheless, Greek and Roman culture took a while to collapse (and alot of other factors contributed beyond thier rejection of technological and scientific progress), so it is quite possible to say that your culture is in technical equilibrium do to social forces.
I've always said that the hard part about progress isn't the science, its the sociology. The whole of the Middle Ages was about evolving the right culture to take advantage of the science that antiquity had achieved but couldn't really put to use.
)
I think Dr. Stangemonkey has been in the cat-nip.
