88. A Treatise on Kofusachian Economics (By Contrast to Abadaran Economics)

(Epistemic status: a nonstandard frame for economics that finally crystallized; as usual, descriptive of patterns I've observed in trade, gift economics, and coordination; moderately prescriptive about what patterns build what kind of prosperity; and surely incomplete. Built heavily out of the Glowlarion theological-decisiontheoretic frame. For SC, and anyone through whose hands the coins I've made pass or have passed.)

Come, sit down. Have a drink and let me tell you a tale...

"Long ago, on a dusty road through a desert, there trudged a travelling merchant. The road was unpaved dirt, barely better than the shifting sands around it; the merchant's donkey struggled to pull his cart over potholes and through the occasional dune that had drifted onto the path; the merchant's cart was loaded down with bolts of fine cloth and sturdy pottery jars of preserved fruit. The merchant relaxed as he approached an oasis; he and his steed were parched, and he had been walking for so much of the night that his boots had filled with the fine sand. As day broke, he realized with horror that a group of bandits had made their camp there. But they had spotted him as well, and they were upon him in moments."

" 'Your money and your goods or your life,' said the bandit chief. The merchant dropped his staff and raised his hands, hesitating as the bandits grabbed the hilts of their swords. 'Please', he said, 'I cannot. There is no distinction between the two for me. I have sunk all I have into this venture, and if I return home without any goods or coin, I will starve in the city rather than bleed out here.' He looked from the bandit chief, clad in the tatters of what must once have been a richly dyed robe of fine cloth, to his retinue, looking gaunt and desperate. He thought for a moment, scheming desperately as figures danced frantically in his head. He began to speak. 'You could everything you wanted from me and then slay me,' he began, 'and even if you did spare my life I would never be able to return. Let me make a deal with you: I am far from home, and on the outbound route at that. So if you take only my remaining coin and part of my goods, when I return by this same road I will gladly pay you your due again; only, leave me enough to sell and trade. Here,' - and at this he rummaged around in his cart and pressed a small glass jar of candied lemons into the off hand of a bruised-looking bandit - 'take this. I can see the signs of scurvy beginning to set in.' "

"The chief was taken aback, speechless. What merchant would ever ask to be repeatedly robbed? What victim would ever show such consideration? We will never know the thoughts or the reasons, but by some whim or miracle, the chief nodded, and swords remained sheathed. 'Thank you', cried the merchant, handing the chief a roll of deep blue cloth; he rolled two urns of fruit off of his cart into the soft sand below and followed it with a pot of oil. Lastly, from off of his own neck he handed the chief all of his money - seven jangling coins glinting in the light of daybreak like stars, decorated with unfamiliar scripts in languages the chief had never seen before, all threaded onto a simple chain."

"The next evening, the merchant set off, his heart and cart both lighter, and the chief watched him go with mind full of second thoughts and worries which only mounted as the scorching days passed. But the next month, the merchant returned, cart now loaded down with jars of spices and fine metal tools, and far more coinage draped around his neck. He waved as he approached the oasis from the other side, greeting the chief. 'I have returned,' he shouted, 'and I am here to make good on our deal!' And true to his word, the merchant tossed the band of thieves a whole string crammed full of coins from the bunch, and, unprompted, began to unload a jar of black pepper, another of cardamom, and a small pile sturdy steel tools; shovels and hammers and knives. For by this point, the band had set up at the oasis and begun to build. Waving them a fond farewell the next evening, the merchant set off for home, richer by far than when he set out..."

 

Glowfic is a format for collaborative fiction popular in the rationality community. For historic reasons, it has taken a shine to Golarion, a setting from Dungeons and Dragons' Pathfinder spinoff. In particular, some of those writing stories set in Glowlarion (as it's sometimes called) have taken to carefully working out the theology of the Gods of Golarion. For there are many of those, and they all suggest various reasonably coherent theologies, none of which are worked out in much detail by Paizo. Those Glowfic writers have thus taken it on themselves to figure out what kind of consistent principle or decision theory each God represents: Calistria (Chaotic Neutral) embodying symmetric power relationships and the threatless promise of massive retribution; Sarenrae (Neutral Good) as pure positive utilitarianism and universal redemption; Desna (Chaotic Good) becoming the "explore" side of "explore/exploit" as well as mixed strategies; Asmodeus (Lawful Evil) unnervingly accurately tying together tyranny, slavery, contracts, and pride into corrigibility. (And of course, there's Iomedae (Lawful Good), Crystal Dragon EA Jesus Who Is Also A Girl. I mean, ah. The need to triage resources in fighting evil and ending hellish suffering.)

