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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 8279913" data-attributes="member: 72555">Another way to look at it is that gaining productivity, in terms of more arable land or the like, used to take insane amounts of investment.The cost to do that was much, much higher than the cost to produce more humans, and human productivity outside of tending arable land was limited.  So human population would grow faster than productivity, then you'd get a die back.With the industrial revolutions (and there have been more than one), the efficiency of investment to produce more wealth matched or outpaced the efficiency of making more humans.Economically, for most of human history, the return on investment of savings was negative.  It cost more to store food to eat next year than it cost to make the food this year.Storing your wealth as coins was expensive, because people could easily steal it.  Storing your wealth as food was expensive, because it would rot.  So instead, when you had a surplus, you stored it in building a tavern or what have you.The tavern wouldn't have to produce more wealth from owning it than you invested in it, it would just have to be harder to steal than coins and rot slower than food for it to be a smart investment.As someone who wasn't dead, you'd have rights to an income stream.  Maybe you had rights to grow crops on someone else's land, and you'd pay a traditional share of those crops for that right.  It was hard work, but the value was less in your work than in the land and the rights to grow on it.  If you had excess food, you couldn't invest it in buying more such rights.   You'd eat what you could, and if there was extra you'd invest it in children, family or sometimes you'd sell it to the market for various stuff.  That stuff wouldn't have to be "worth more" than the food you ate or have a good "return on investment), because even storing that food was expensive.  (You'd store as much food as you could, because next year's harvest might be crappy).  Buying that cooking pot or whatever would just have to be better than building a new grainy.When bad times came, what wealth you managed to store up might let you live through it.  Or maybe not.If there where places you could invest money for return that where not basically negative, we wouldn't have been in that trap.  Investment would be done in that area and exponential growth would flow out of it.  Instead, there are centuries of about 0% annual growth in total wealth.  That represents a relatively fixed stock of capital producing wealth, which is divided up among the people based on politics, and no good investment opportunities.  Negative return investments -- savings -- would smooth the population curve for short term economic damage, but that would lead to population growth, and eventual population collapse from a starvation mediated event (plague, war, whatever).  Because there where no good ways to boost total food production (the foundation of the economy).We can look at Eberonn at an attempt to show a magical industrial revolution.  But such societies are definitely not static, like most D&D settings seem to be.  If you escape from the trap, the world changes every generation in ridiculous ways.</blockquote>

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