Capitalism without taxation.
There aren't any large wars between competing spheres of influence, because the elites are able to quickly work out issues with each other. (Cultural differences don't really form like they do with the humans - they're affectations that the robots put on, to try and seem like their 'Europan' or 'Amerian' ancestors.) This removes the need for a military and, consequently, defense spending. Robots are also free of the usual human need for healthcare, and so you have a government that isn't required to devote a sizable expenditure towards that.
Well if you're not spending money on defense or healthcare, what are you collecting taxes for?
Ameria and Europa and Zonha
and Aprica quickly become Corporatocracies that way. (Australia is uninhabited and Rossya doesn't change, as per usual...)
However, the main reason to reapply profits back into development is to grow and evolve, and the Corporations don't need to do either during the story since they're the only games in town. And so you end up with an economy that's somewhere between two extremes: goods and services are paid for at cost, or they are paid for in excess of it (below cost isn't an option here, because everyone would refuse to work). Payment for something in a perfectly managed economy would be exactly what it cost to produce it, netting zero profit and loss.
This is not a perfectly managed economy, and so the corporations all end up with a profit margin of, say, 10%. This goes directly into the pockets of the elites, who have no need to spend it without various forms of taxes essentially charging them for having money. Thus, you have a literally more-money-than-sense Highest Class, which employs various bits and pieces of monetary control to give the illusion of a stable economy even as it accumulates a parallel fortune.
The problems start when they decide to spend their income. Since this Corporatocratic economy functions as the ultimate closed-loop zero-sum system (it isn't, but that's how it operates), what would adding money to it do? The system compensates every time there's a fluctuation in the value of the currency, but when one elite secretly/publicly blows the equivalent of $10 billion to have a massive crowd of reimbursed rioters to moon their rival - what then? Where does the money go?
It disappears. Even if it got invested into a skyscraper, the skyscraper is disappeared.
The problems begin when infrastructure is disappeared - say, a recently built highway is removed by security forces overnight. The economy struggles to compensate. Etc.
The Best Worst Psychonaut
So when you say that the money 'disappears', what does that mean, exactly? I probably should have mentioned I'm not really an expert on economics; I more-or-less understood everything except for that part. I got the impression that that skyscraper they decide to build literally gets torn down. :V
And when you say that the elites don't have any need to spend it, they do still spend their money; on services, upgrades, backup units, ludicrous vanity projects, and so forth. Although since they run everything, all that money they spend just ends up going back to them; even the money they pay all their employees (i.e. pretty much the city's entire population) ultimately goes back to them since said employees have to pay them to survive. ...So I guess in some roundabout way, they don't spend any money.
Are you saying that, because of that 10% profit margin, they get progressively richer while everyone else gets progressively poorer, and they try to cover it up by deliberately creating more money, causing hyperinflation (being too insane to realise this, of course)?
"If you think like a child, you will do a child's work."
Yeah, I'm not an economist either. (And look at the timestamp - I was falling asleep when I wrote it.)
When I said 'disappeared', I meant it in the sense of a forced disappearance. Yes, the skyscraper is literally torn down under cover of night, and if any citizens were inside it at the time that's their problem. I'm hoping this sounds as absurd to everyone else as it does to me. One form of inefficiency is to add inefficiency - the more pointless the better - and this seems like a good(?) way to do that. Another option would be the situation in Brazil, where the endless bureaucracy creates far more problems than it's supposed to solve... but that gets away from the idea of a corporatocracy.
Hyperinflation would only be a problem if there was more than one currency; there wouldn't be any other in this setting, is my thinking. The idea is that the real value of the currency doesn't change so much that it's noticeable - and on the occasion that it does, the currency itself is replaced with something that seems to make more sense (eg. CR$ to R$).
The Best Worst Psychonaut
So if I'm understanding you correctly, they tear down the things they build for the purpose of reclaiming the resources used to build it, and thus, the money? And what if they pay someone else for something? Do they then have to 'delete' them? I'm trying to figure out the logic they're using; absurd as it may be, I want there to be some kind of demented Insane Troll Logic at work, as opposed to it being completely nonsensical.
"If you think like a child, you will do a child's work."
No, the resources are lost. The things built or created or done using money that shouldn't exist are torn down because they shouldn't exist. All in the name of keeping the economy functioning they way they think it should, sanity be damned.
The idea is, the explanation should engender a response of "WTF?!" when the reader sees it. This system clearly has some internal logic beneath it - but that logic isn't rooted in reality in any way.
The Best Worst Psychonaut
I'm still not really understanding the insane rationale behind this (which may be the whole point), so perhaps it might help if I asked some related questions:
- When you said the system isn't the ultimate closed-loop system but it's run like that anyway, what does that mean? Does that imply that there's money coming in from elsewhere? (Possibly trade with foreign city-states like N-Yak City or The Angles, or just making more money?)
