Who can estimate the Gross Domestic Product of Golarion's nations?

[Oli Ironbar]

Assuming that the average person operates on the same level of a PC using the craft or profession skill, can anyone crunch the numbers?

[avr]

If you assume 1 rank, class skill +3, +1 stat mod & no relevant feat then that's +5. On craft taking 10 (on a DC 15 item, or DC 5 taking +10 to work fast) that's 15^2 = 225 sp of progress per week, of which 1/3 (75 sp) is raw materials. That's the ideal situation; if the crafter is working at about half the max on average because they don't have orders, can't sell everything etc. then they produce ~ (50/2)*150 = 3750 sp / year = 375 gp / year.

Profession of +5 taking 10 earns 7.5 gp per week and probably can work 50 weeks at that rate. 50 * 7.5 = 375 gp / year.

Multiply by working age population for a GDP, but note that a lot of that will be in clothing and turnips rather than anything lootable.

Higher level characters aren't common enough to skew this via skills but spellcasters might be.

[Oli Ironbar]

Aha, Vestofholding has produced the data on Golarion's total known population here .

With 8.2 million as a lowball estimate and 375gp/year as standard income, annual GDP is about 3 billion gp.

Projections could be made on how many people live outside of the settlements counted in the 8.2 million population, which would need to go hand in hand with an estimation on what percentage of the world population is of a working age, as well as what percentage of the world population is a skilled worker vs unskilled (who net about 25gp/year at 5 silver a week).

But it could be the case that those who live outside of population centers have a lower average percentage of skilled vs unskilled workers than the areas counted. I think the number would be in the same magnitude as a 3 billion gp GDP.

Anyone have an exchange rate between GP and recent USD?

[avr]

Working age population - some people will be too old or too young to have meaningful contributions to make. Soldiers don't contribute directly to GDP either. While kids start early in a medieval society they'd be offering unskilled labour or aid anothers to skilled labour at first (worth between 1/30 and 2/15 of the skilled labour's earnings; 12.5 to 50 gp/year).

There really is no meaningful way of converting gp to $. Pick any two types of prices to convert and you'll get two different answers.

[Oli Ironbar]

On the topic of children, we could also consider whether unpaid child care factors into GDP.

Edit: Consumer Price Index could be substituted for median monthly expenses, which is conveniently spelled out in the rules for Golarion: average = 10 GP/ month.

So about 5,000 current USD would be around 10 gp, so 1 gp is about $500 today.

[MrCharisma]

Just gonna throw this spanner in the works: GEB

[Oli Ironbar]

MrCharisma wrote:

Just gonna throw this spanner in the works: GEB

Ooh, that is interesting. I don't know if the fact that they don't consume food or other services would change the GDP, since someone somewhere is buying it.

[MrCharisma]

For a real-world analogue, THE NETHERLANDS are one of the largest food exporters in the world, despite being a very small country.

[Oli Ironbar]

Not only is the comparison amazing, but the plural 'Netherlands are' warms the grammar nerd side of my heart.

Looking at global GDP between the real world. and Golarion, it looks like the Pathfinder series is set in the economics of the early Industrial Revolution.

Which makes sense with the differences in development between some of the nations of Golarion.

[avr]

Oli Ironbar wrote:

On the topic of children, we could also consider whether unpaid child care factors into GDP.

Edit: Consumer Price Index could be substituted for median monthly expenses, which is conveniently spelled out in the rules for Golarion: average = 10 GP/ month.

So about 5,000 current USD would be around 10 gp, so 1 gp is about $500 today.

That's one price conversion. Grab another, any other, and it will disagree. Poor meals are 1 sp/day, 3 Big Macs and a couple of drinks set you back ~US$25, so 1 gp = $250. A pressurized air tank costs 25 gp, or maybe US$300 at the low end; 1 gp = $12.5. I could go on.

[VoodistMonk]

Any magical crafting is going to throw off the estimate... both in what can be made magically, and the crafting that goes towards the creation of magical or alchemical items. Toss in your random Druid with Druidic Herbalism, or someone paying Obedience to Brigh, or any other plethora of ways to completely break crafting...

