".....I don't know that anyone has suggested specifically a reorganization that leaves all current nobles better off, because if you're not making the world ludicrously wealthier it'd be really really hard to offer them a deal anywhere near as good as the one they have now."

"That's - got literally nothing to do, with how well off they are now, if the system is a million gold pieces wealthier than it was in total before, you've got a million gold pieces to pay people above what they previously had, what prevents a reorganization like that are friction costs where moving things around is very expensive -"

"But we're not actually going to fix it.  Fine.  How does the Project deal with this monstrosity?  Are the dukes not going to respect the intellectual property of Cheliax, are the counts not going to respect the intellectual property of dukes, am I actually dealing with only a tiny fraction of twenty million people constituting only the top ranks of Governance who have any unity with which to negotiate with me?  I guess if the people who can negotiate with me are the most powerful spellcasters and have most of the money, that still counts for something, for certain terms and definitions of something."

"No, they'll all respect a deal the Queen makes, and enforce it in their own jurisdictions, and they'll mostly respect each others' separate deals on top of that if we make any of those."

"But there's no centralized measurements of how well the whole economy is doing, it sounds like.  Cheliax literally does not know its GDP and has no way of finding out.  All it has are the amount of taxes it collects from the subhierarchy, and whatever verification structures must exist in order to verify how much the taxes - does the system have any way of knowing whether a Baron is just lying about how much tax they extracted from the people underneath, or is it all trust-based?  Trust-based doesn't sound like it should work in Golarion, and wouldn't even be tried in Civilization."

"I think they check some random selection and punish the cheats such that it's not worth cheating, but I don't know the details."

It's always worth cheating; it's never worth getting caught.

"And all of this entire system is not based on fair division of mutual gains from moving to coordinated arrangements that make everyone better off; it is at least partially enforced at every level by threats that wouldn't counterfactually be made except for the threatened agent's predicted tendency to give in to threats; meaning everybody at every level of the structure has various reasons not to like the current arrangement and to find it easy to imagine how they could do better; but they're terrible at coordinating and have high friction costs and expected destructive losses from trying to change anything because lots of the destructive threats would start firing; to the point where it's proverbial that everybody overestimates the gains and underestimates the losses from trying to change anything and people shouldn't even talk about trying that."

"You can change some things. Just not try to overthrow the whole system at once."

"I'm not sure the thing you're saying about threats is true?" says Meritxell. "So, say I'm a count. And I refuse to pay my taxes. The Duke I'm supposed to pay them to would rather have a Count who does pay taxes, so he'll kill me and replace me. He's not doing that to threaten me, he's doing it because he wants a count who pays taxes. To the extent that I refuse to respond to threats made only to keep me in line, like a god, I should still pay my taxes, because the killing and replacing me isn't done to keep me in line, it's done to have a taxpaying subordinate."

"I agree that this is a correct view from the perspective of a single Count imagining their own decisions to be uncorrelated with any other Counts' decisions; with all of the other Counts, of course, thinking exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons and so arriving at exactly the same decision."

"Are you thinking something along the lines of - if you introduce more Lawfulness into this system, it explodes, so we'd be on some sort of time limit there?"

"I had been questioning whether or not to say that out loud.  But yes, that is among the things I was thinking.  In particular, you'd have to master the art of reorganizing the system and distributing the gains in such a way as to make everyone better off, yes, including the people who are currently doing pretty well, before the system actually just explodes."

"I predict that actually we can't get 90% of Cheliax Lawful in the dath ilani sense, likely can't even get 10% to be, and therefore there is a very large supply of Counts who will pay their taxes for dukes to replace all the dath ilani with, and therefore all the dath ilani are stuck. But noted."

"Out of curiosity, why is the Nethysian the one who -"

"Nethys is also said to be the god of explosions."