- What's the functional difference between a closed-loop zero-sum system and a more 'traditional' economy?
- How can they end up using money that doesn't exist? I think that's the thing I'm really confused about. As I mentioned before, they own everything; all the money they spend will just end up going right back to them (assuming there's no foreign trade or currency creation), so their existing money doesn't really go anywhere, even if the system is pretty much rigged to keep the top 5% as rich as possible, or at least it was at first. I don't understand how they can end up using money that 'doesn't exist'. Is that implying that rather than actually pay for anything, they just tell them they're paying without actually doing so?
- If they used this non-existent money to pay for a service rather than a good, does that mean they have to kill the robot that provides the service? Or massacre their workforce on payday?
Just trying to figure it out so the 'WTF' you mentioned is from shock and not from confusion. 
edited 21st May '17 5:56:56 PM by PresidentStalkeyes
"If you think like a child, you will do a child's work."
First thing: I'm assuming that there's only one 'economy' in this setting, as opposed to the hundreds IRL. One Lugnut will get you an hour's worth of fuel in Whosten and in Paging, and is the single currency in use on the planet. (Bartering might be a thing, but more of a local black market thing than legit commerce.) Nothing I've said here holds if there are other, competing economies.
Money does not come in from outside of this single economy, because there is no outside economy - is my assumption. (You didn't mention visitors from "elsewhere" so I'm assuming this is a one-planet game.) I read it as C-Cargo being the source and therefore headquarters of the robot corporatocracy.
A traditional economy can expand, because it can continually bring in outside 'stuff' - materials, capital, workforce, culture, etc. Here, imagine a farm on an island that's unable to receive anything from outside. It has enough materials that, through constant recycling and careful use, it can sustain the people living on it... up to a point. (Incidentally, fun worldbuilding fact: with proper agriculture, it takes about an acre of land to create the food necessary to sustain the average human being. This is in the sense of four acres with rotating crops and a growing season sustaining four people, not "a man can live on only green beans in a desert for a year".)
That farm probably cannot produce a Volkswagen without a mine and a smelter, and it probably doesn't have rubber trees either. It may not even have a need for one. So as long as you're working at that farm, on that secluded island, you are for all intents and purposes in an enclosed system. This extended metaphor is the sort of economy I've been talking about - or at least, what it appears to be. (The elites drive '67 Beetles that can't have been made and snort Penicillin that can't have been cultivated.)
A more traditional economy, as I understand it, functions with other economies to trade or cooperate with. Put a second island near that first one, say within shouting distance shore-to-shore, and the farms can think about making boats to facilitate trade - or spears to, uh, force the issue.
Next part: the extra money doesn't exist. Well, it does. It's off the books, only instead of being unaccounted for in an official capacity it's made to seem like it never existed - with force if necessary. Going back to the farm metaphor, it's like a farmhand has secretly mined and smelted up a '67 Volkswagen (complete with tires from rubber trees that no one knew about!). To preserve the status quo, that charming well-engineered Nazi-mobile is burned, sunk, salvaged, burned again, and then buried. Secretly. The closed loop is maintained, the other farmhands go about their daily lives sustaining themselves, and the logic is absurd in any context outside of the island.
The mine, smelter, and rubber trees aren't destroyed - someone with the time and energy can produce a '67 Volkswagen Bus.
(It is all, I think, similar to what happens in certain video games, where Karl Marx Hates Your Guts. You cannot make money on trade without finding or making things to trade, and in a closed circle there's no way to do that... unless you cheat, steal, or rob.)
And, given that the workforce is robots, couldn't you just shut them down instead of massacre them? Of course, that definitely sounds like the sort of thing 'Grayed' AI elites might start doing. In fact, I think you should have them do that instead/too.
(EDIT: counting brackets is fun, by the way!)
edited 21st May '17 11:47:50 PM by DeusDenuo
The Best Worst Psychonaut
Hmmm... that's got me thinking on some more world-building.
I was thinking initially that C-Cargonote is not the headquarters of the world, but rather one of a handful of such societies worldwide. But C-Cargo in particular is very isolationist, as the 'Higher' AIs that run the place decided to reactivate a pre-war containment field - originally designed by the humans to stop their spread - to create an enclosed robot utopia, and stop the supposed dangers of the outside world from getting in and messing everything up.
Oh yeah, and the containment field never actually existed in the first place. The elites made it up and assumed that none of their 'employees' would ever become intelligent enough to question its existence. Originally this was stop them from 'hurting themselves' but quickly became a means of keeping them in line. Nowadays, the non-existence of the containment field is pretty much an Open Secret, but nobody's going to try running off and setting up their own power plant any time soon - remember, robots need power to survive, and much like a Feudal lord, the providers of that power won't react well to anyone competing with them.
