The Economics of a Portal Fantasy

The Portal Fantasy: we know it, we love (?) it. Or, to put it in shorthand, assume travel suddenly becomes possible between our world and some other world of a much lower tech-level.

Usually this setup is used for some lucky person to have adventures on the far side. I'm looking into a different question, one that will undoubtedly come to the minds of many who see the world on the far side, and immediately ask themselves: how can I get stinking rich?

Naturally the parameters will matter a lot: what's the nature of the world on the far end? What about ease of transportation? Is the portal a constant, or does it flicker? What about the attitudes of the national authorities who control passage through the portal—or is it in international waters?

What I'm looking for are generalizable observations that describe trends applicable to all kinds of portal-world situations. Charles Stross looked into the question a bit with the Merchant Princes series, and came to the conclusion that tech transfers are the most profitable in the long term; I'd like to jump onto that discussion.

If it's more than 1 portal at a time, you can use it for very fast travel between two points with a connecting stop in Portal-world. I suspect the financial sector will jump on this first.

Multiple portals give that option, certainly (and it works the other way too), but let's look at single portals for the moment.

Though I'm wondering about why finance would benefit especially. If you're hauling carts or ships full of specie, certainly; but today's instruments of debt travel at the speed of an Internet connection.

I think something to keep in mind is that the the nation a portal was discovered in would clamp down faster then a screw press on a portal to a lower tech universe, and most western nations won't be exploiting the locals for money and they won't let there citizens do the same.

In order for rule one to not apply, say it's a hidden or something then it can't be a big one or else the governments of the world would eventually notice so you can't exactly drive a truck through it, soon or later someone's gonna notice.

Also: if you did make money from a lower tech world that means your going to need to sell something with value to the people form world B, and receive in payment something with value in world A. The first place someone might jump to are precious materials, gold, silver, gems, but start hawking that stuff in bulk in world A and the FBI or other agency is going to notice you. You could try craft objects like paintings or sculptures and pass them off as your own, but the volume, quality and unless you careful styles of what your selling will get attention.

Conversely if you attempt to live rich in world B and come to world A for supply's, well same issues, the local government will be looking very, very closely at any body who suddenly produces modern technology, heck you could end up getting burnt for being a witch if your not careful even if it is possible to shoot your way out with modern tech, and trying to use your wealth to acquire more items to sell runs you back into problem A of the world governments noticing a large influx of gold suddenly appearing.

So you have to be really careful no matter how you slice it, you have to have items simple enough that locals won't want to burn you for having a mp3 player, and have the payment be low enough to not tip off the world governments that you have a portal to Narnia in your closet.

All in all, keeping such a portal secret may be too much of a headache and your best bet would be to try and find a way to get your local government to work with you somehow so that you can make a profit. It may be more limited but you don't run into issue of the FBI wondering where you got 50 pounds of gold coins with strange strikings. Plus it opens up new options such as getting paid for being a school teacher or doctor in a alternate world

I'll actually disagree at the whole "won't let exploitation happen". That may happen in the short term, but in the long term the nation will want to exploit the new resources available; ethical concerns may limit it if Side B is in luck, but it won't eliminate it. Side A, the industrialized nation-state, has only its sense of self-restraint and the resistance that Side B is able to put up, to stop of it from taking full advantage of what it can.

Also, the majority of actions undertaken won't be by the nation-state once it has established at least a basic modicum of control (a border-control toehold on the far end, at least). It'll be by private actors. The historical model to follow here is the colonization of the Americas and Africa; you'll see a recurring pattern of the nation-state agreeing not to expand beyond a certain line because it doesn't want to spend the resources going to war, only to be dragged beyond that line by settlers and private individuals.

We'll obviously see different outcomes if the portal is secret, and thus trades must be made clandestinely, versus if the portal is open knowledge and trade is semi-regulated.