And then there's Abadar (Lawful Neutral), god of cities, laws, merchants, and wealth. In Glowlarion He has come to represent Lawful coordination and trade between agents, and by extension gains from trade and the fair division of those gains. Unsurprisingly, He is a favorite of the community. (Alongside Crystal Dragon EA Je- ow ow OK quit it.) But for a variety of reasons, Glowlarion generally restricts itself to Avistan and the Inner Sea region - Golarion's answer to Europe and the Mediterranean, respectively, notable for containing the countries most closely allied to Asmodeus, Abadar, and Iomedae, as well as the Worldwound - a symbol of international cooperation against the end of the world - and Absalom, a wealthy city-state drenched in magic. In particular, few if any stories ever make their way to Tian Xia, Golarion's answer to East Asia, which has its own overlapping sets of gods.

One such is Kofusachi (Chaotic Good), god of abundance, prosperity, discovery... and merchants. Why does the setting need two entire gods of merchantry? Here's my claim: that Abadar and Kofusachi represent two fundamentally different but partially compatible approaches to trade, deals, prosperity, economics, and the material flourishing that underlies all other flourishing. Much ink has been spilled on the topic of Abadaran theology over the past few years; little if any attention has been payed to Kofusachi, the Laughing God, let alone His theology. Let me try to address that gap.

Consider the Abadaran merchant. They assume that resources are scarce, and thus that profit is primarily sought where scarcity can be profited off of. They acknowledge the central mystery of economics - that different agents have different preferences, such that an apple and a bag of nails can change hands, and without any matter being created, value has been brought into the world from thin air. They value the density of cities, cutting down on travel costs, and the crucial technology of currency, removing the need for time-costly bartering. But they assume no trust and extend no hand - contracts are a must-have to make expectations clear and precisely spell out terms of trade, along with the enforcement of those contracts and their penalties for violation. And contracts must indeed be honored to the letter, no matter how unjust their terms; likewise for the law, which must always be obeyed, for how can one trust in coordination with a potentially unpredictable lawbreaker? And charity is a heresy, a grave sin - to give alms is to give away value rather than generate gains from trade and labor. Everything has a price, from decision-critical information to goods delivered (especially when the buyer is desperate for them!), and to give them away is to spit on that value. Better to visit a struggling shopkeep instead, paying for their goods precisely what they charge - and if they charge too little, so much the worse for them.

The Kofusachian merchant pursues the same goal - profit - though with a different code of behavior and with different assumptions. For them, the whole point of trade is to generate so much abundance that no one need care anymore who gets precisely what; discovery and coordination promote prosperity for all involved, and scarcity is a foe to be battled. They, too, acknowledge gains through trade, but as the bedrock of all deals rather than as a grand mystery - of course people are driven by and towards what they want! And currency becomes less of a tool of trade and more of a universally desirable trade good, still removing the need for arduous barter and making the kind of favor-trading that would already happen, move all the faster and more surely. But with regards to trust, they might start off assuming good faith, kicking things off by playing Cooperate and keeping that up until that strategy fails, and refusing to trade with the untrustworthy or maleficent. The abundance so generated is a buffer against the (hopefully rare) bad actors, and better yet, provides a wellspring for the kind of small generosities that build relationships over the longer run. Everything has a price, but to seek to take advantage of a trading partner through information withheld about one's goods is a grave sin - better to build trust by sharing it more freely. Contracts are informal, little more than a memory-aiding record of a handshake deal, if at all necessary; after all, for some trades, contract enforcement costs would completely wipe out the surplus from trade, or would be laughably infeasible; a common High Modernism L. And the law is there to serve the people, not the people there to serve the law; an unjust law or a poisonous contract should be broken at need. Run a black market in banned books and medicines the daylight world would profit-gouge you on; free the slaves in the unmarked crates not mentioned in the shipping contract.