If somebody actually got Ione a real book on Nethysian theology and swore to her that it was untampered, Ione could make sure that she was not committing heresy that would potentially get her soul destroyed by Nethys each time she tries to help prevent something in Cheliax from metaphorically exploding.  This would help her cooperate with Cheliax.

(As Ione has not yet delved very far into Probability, it will not occur to her nor to any listening Security that failure to deliver such a book is then also updatable evidence.)

"Curious as to whether you can pinpoint the flaw in Carissa's argument for why the system won't explode."

"Uhhhmm.  Not seeing it actually.  Unless it's something like - the dath ilani Counts end up too powerful from being dath ilani, and Dukes who try to replace them, if they succeed, will just find their duchies fading away in the new Cheliax."

"It's a short-term view.  Can't get 10% of Cheliax that Lawful in five years?  Sure.  Can't get Cheliax that Lawful when the average innate intelligence has risen to 14 and spellsilver mining has been scaled to mass-produce +6 headbands?  Kind of a different story.  Civilization does not run on being like this."

"Unless you still think I'm wrong about that, Carissa?"

"Oh, sure, I agree with that, but by the time we have all that we can just pay people to move to an equilibrium that's better for everyone, and I don't think it'll explode before you get the headbands."

"Everything explodes eventually takaral, and life is just the thing that happens before the explosion."

"Remind me to ask later if I'm on an eventual time limit for evacuating this universe, my last universe had similar issues.  Though that was more an issue of freezing over some very large number of years later, and the Keepers basically told everyone not to worry about it for now."

"Anyways.  Let me think on what to do about Cheliax not being able to measure its own GDP."

It would be nice to conclude they're just lying in order to cheat him out of a fair share of the gains.

But of course, if they were going to do that, they could just not pay him after signing the contract, instead of presenting him with an overtly weird contract he might refuse to sign.  Sure, he could ask them to swear an oath about it, but in most of that possible-world's probability-density, the story about oaths being Abaddon-enforced is fake anyways.

...Keltham doesn't know what to do here.

Well, no, he knows this trope, it means he is in a Trade With Aliens story after all.  The Aliens have a legible unit of account matching their medium of exchange which readily translates into unskilled-labor-hours, the Aliens can negotiate market prices on things to balance supply and demand, but the Aliens have no idea how large their economy is and can't measure its growth trend, let alone detect the growth going above-trend, so how do you capture a fair share of the gains from trading knowledge to them.

"It sounds," Keltham says aloud, "like the central problem of this contract is not dividing the gains but measuring them.  Out of dath ilan there are proverbs about how, once you have identified the important part of the problem, you should make sure to stop, step back, and deliberately focus on solving that part of the problem."

"I suspect that what I have to do is sit down with Governance experts on the local economy and its measurement and hash out the part of this contract that is actually the critical part and actually important.  And before then I should design an interim contract intended to be replaced by a future one, so that we could potentially get started on roads or metallurgy or automatic clothmaking."

Well, it could've gone much worse.

"Right, so, I think the things that need to happen are... finally actually talk to the site manager so I can get a concept of the site budget and get some fraction of that budget available to me as a budget to do things like pay the Project's employees, and I can't enforceably offer them real equity or options until Cheliax can recognize the existence of Golarion's first real corporate structures... well, I could give them shares of future income that they're allowed to resell and ignore all concepts of corporate governance for now."

"I know what Civilization thinks is a reasonable equity distribution and vesting schedule in a case where you have one supergenius plus a bunch of more replaceable cofounders and employees, and it does not exactly sound like anybody knows enough to contradict me about that."

"I propose that everyone around the table except me separately, and without checking with each other, but with attribution, write down what they think would be a fair nonvolatile portion of wages for each of the eight Project members to be retained, including themselves, but not me.  I'd try it myself except for the part where I just have no idea at all what anybody gets paid around Golarion."

Urgent notice to Security:  Don't give any of us any information about what the others are thinking, we do not know how to make collaborative results look exactly the same to Keltham as if we'd come up with them separately.