Do keep going on what kinds of trade will be taking place, though. If the tech differential isn't too high, wholesale technology transfers might be possible and profitable. Tech transfers alone won't be enough to singlehandedly bring on the Industrial Revolution immediately, however, since social and political factors will play tremendous roles.

edited 9th Dec '15 10:09:49 PM by SabresEdge

If the portal is public, you could sell things that are easy and simple to produce in industrialized society (is it A?), but hard to acquire in low-tech society. It doesn't necessarily need to be anything high-tech - I recall a story when a man became rich by selling production-line-made hatchets to medievalesque aliens. The key point is that it's easy for A to make a good-quality steel hatchet, but in B's society, it requires much more time, effort and work-hours. This can translate to many other things, from furniture to clothes and weaponry. Also, A's higher production output means lower production cost, meaning that even with shipping, you could make 4 or 5 five the cost of a single product. A could flood B with products that are cheaper than B's standard fare, but still more expensive than they'd be in their homeworld. This would, of course, do hell to B's trade guilds, craftsmen etc, etc.

The second main group are, of course, things that do not exist in B, but are common in A, such as pens or pencils. Now that would be popular in the world that had only known quill, ink and drawing coals, and in A, they're dirt cheap. As with the previous, you can severely overprice them and yet people will still buy them. I suppose if you want to both make A rich and preserve B's economy, this would be a better way to go, as A wouldn't intrude on B's craftsmen's turf this way.

B would also have a lot to offer A, but while A would focus on mass production, B could sell luxurious products. Hand-made carpets, beautiful sculptures, finely-crafted ceremonial swords and "ethnic" art will always find their buyers, and they too can be severely overpriced compered to how much a local buyer would give for them. Ditto for things like local spices, herbs, alcohol, cuisine or jewelry.

You could construct a sort of "sales model" with this, I suppose, that would enable you to make useful, A-world money. Just to think of an example:

1. Buy cheap, Made-In-China pens in A, go to B
2. Sell supposedly-good-quality pens in B, get B money for it
3. Use B money to buy run-of-the-mill B wine, go to A
4. Slap "exclusive" label on B wine, sell it in A, get A money for it
5. Return with part of this money to point 1.

Hope this makes sense.

Here's how I handled it...

Premise: The Magic Comes Back. Earth is reconnected to other worlds (where magic never went away in the first place) through a portal leading into "The Mists", an ever-shifting world-between-worlds with only a few stable routes leading through it.

Earth has far superior technology to everybody else out there (Medieval Stasis has been sort of in effect on most worlds, with magic filling in the gaps that technology would otherwise spread into), but is very much a developing nation in terms of magic. A shootout between the US Navy and an angry dragon was pretty much declared a draw when both sides were too damaged to continue, demonstrating that magical powers were quite capable of holding their own against earth's technology, and a neutral party with a ''lot'' of firepower is holding the portal and ensuring that no exploitation takes place in either direction.

Earth-based technology doesn't do a whole lot that can't also be done just as efficiently with magic, so technology transfers are profitable but not hugely unbalancing. What is starting to shake up the balance of power is that Earth is starting to combine native technology and magic into something completely new (possessed computers, alchemical power plants, quantum magic...), but that hasn't impacted the economy of other worlds too much so far.

The primary commodity that is traded across worlds is luxuries. Fine wines. Exotic furs or furniture carved from alien trees. Art objects and relics from a thousand different cultures, some human, many not. The crossworld trade moves small quantities of goods (because getting large amounts of freight through the Mist Roads is very, very difficult) but what it carries is of extremely high value. One or two successful round trips can set a trader up for a life of luxury, but the risks of crossworld travel and the high setup cost make it a dangerous gamble.

In effect, crossworld trade is very similar to the historical silk and spice roads.

The last paragraph is quite similar to what I was thinking, and makes sense. As to the rest, sounds interesting. Any chance you're publishing it somewhere already or not really?

Luxury trade makes by far the most sense if you're limited in volume of goods that you can bring across to either side, but the net economic impact wouldn't be very high.

The part that I'm stuck on is this: what luxuries can the "far side" world bring to our side that would fetch a good price? With the exception of a small number of high-rarity goods like pearls or gemstones or gold, and possibly a small art market, it seems hard to get something that will return the investment on, say, a case of good cognac or artificial diamonds or whatever else you're hawking to their nobles.

It seems to me that while the "far side" can probably repay you in things like land and labor, they'll have a much harder time scraping together assets that you can liquidate on our side.