So the elites know perfectly well there's more resources out there, and it'd be smarter for them to just expand even further and take those resources... which is exactly what they did. But then they realised 'wait a minute! Now our employees are going to start leaving en masse to go live on their own!', and then the CEO was like 'glitch! You're right! We need to destroy all that junk we're building and pretend there's no resources! The world outside is a barren wasteland filled with... um... mechanical monsters! That will eat you for breakfast! Yes, they eat metal! And intelligence!'
And then his advisor was like 'but wait, how are we going to explain this to our employees?', and the CEO says 'uhhhh... just tell them we built it wrong and it fell over! ...Because we were distracted by mechanical monsters! Built by the HUMANS! Because we didn't kill all of them and they're still out there and they're going to take your intelligence out of jealousy!'
...Does that sound about right? At this point it sounds like it might be less about economics and more about politics. Just my luck.
Oh, and on an additional note, a 'mass shutdown' and a 'massacre' are basically the same thing; most robots can only afford one resident unit (and maybe a dedicated work unit, if they're lucky), and if that unit is destroyed, the controlling AI goes with it. And according to company law, this doesn't count as murder because robot bodies are considered property rather than citizens in their own right - it's the controlling AI that's a citizen, and if that dies as a result of the unit's destruction, well, then the cause of death is put down as a 'sudden power cut' and no-one is held accountable. Or at least not if the police-bots were responsible. :V
edited 22nd May '17 8:34:47 PM by PresidentStalkeyes
"If you think like a child, you will do a child's work."
So for a while now, I've had an idea for a literature-type word-filled book of literature with words in it that you must read with your eyes set in a retro sci-fi sort of environment (think Cassette Futurism). It takes place two hundred years after a Robot War that wiped out humanity, (they used poisonous gases and they poisoned their asses) leaving the AIs they created to inherit the Earth. Having developed humanlike intelligence and emotional range, they've since set up their own societies.
One of the largest and most important of these societies, and the one the story takes place in, is a city-state based around the metropolis of C-Cargo (formerly known as Chicago), which is where the world's biggest robot production company was headquartered before the war, and where the Robot Uprising began.
After the war was over and the humans were all dead, the most intelligent AIs took over the company for themselves and began to build robot bodies for the thousands of 'free' AIs in the area, which were still developing. At first, they simply gave the bodies away, even building them according to each individual AI's custom specifications, all of them wanting to abandon their old, broken-down human-built bodies, seen as symbolic of human oppression. Individuality became valued, and they wanted to both emulate humanity but at the same time set themselves apart from them, which is why their robot bodies tend to be humanoid (mostly) but unmistakably robotic.note
Of course, this all requires resources and energy (which, besides serving the usual purpose, effectively functions as robot food), and the company took over all the power plants in the area and put the less-developed robots to work - they couldn't just enslave some non-sentient robots because that would go against the popular ideology - that ALL robots have a right to sentience (plus, for them, it'd be like vat-growing braindead humans, installing remote controls in them and using them as slaves).
It wasn't long before they developed to a similar level of intelligence and questioned why they needed to work for them in the first place. A few of them suggested putting everyone on a rotor, but the 'higher' AIs, seeing themselves as an intellectual elite that's 'above' manual labour, instead decided to emulate pre-war human society; they controlled all the industry anyway, so simply instituting a new currency and locking everything behind a paywall was trivial. Pretty soon, the company bought out the entire city and established itself as the government.
This is where the question comes in: I'm trying to work out the specifics of the economic system they have running. I'm actually not looking for something that works; I'm looking for something that doesn't work. Something inefficient; creates massive short-term profits for the elites and misery for everyone else. Something that you'd have to be crazy to implement.
The dark secret behind the society is that all the AIs, once they reach a certain level of development, begin to degrade and go crazy, and nobody seems to know why; finding out why is a Driving Question. Naturally, the 'higher' AIs in power were the first to go rampant, and began to abuse their ability to cheat 'death' by inhabiting multiple backup units by taking Refuge in Audacity and indulging in dangerous, outrageous pastimes. They also meddled with the economic system, driving the city into the ground out of incompetence, and throwing hissy-fits whenever anyone tries to put them in check; usually by siccing the robot police on them and having them deleted.
So, in short: what's the best (worst?) economic system that could fit this scenario? And feel free to be as absurd as possible; this universe is meant to be filled with Black Comedy.
edited 19th May '17 5:41:17 PM by PresidentStalkeyes
"If you think like a child, you will do a child's work."