Yui108

But its difficult to assess this. Most central planners emphasise intangible factors anyway. Going head-to-head on straight GDP almost never happens. Social outcomes and whatnot are usually stressed and in those (usually the access to material ones) they usually outperform capitalism. (In the long run generally not.) Its probably not unfair to claim a victory in absolute growth terms if the other side habitually yields the field. But even so, it pays to be wary of arriving at conclusions ahead of facts. Its always nice to polish your argument anyway through debates. Even if you lose the first few times.

Russia offers a good example. It was rapidly industrialising before the Bolsheviks took over and there is no reason to suppose that in their absence this wouldn't have continued. The outcome would have been different - more of emphasis on light industry in preference to heavy - under capitalism but it is difficult to assess the outcome objectively. My personal feelings are that the importance of central planning in the rise of China and Russia are overstated to a large degree. The former demonstrates persuasively that growth under a capitalist schema is probably higher and that it may be happening despite central planning and not because of it.

Basically you hit the problem on the head. There is a tendency to overemphasise the failures of central planning; at the same time its not uncommon to unduly play up the strengths of capitalism. The truth lies somewhere in the middle: there are flaws in central planning - e.g. a tendency to overshoot and undershoot production - and the same applies to capitalism - e.g. the singular ability to arrive at social outcomes nobody wants. But in terms of evaluating relative performance your right, optimally we should look at the outcomes and work from there.

Orders okay for me?

#nes?

What Yui and Kraz said, before all we crusaders assembled on #nes decide to let the Lord do it for us.

What Kraz said

Can you come on #nes for a second?

Its fine. I barely know anything. Will do.

I'll send a revision in about a hour I think.

Did you get my orders? Did I do them okay?

What time zone are you in/using for your NES?

get on #nes?

I'm a stupid teenager.

Instead of risking getting booted from the game while playing as the Papal States, I'll take Poland instead.

Sorry Yui, I forgot, horrible as that sounds. I've been busy with RL stuff and unfortunately that hasn't abated so I don't think I'll have time to work on your map

I thought you were doing something else, I was kinda expecting a "Hark Masada you can start the map nao" post. I'll get back to you on it tonight.

Coromandel would also have adjusted course as well under these circumstances with what I presume is a break-up of the overseas Tamil merchant guilds, not to mention the collapse of the export economy which isn't as harmful for them as for the Malabar coast lot, but even so we're looking less at a Chola analogue and more at a Vijayanagar type agricultural state with little to no exposure to trade. If that's indeed the case and trade is being managed by Malays and if Siam does exercise a semi-effective control of the Peninsula we would expect to see trade settlements in Southern Sumatra in preference to say Malacca et. al. You can't change one end and not expect the effects to magnify. Also, lol at China because the Black Death won't spread into Europe now.

That's not really all that useful: what are Chinese merchants actually doing? Are they trading into Southeast Asia or have they relinquished that? Its hard enough to think of Persians et. al. going past India in your time-line. And the Chinese weren't up to making the journey to India themselves. So there needs to be an intermediary set of traders making the trip. And if that's the case then we have a higher probability of more defined states in the Malay Archipelago. But at the same time since India seems to have retrenched in its trade we have the problem of actually coming up with a viable picture of what India looks like. Since, obviously, the effects of the interruption of trade for two decades would have magnified through the highly trade exposed South Indian polities especially on the Malabar coast which don't have an agricultural hinterland to retreat into.

That doesn't really explain anything for me. China's trade wasn't a matter of what China was doing in foreign policy terms but what its internal policies were and what degree of latitude they had.

Not, yet. I still need to know what's happening in terms of Cina.

You're confusing Louisiana with Texas. What few people Louisiana had were ambivalent about the whole deal, if not completely opposed.