The "ethnic" things. People love this stuff! Just look how expensive hand-made carpets can get, or how much people can give for a "local" jewelry. That goes double if it's from another world and something we don't have here. Chandeliers, sculptures, ceremonial swords, tapestries, furniture, stuff made of wood that doesn't exist in the high-tech world... Such a seller would probably have a smaller base of buyers in the high-tech land, but he'd sell everything for much, much, much higher price. Then you have things like local spices, foods or drinks that also aren't available in high-tech land and can become fairly popular there - just look how Europeans embraced sushi bars.

I kinda feel like I'm repeating myself here. Is something wrong with what I've written earlier?

Another thing to consider is that if you found one magical portal that leads to a lower-tech world, that would pretty much verify the truth of the multiple worlds theory. The government, military, NASA or whoever, would then point out that if that's the case then there's nothing preventing another portal from forming that leads to a higher technology world or even some bizarre reality full of Zerg, Supervillains, or the Combine.

Pretty sure the government would want research teams examining how the portal works, and they would be including other nations into the research process and see about sharing a portion of the profits from the portal. Losing say... 10% of the total profits gained by getting spices and silk from a medeval world would be bad... but leaving out other nations to the point where they would start hiding their own research into portal creation (or finding their own portal) and risk some huge outbreak of zerglings, a magical zombie virus, or an Elder God crawling into our reality would have much more destructive consequences.

Granted, the story doesn't necessarily have to include those things as a legit risk or probable event... you could just have it known that the US Military has multiple plans in place to deal with hypothetical enemies ranging from vampires, alien invasions, zombie outbreaks, or a band of girl scouts gone rogue with high-end military weaponry. Them finding a magical portal to a medieval fantasy world should just one of many possible scenarios they have plans for dealing with... though you can expect several of the plan-makers would be quite surprised that this scenario actually proved real.

Also, medeval settings weren't exactly well-known for their medical knowledge or sanitation and if there is magic in the setting, there could well be all sorts of magical diseases that do things like make people dance until their legs break, turn green with no other negative effects, or have their skin fall off ala leprosy. To say nothing of the effects our germs might have on the other world's inhabitants. Getting a quarantine set up around the portal would also be good to prevent possible outbreaks from crossing over.

As for the economics or how to make money... I imagine that things like art and literature would be among the most profitable things depending on how things go. I mean, this is an entirely different world with possibly different religions, mythology, and history. Think of all the crazy creatures from folklore we have... Greek centaurs, leprechauns from Ireland, the Hide-Behind from American folktales, and of course all the monsters and legends from Japanese folklore that made it into anime and cartoons. Imagine collecting various tales, stories, and legends from the people on this other world, translating and compiling them, and then publish and sell them all in your compilation? Or if you had a huge adventure in this other world, write it down, get it published, and make millions and billions of dollars from your first-hand report of this new world (assuming it's not supposed to be a secret due to the sensitive nature of it being a real world).

I mean, gold and spices and stuff might be profitable, but you're still limited to just one portal which might not exactly be big enough to drive a cargo carrier through and people would want to keep an eye on the portal to keep dangerous stuff from getting in and out. Your most profitable stuff would be something that can be brought through once and then replicated on either end... like bringing copies of religious texts from their world, or sending information on sanitation and better farming techniques to their end. Once the transfer is made, you could have publishers or a printing press make copies of the items for you.

If their other world has some cool plant or animal... like say you ended up in the Elder Scrolls: Skryrim world where a mix of blue mountain flower, swamp fungal pod, and imp stool cab make a healing potion that heals you up from getting slashed by arrows... then gathering those plants and growing them in a greenhouse for ingredients on potion-making would be a super way to make money. In fact, any fantasy world with advanced magical healing you can replicate (or at least bottle) would be a veritable gold mine if you can get the rights to them.

I'm looking at no-magic scenarios thus far. Magic gives the far side a comparative advantage in whatever it is, and that equalizes the trade a lot more.

I strongly suspect that no-magic scenarios are economically more akin to development of third-world countries than to trade between two large economies.

Of course, the nation-state's security forces, either civilian or military, will be involved. Apart from all else, it's a border with a foreign country. (From a military perspective, it'd make a ton of sense to go and place observation posts and the like on the far side if at all possible—full disclosure, Gate was an inspiration for this track of questioning, along with The Merchant Princes.)