Compared to a party of professional adventurers, everday is "downtime" rules for an NPC... all they do is craft and make Profession checks... that is their life... until a party of professional adventurers brings plagues of witch curses and hordes of undead to the city gates. Lol.

Plus, you HAVE to account for both skilled labor and, umm, "free" labor. Skilled laborers exist by probability, alone, unless you live your PF1 life in a dead-world vacuum... even NPC's progress in HD with time and activity... chances are at least some of them advance in either NPC or PC classes, invest feats and skill ranks in their craft/profession... become decent, even d@mn good, at whatever they do.

I am not going to elaborate any further on the various forms of "free" labor, but they can produce more than your average 50/wk a year paid laborer with proper motivation.

To be honest, given that there is magic in Golarion, and that crafting is quite possibly the easiest of all PF1 rule sets to completely break, I would imagine the overall wealth to be huge in comparison to the population. By no means evenly distributed, but it never is. But the amount of wealth produced by all the nations combined has to be astronomical.

[VoodistMonk]

Certain races have tendancies towards, or at least alternative racial features supporting, certain crafting or Profession skillsets... so population density of races will influence whether or not that particular population is likely to include more skilled laborers. Even playing probability, some of each race will randomly exhibit alternative racial features... suggesting that they will, in fact, probably dedicate feats and skill ranks supporting what they are already good at. Do we have population density data? Anyone want to randomize all that alternative racial features and blanket apply that across the entire population?

Not all NPC's are NPC classes. By probability, alone, some will be Wizards or Druids or Alchemists... and there goes any chances of an accurate estimate... even low level NPC's with minimal optimization can destroy one's ability to even guess.

[VoodistMonk]

One could choose a year, and tediously comb through all the printed/online materials to find the GDP of each settlement [which existed, and has stats listed for that particular year]. Or at least gather a wide enough spectrum of data points to somewhat reliably extrapolate an estimate... but I don't even know where you would start... which year most accurately represents the era you care about... finding a list of settlements... searching trusted online sources for information on each settlement... plotting a graph... Mathfinfer is already enough work as it is. Lol.

[Coidzor]

Come to think of it, I am kind of curious about what the GDP of at least the Inner Sea Region would be in terms of Kingdom Building/BP.

If one could estimate the amount of arable land in service, I think the Downtime subsystem may provide a better idea of the economic output of agricultural lands through the Rooms & Teams sub-subsystem than Profession (Farmer) or Craft (Cabbages). Without the raw tedium of looking at Medieval and Early Modern farming output and converting bushels of crops into their closest equivalents that we have prices for, that is.

In addition to magic item crafting, spells themselves also can do wonky things.

Whether magicking ~50 gp of Cold Iron into existence with Iron Stake or several hundred gp of masonry stone in the form of a completed wall with Expeditious Construction or creating a Chain Shirt using False Focus and Serren's Swift Girding or just casting Unseen Servant and having it grind grain into flour using a Hand Rotary Quern or turning a lump of metal into some old-fashioned bullets using Fabricate Bullets. Or just casting Fabricate. There's a fair bit, and that's not even at the level of things like industrializing the production of dragonhide armor using the Slough spell or using undead or constructs as perpetual motion machine motors.

Although back onto the subject of magic item crafting, I'm reminded of how Souldrinkers can technically create magic items from nothing, or at least, essentially nothing.

Daggermark Poisoners can also put out an awful lot of poison which has a grossly inflated gp value. At least from what I remember of Dave the Commoner.

[Kasoh]

I think Thuvia is an interesting case for study. Its primary export is six magical items every year, which sell for between 50,000 and 80,000 gp. In addition, every bid that doesn't win is also forfeit to Thuvia. So depending how many people attend the auction, the Government of Thuvia runs on about 1.5-2 million gp a year. (I assume 30 or so participants in the auction, given its a product for the ultra wealthy)

It looks like Government spending to GDP can vary wildly between countries based on things, but I see ~30% in an unscientific perusal of search results. (You can also see over 100% so /shrug.)