An Abadaran ought to shun charity and disburse loans precisely at interest rates calibrated for risk and perhaps externalities, no less. A Kofusachian would happily give someone struggling a meaningful amount of money, and then might follow that up with a loan, albeit with an interest rate just barely enough to cover transactions costs and inflation. After all - all too many of life's problems are with cashflow and not absolute resources, and are cheaper the faster they're fixed, and giving a loan instead of pure charity means you can go help someone else after the loan is repaid. The concept of a gift economy - a system of allocation of scarce goods where those with plenty have a duty to spread that plenty around, that it might be widely reinvested and hunger never give way to violent desperation, to keep the gift moving, lest it become poison - is totally incomprehensible to an Abadaran. Where are the trades, the exchanges? Where are the loans, the contracts? But to a Kofusachian, a gift economy is comprehensible, if a little shabby - sure, if you collapse down the time dimension, there's an approximate balance of trade between any two people, but there are so many missed opportunities for deals and inadequate reason to invest in capital production!

I think one of many crucial concepts to Kofusachian economic theology is "lagniappe", or "서비스" (pronounced suh-bi-soo(t), like "service"). It's the little extra thrown in for good measure, the small inexpensive freebie for being a good customer. It's the 13th roll in a baker's dozen, the forgotten but crucial roll of twine or bundle of herbs given away anyway with a fair-sized purchase, the plate of fried dumplings and side dishes (반찬) given to a table of diners. The mechanism is an elegant one: the cost for the producer to procure these things is vastly outstripped by the use-value to the consumer, and giving them away every now and again both signals abundance and builds relationships with grateful customers. The successful anticipation of tastes and needs is gravy on top of that, and if - as is done for lagniappe - you spread some of that benefit to servants and purchasing agents, all the better. Everyone who touches the deal should thrive.

The very idea is alien, even anathema to an Abadaran. Every item should be priced exactly, contracted quantities and items fulfilled precisely and not a single grain of wheat more, and think of all the waste! But it's second-nature to a Kofusachian - if you overdeliver a little, anticipate forgotten needs and unstated tastes, and refuse a mentality of delivering no more than promised, you invest trifling costs now to build a relationship that's perhaps not truly priceless but at least available at a massive bargain.

These two approaches set up distinct cycles of economic activity, doing the same thing in different ways. For Abadar, you start with a trade opportunity. This gives rise to a contract and either delivery or enforcement. This affects reptutations and results in fairly-divided gains from trade, and that means you get more trade. Kofusachi, by contrast, begins with the discovery of a desire and the extension of a little trust and good faith going both ways. This makes discovery profitable and coordination easier, and that cashes out in abundance. Some of that abundance becomes profit and reinvestment, and some of it disappears to betrayal, and that still leaves enough for generosity at the end, which justifies and reinforces the trust. Abadar's cycle is stable and predictable; you'll never get burned trading with an Abadaran, though you'll never get more than you wanted or anything you didn't know you needed, either, and you might well participate in generating negative externalities - recall, the slave trade is distasteful but not anathema to Abadar. Kofusachi's approach is riskier but potentially higher-return. The extension of trust is always a risk, and discovery through exploration is risky, too. But sharing the gains more widely and generously produces a better reputation, stronger relationships, and ultimately more trading opportunities that might have been missed by someone harder-nosed.