And, of course, the nature of the portal and how much you can transport through it is a parameter that will affect much of the trade. I'm not going to fix it; I want to see what might happen if we adjusted that variable.

edited 10th Dec '15 12:56:41 PM by SabresEdge

Also: something important is how new is the portal? yes it could only recently been discovered, but if there has never been contact between two worlds then you haves whole new host of problems.

Language is one such issue for example, if you have contact in the past then the possibility of a shared a language does exist if only as a trade tongue or something preserved that you can draw on. Note: if the story takes place in north or south America, this trade language would be a variant of one of the native languages that may or may not be extinct so even if there is a common language you may not be able to understand it anyway.

But a bigger issue is disease. if contact between the worlds was far enough back then both sides won't have resistances to each other. World A has modern medicine to help, which may not even be enough but world B is lower tech and may just have a plague of the common cold, and World A WILL try to find the source of a unknown plague.

Language is a relatively short-term factor. Some variant on pidgin or trade language will get running very quickly, and from there it's only a year or two more, at least if the colonization of the Americas is anything to go by. Translators will be able to make a good living.

As for diseases, barring some extremely pestilential and virulent outbreak (the Plague in Europe, smallpox in the Americas), it'll probably not be enough to deter enterprising traders from going forth.

This sounds kind of like Gate

edited 11th Dec '15 10:39:27 AM by EchoingSilence

Gate doesn't go into the day-to-day economics in any real detail, and has a very generous supply pipeline. I want to play around with those.

You're right, it probably wouldn't, but I guess the governments would be wary of it. How about simply making it requisite for people travelling across the worlds to wear those face masks◊, at least until both B and A make sure they won't kill each other off with their own virii and bacteria?

Hmm, haven't read that in a while, but I suppose a more Outbreak Company-like solution would be a desirable outcome.

Uh... going by your link, a "portal fantasy" usually revolves around characters being pulled into another world against their will (or at least, without their consent), with no easy way to return home.

So... in the conventional model of such a story, there would be next to no economic activity going on, as any method to cross between the worlds would likely be extremely difficult, expensive, unreliable, unpredictable, or any combination thereof.

I would also like to highlight that in most cases, these kinds of stories aren't interested in the interplay between our mundane, earthly world, and the fantasy world on the far side. Rather, they serve as metaphors for the displaced protagonists' inner struggles, or as catalysts for character development, with the adversity of the fantasy world serving to draw forth the protagonists' inner virtues.

In other words, the fantasy world exists to serve the story, not the other way around.

edited 12th Dec '15 5:43:00 PM by Tungsten74

Usually—not always. Most authors aren't particularly interested in exploring the social/political/economic nature of feudalism and the evolution thereof, and I have to admit that it can be a rather technical subject that requires a pretty broad base of knowledge. Since most authors aren't economists, historians, or political scientists, and lack interest in those subjects, that's understandable.

However, I do happen to be interested in those kinds of things. Besides, where's the fun in travelling the well-trod road of "usually"?

Here's a potential rabbit hole to jump down: the most easily available resources in a feudal-type world would be labor and land (as in most third-world countries). They aren't easily turned into liquid assets in our world, but the long-term potential to generate revenue from a relatively low-paid labor force is quite high; add to that the relative ease of defending your investment from greedy neighbors armed only with swords and steel armor, and the very high demand for even fairly basic goods (that our world could provide), and an enterprising investor-turned-landowner can potentially make a fairly good profit, whether by introducing a basic assembly line to produce goods or by leasing out their land and introducing things like crop rotation and other high-intensity agricultural practices. (If transport volumes through the portal were high enough, imported ammonium fertilizer could be a trade good all of its own; otherwise, I doubt it'd be efficient, and setting up a Haber-Bosch plant to produce ammonium nitrate seems impractical given the tech base. This means that, alas, one of the highest boosters of agricultural productivity isn't available.)

Labor brings with it an issue, though. Part of what made feudalism work was that the peasants were tied to their land, and were generally not free to leave. Russian boyars made a point of punishing escaping serfs gruesomely. At the same time, the promise of payment for their labor—as well as incentives like, say, basic clothing and medical care—would make the new landlord's demesne a destination for escaped serfs and freedmen. In short, introducing mass paid labor to get the most out of the population would be seen as an ideological threat to the feudal system.

