Ch.141Making big money

I smiled contentedly as I watched the walls of Amurtat City crumble.

The walls crumbling now did not signify Amurtat’s disarmament.

They were being dismantled to protect a longer, wider urban area. If the expanded city were to be embraced by even larger walls, Amurtat City could easily accommodate a population of 10 million.

As I was sipping wine and dreaming of such a rosy future, my aide suddenly approached me.

“Your Majesty. Do you have a moment?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“This, please…”

I took the note handed to me by my aide.

It was probably a message delivered by spies dispatched to other countries, but the paper was soaked with blood, giving me an ominous feeling right from the start.

“Sigh…”

I put down my wine glass and carefully unfolded the note to read it, then tossed it into the fireplace, expressing my irritation.

“Damn it… Nothing ever goes right!”

*

There is a law called the law of diminishing marginal utility.

Simply put, this law is a verbose explanation of the concept of “getting tired of something.”

For example, imagine a hungry person eating delicious food.

Being hungry, this person would devour the delicious food in the blink of an eye, and lick the crumbs from their lips with a satisfied smile.

The satisfaction felt here is called “utility.”

Then what happens when you give delicious food to someone who is already full?

They might still eat it since it tastes good, but being full, they can only nibble at it, and their satisfaction—that is, utility—would be much less than that of the hungry person.

In simpler terms, they become “satiated.”

This can be related to the growth of a nation.

When a nation is first established, it has virtually nothing and is reduced to digging the earth for survival, so even a little effort to develop the economy quickly yields results.

Cultivating land to increase farmland leads to population growth, and developing mines to sell ore increases wealth.

These preciously accumulated achievements become the foundation for the next stage, and the results from that foundation again become the foundation for future achievements, creating a positive feedback loop.

However, this process eventually breaks down.

This happens when the net profit from industries maintained and developed so far < the cost of developing next technologies or attracting new industries.

In simple terms, it means that it’s no longer easy to accumulate wealth and develop.

By now, the country is running relatively stably, and enough national power has been accumulated to no longer live by merely digging the earth.

However, the national power is not quite sufficient to challenge for regional hegemony, and compared to neighboring countries, there’s nothing particularly better… just an ordinary country…

We call this a “middle-income country.”

Neither poor nor rich, literally just getting by.

And from this point on, to leap to becoming an advanced nation requires tremendous sacrifice—literally grinding citizens in a crusher, demolishing all established systems, and innovating.

The human heart is truly fickle. When one’s back is warm and stomach is full, sleep inevitably comes.

In other words, people become lazy, and the thought “Isn’t this good enough?” gradually seeps into the citizens’ minds.

It wasn’t entirely wrong.

The barren fields were now fertile and filled with frolicking sheep, pigs, chickens, and cattle. Inside the walled city, 3-5 story buildings and various taverns had been established.

And with entertainment districts providing all the pleasures humans desire, what more could one want?

Money is a strange thing—desperately needed when absent, but when in hand, it evokes nothing more than a bland “Oh, I have money.”

A poor country can push for development with the determination to “somehow eat chicken every day!” while a rich country can continuously whip its citizens with the fear that “if we become complacent, latecomers might overtake us!”

But middle-income countries, stuck right in between, lack the motivation to raise their national level, and thus cannot develop further.

In fact, there were other reasons why they couldn’t develop.

Even while developing into middle-income countries, they continued to accept migrants and immigrants. These people were helpful in the transition from developing to middle-income status, but in the transition from middle-income to advanced status, they offered little beyond labor provision, and sometimes even hindered progress.

The reason was surprisingly simple.

Migrants, essentially refugees, were in a position where they had to bow down in gratitude for just a shabby tent and thin porridge, so they tended to conform to their circumstances. Immigrants, having chosen this shabby country over more prosperous ones, proved themselves incapable of establishing themselves properly in advanced nations.

Therefore, once a certain level of development was achieved, these people employed all sorts of petty methods to maintain their status or prevent their security from crumbling. Among these, the most severe was the tyranny of landowners.

Of course, in this world, one could simply push landowners or businessmen into the military to resolve issues. If they truly opposed public authority, forceful suppression was possible. But these landowners had literally purchased land, allowing them to exploit tenant farmers and workers on their land as their private soldiers.

Simply put, the more landowners there were, the weaker the monarch’s power became.

This was one of the reasons why I deliberately distributed precious land for farmers to cultivate. Self-employed farmers had much higher motivation than tenant farmers, didn’t have to pay rent, and the merit of “their own land” (a very important point) was a major reason why small-scale self-employed farmers could overwhelmingly outproduce large-scale tenant farmers.

In fact, the landowner class should have fulfilled its role and disappeared after reaching middle-income status, for the following reasons:

First, most landowners were absentee landlords (living in cities or elsewhere) who treated farmers as stewards. Naturally, they couldn’t know the productivity of the land or the mood of the tenant farmers, so the farmland suffered from soil depletion and acidification, gradually dying and ultimately wasting valuable land.

Moreover, when full-scale industrialization begins, advanced agricultural techniques must be used to create high yields from small areas. This threatened the interests of landowners who accumulated wealth through agriculture, creating a major obstacle to accepting new farming methods or seeds.

And building industrial facilities naturally required space, inevitably causing friction with landowners who held vast tracts of land for large-scale agriculture.

In short, they were the very corruption that had to be eradicated to transition from a pre-modern to a modern state.

That’s why experienced players, despite immediate disadvantages, either avoided tenant farming systems altogether or imposed limits on the amount of land an individual could own.

I had prohibited tenant farming, limited the amount of farmland an individual could own, and severely punished attempts to circumvent these rules through proxy registrations and other loopholes.

The idea that all land in the country belonged to the state—that is, to the monarch—wasn’t particularly alien in this world, and even college-educated economists gnashed their teeth at the mention of landowners, making this possible.

So after winning the battle against landowners and using their vast lands more efficiently, agricultural prices fell, allowing city workers on low wages to sustain their lives, and more diverse industrial complexes could be established on salt-preserved land, emitting acrid smoke.

However, one should know that industrialists are not inherently good.

If you’ve read this far, you should have some understanding of what the middle-income trap is and why it occurs.

Then the next question naturally arises:

‘Why am I explaining this?’

The answer was simple.

Because the landowners in the three countries south of Amurtat had gathered private armies and rebelled.

In truth, the rebellion itself wasn’t that important.

What mattered was that they still had to repay their debt to me.