And it's precisely that trust, that willingness to pay it forward, that easy acceptance that it'll all approximately work out in the end, that unlocks yet more trades. Consider the case of a farm stand. You could, if you thought it best, have someone sit in the stall  and wait for people to come by all day; you'd have to pay them, obviously, and  

Here's where it gets spicy: how can a merchant be Chaotic and still trusted to deliver? The answer is that a Kofusachian trader is not only informally generous and might give you goods that have unexpected consequences (storage fees, if nothing else) but also entirely willing to break unjust laws and tainted contracts when morality calls for it. If border law is unjust, pay undocumented workers in cash under the table. Run black markets in HRT and banned books because the law is dumb and slow and doesn't serve people, and those goods do much more good than harm - at least, if you don't count the law's fist. This approach is problematic, though: how do you distinguish principled lawbreaking from simple unreliability, whim, or base criminality? The answer is a concept I haven't seen defined before: "metasteadfastness". Be reliable in when you will or won't be reliable; predictable in when you will or won't be predictable. Have clear lines you'll never cross, whether or not they're public, and clear principles you'll gladly pay to uphold. Burn only people who were doing wrong and knew better. If you trade faithfully and honestly, a Kofusachian should never betray you, but if you're dealing in slaves or profiting handsomely from contracts signed under duress, all bets are off. You probably see a problem here; we'll get to it.

But for a more glaring problem, does this even work at scale? How can I seriously propose that handshake deals and kindness and trust and keeping the gift moving can run large-scale commerce? I've actually got history on my side. Consider merchant networks in the Renaissance and earlier, where contracts might exist but enforcement was fraught, and handshake agreements and reputation networks were decisive. Consider Jewish gem merchants, with centuries of high-value trade based largely on trust. Consider hawal networks in the modern day, a system of remittances and fund transfer in the Islamic world, shuffling around billions of dollars on the strength of trust. And small business ecosystems often still rely on trust and reputation. A willingness to cut off an untrustworthy trading partner is a powerful tool.

Abundance creates a buffer against the occasional bad actor; surplus allows one to weather the rare betrayal or default. And the social consequences of that betrayal are severe - you lose any nice side benefits (lagniappe, favorable terms, information sharing, help in crises) and word spreads. Kofusachian merchants stop showing up all at once; only Abadarans come, demanding much higher prices and harsher contract enforcement as a risk premium.

Here's another key distinction: Abadaran practices emphasize success in transactions considered atomically, while Kofusachian practices advise a willingness to take a loss in the short term to not only build up a trading relationship in the long term, but also aim for the thriving of an entire network of trade which one can expand and through which one can transit. And while in a framework of Abadaran trade, the travel of anything but goods is at best a side benefit, for Kofusachian trade, exploration and discovery are ends in themselves through profit can often happily be obtained with minimal extra effort. It's hard to avoid teaching or learning from your trade partners, especially when away from home, and a Kofusachian frame advises leaning into this: shared understanding of life's needs and delights just makes for more trade, and a traffic in languages, culture, and good ideas is every bit as vital as the trade in goods. Accepting roadside hospitality is a good way to do this, as is offering it in turn; what's more, it's a good way to discover new goods, new trade partners, new sources of abundance - and get some valuable market research in, too. To sample the delights of a foreign land with a keen eye towards what buyers back home will want is practically a sacred duty.

For yet another contrast, Abadaran trade is centrally about achieving Pareto-optimal outcomes. Try never to leave obvious cash on the table; move towards multi-agent-optimal outcomes through moves that are, themselves, multi-agent-favored, from an inadequate equilibrium to a better one. Kofusachian trade has a Rawlsian flavor to it: treat deals like you're not really sure which side of the deal you're on; be accordingly generous, and if you get the better end by far of the deal, consider tossing some of the trade surplus back over. Both frames want to avoid leaving cash on the table to missed wins, but while Abadaran trade assumes zero trust and aims for tidily contained atomic trades and thus can't rely on side payments, Kofusachian trade can afford to embrace them, unlocking Kaldor-Hicks optima that can be even better than Pareto-optimality. Seek massively excess total surplus, possibly even at the momentary expense of your trading partner; that will let you make them whole and then some. Not because any contract demands it, or even a handshake deal - because you intend to trade with them again. Because you don't want to feel like you're exploiting them, or for them to feel exploited.

Because, as RWK has remarked in her writing on gift economics in "The Serviceberry", "[you] store your meat in the belly of [your] brother" in times of sudden plenty, and if you can be known to predictably benefit those who will predictably benefit you, all sorts of new efficiencies open to you. Windfalls stored in (largely productive) social relationships is wealth that compounds and returns to you, providing a natural solution to how best to stably make use of and amortize bounty out of season.