One time-travel story (that I won't go into great detail about right now) had the effect of introducing modern crops to medieval farmers, simply by giving them a packet of seeds. The modern varieties of staple grains are much hardier, grow faster, have higher yields, and are more resistant to crop disease. Then there are the other crops, such as corn and potatoes, which your typical medieval farmer wouldn't even know about.

One anecdote stated that, when saving seeds to plant the following year, the modern crops gave a return of fifty to one, whereas five to one was considered excellent and three to one was normal.

Would those kinds of returns be possible without a whole package of innovations, instead of just seeds, though? Things like deep ploughing, crop rotation, modern fertilizer, and all of that, and not all of them could be easily adopted by a Medieval farmer.

Example: land reform, i.e., consolidating all those tiny strips of land into one big farm, can massively boost output. However, it'd involve losers as well as winners, among whom may be the owners of that land. ("Wait, I have to pay my serfs now?!") Getting that through may be difficult.

The countervailing pressure, though, is that those who successfully adopt reforms have a lot more money to work with, and since money translates into military advantage, they can beat those who don't reform.

Yes, the time-traveler did introduce crop rotation, using bat guano as fertilizer, steel ploughs, and even the wheelbarrow. (A man can carry a lot more in a single trip with something as simple as a wheelbarrow.) He got over the initial resistance by convincing the local lord set aside a few fields specifically for the modern crops, demonstrating how much more productive they could be. The peasants naturally claimed it was all done with witchcraft at first, but they soon saw the advantages of having more food to eat and extra produce to sell. (Win their hearts and minds by appealing to their stomachs and purses.)

edited 12th Dec '15 7:43:51 PM by pwiegle

That does seem pretty plausible in the short term, though it'll still be pretty difficult to really increase crop yields without introducing social factors and the like. (Model: Russia, post-freeing of the serfs.)

For instance, steel ploughs and the oxen to pull them would be quite expensive. It'd be out of the question for each individual peasant, with their tiny alloted strip of land, to buy their own. So they could potentially lease it all from the lord. If the lord demands too high of a lease price, though, they'll simply not bother; why go to all the extra trouble if the lord will just take all the surpluses away? That in turn would see something of a change in the master-serf relationship; it may be closer to sharecropping than to serfdom...

on the subject of crops: what about animal breeds? a beef cow, even without perfect feed is genetic predisposed to give more meat then a normal cow, plus the money is self sustaining, the blood line will thin out enough meaning you can sell them another cow. Sames true of horses, or animals they may not even have, like say Llamas AKA the horse, sheep hybrid.

OR for that matter the other world may not even have some kinds of animals (due to humans being not native to the plane and thus the world did not evolve with the same compliment of wild life we did.) meaning just selling them horses.

Other thoughts might be specific highly breed dog breeds that may be better adapted for herding then local breeds, if they even have dogs, or other more more unique breeds of dog and cats as status symbols to nobility, and of course you can go the other way and sell local animals specimens back, assuming of course your allowed to, we have enough problems with invasive plants and animals that are native to the same planet, much less from another one. Though the people from world B should care less on this subject.

But all this assumes that the world on the far side of the portal is actually relatable to ours in any appreciative way.

The other world might not have any oxygen. It might not have a sun, and be swathed in eternal blackness. It might not even operate on atomic physics, with all matter being composed of some other fundamental particle (or it might not even be composed of particles at all). It might not be a planet at all, but a fragment of a dream of the Godhead.

People in the other world might not live in a feudal society. They might have weapons technology that far surpasses our own. They might be psychic. They might have verifiable and quantifiable souls, with a verifiable afterlife awaiting them. They might not be made of meat - they might be made of metal, or promises, or fire. They might not be even remotely human.

You talked about not wanting to consider no-magic scenarios, but this isn't even magic - this is the possibility of the other universe flat-out not working the same way ours does on a fundamental level. The mere existence of a portal between worlds already puts our current scientific models of reality into question. Why should anything else work the same?

edited 13th Dec '15 7:42:17 AM by Tungsten74