Recently, the economist David D. Friedman asked about fiction with an economic theme in his blog. The lack of any significant plot points about economics and the simple flat-price shop system in Final Fantasy XII would make it a really poor choice to nominate as an “economic game” there. However, I can’t help but think that someone inside Squenix had the idea of the perils of central control of the economy in mind when they came up with the concept for the city of Bjhurba.
First of all, a little background. I’m about 20 hours into the game, which is only a small fraction of the way through the plot, and just arrived at the Garrif village. Bhujerba is a floating city – it’s literally on flying rock in the sky. While most of its neighbors have fallen under the control of the Arcadian Empire, Bhujerba maintains a fairly strong independent government in the form of Marquis Ondore. The Marquis is related to the royal house of Rabanastre, which the party is trying to restore. Since it’s on flying rock, there is no significant agriculture in Rabinastre; food and other supplies are mostly imported.
Except for the fact that Bhujerba defies gravity, nothing that I’ve mentioned above is based on fantasy so much that you couldn’t have a city like that in real life. City rule based on nepotism? Not at all unimaginable. A unified political area with limited land and natural resources? Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all fit this description. Massive military and economic empires with rivalries? That’s the history of the previous century in a nutshell.
So, if you were the Marquis of Bhujerba, how would you organize its economy? A modern, enlightened ruler would recognize that the marketplace organizes itself through price signals given a reasonable legal framework, but Marquis Ondore is old-school central planning. Out of necessity, of course, things in Bhujerba are mostly imported from elsewhere. What’s entirely unnecessary is the way in which these imports are paid for. While a market economy would be inclined to naturally diversify its exports, the exports of Bhujerba consists of magicite mined from the land.
As one NPC points out, the magicite is what keeps Bhujerba airborne. As the ruler of a flying island, I would look harder for a way to make money without bringing my little fiefdom to the ground. Flying islands of the size of Bhujerba not being all that common in Ivalice, the world of Final Fantasy XII, it wouldn’t be very difficult to find something else to contribute to the GDP of the Bhujerban city-state: it’s a thriving tourist location, with a historic palace, scenic viewing area, and the rough equivalent of a major airport. It apparently has enough tourists that Marquis Ondore pays for a free guide on every street corner (some of these are actually spies, but no matter). Most of the businesses in Bhujerba operate “under royal charter,” but a handful do not. There seems to be no signicant difference between the classes of shops.
This arrangement is unsurprising not very robust. When Marquis Ondore leaves Bhujerba in order to stir up support for a anti-imperial resistance, the mines are dormant. The miners want to mine, but they can’t because the mines are filled with monsters. There are bodyguards for the miners that can get rid of the monsters, but they aren’t working because… Ondore isn’t there! So, the unbalanced economy of Bhujerba has basically come to a halt without its leader.
A friend, Scott, says that I’m wrong both to claim that Bhujerba has a communistic government, and to claim that Bhujerba has a centrally planned governments. In particular, he says that Bhujerba is more akin to the company towns of ages past, and less like, say, the Soviet Union, because the ideology of Bhujerba is to benefit Ondore himself rather than The People. Except, of course, that the (real) tour guides are clearly not present for Ondore’s personal benefit. Nor are the mining guards (he could tell the miners to fight the monsters themselves, after all). The people in Bhujerba seem like to like Ondore. Additionally, while the central planning of Bhujerba is not complete and absolute, its clear that Ondore has an extreme level of influence on all aspect of the island’s economy.