And while Abadaran trade asks perhaps too much of mortals - perfect adherence to agreements, the capacity to understand arbitrary complexity in fine details, reduction to a shapeless ideal agent, access to perfect simulations of agents within fractally branching counterfactuals, the ability to perfectly forget information that you've been given and erase all the resulting inferences and changes of gut feeling, that you might then purchase it after knowing its worth for sure - Kofusachian trade is much more humble. It asks so little of us. It asks us to offer a little bit of value to our deal partner and trust that they won't screw us in the fine print. It asks us to be safe to skip modeling in full detail rather than trim away everything beautiful that makes us hard to model. It asks us to have genuine good will for those deal partners, that handshakes and sincere intent to satisfy desires might replace signatures and formal language. It asks us to look after the interests of the unknowing, to care about their utility functions as a sort of market research, to give them the things they don't know they'll need. It asks us to walk a road towards that which we desire, and to leave the road behind us better for our having passed that way. And that trust extended, that ability to leave the fine details to the friendly dealmaker, lets us do so much more.

Admittedly it's not all smiles for the way of the Laughing God. It's all too easy to fool yourself into thinking you're doing better by others than you really are, 

 

[Limitations and failure modes]

 

With all of this contrasting of Abadar against Kofusachi, it's important to still keep one thing firmly in mind: Abadar and Kofusachi need not fight; neither in Glowlarion nor likely through their shadows in our world. They may argue and get annoyed; they might bribe each other to behave differently. But both of them love trade and prosperity. Both of them want cities and economic flourishing, arising from trade surpluses and productivity and the pursuit of desire. And neither advocates asceticism. They walk different trade routes towards the same destination, suited to different circumstances. Both of them work, and both have failure modes. And both have built civilizations.

But our world, such as it is, has plenty of Abadaran trading and a dearth of Kofusachian trading; at the very least, here I am explicitly developing its theology for the first time, having unintentionally embodied Him before even knowing of Him; tying together Kaldor-Hicks equilibria, economics of care, 서비스/lagniappe, and gift economics. The world could use a bit more relaxed sharing of prosperity, more of a willingness to keep pure-hearted handshake deals than unjust laws, more trust even in clear-eyed knowledge of the risks of that trust. More abundance generated through generous exchange and spread because... why not? Somewhat more of the touch of the Laughing God.

"When the merchant set out once more months later for the foreign market he had begun to think of as a second home, now much wealthier after his round trip, he was delighted to see how the desert path had changed. No longer was the path a dirt road half-covered in sand dunes; now, the road was paved, wide and clear, and the merchant's donkeys had no trouble pulling his carts. No longer was the oasis a muddy pool of water amidst the shifting sands that threatened to bury it; now, there was a fine marble fountain with copper pipes amidst a few small crop fields, and colorful awnings shielding . And no longer were the bandits, bandits any longer - some had become farmers, others, inkeepers, and the chief had become the leader of a nascent trading town."

" 'How did this arise?' asked the merchant to the chief as he paid his toll. 'How exactly did you manage all of this so quickly?' 'Gradually', replied the chief, 'and then suddenly. After you left, it occurred to most of us that we might make this more than just a one-off. But the road was hard to travel along, so we broadened and flattened it, and more travellers arrived to bribe us to leave them be. And then we realized that if we had an inn, we might pull in yet more money. But then we needed people to staff it, and we had the idea to make the beds nicer, and getting produce in was so expensive but we needed an irrigation system... anyway, once we got started it was hard to justify stopping. And now, well...' The chief gestured to the fountain, the inn, the fields. 'This. And all because I felt like taking up on a mad handshake deal.' "

• An attempted solution to adverse selection, counterparty risk, moral hazard…

• “Everyone should be glad of every deal they make"

• 
  

• Tipping as about both side payments to resolve KH to Pareto and also what systems/institutions you want to see thrive slightly more 

 

(THE BELOW IS A CLAUDE-GENERATED DRAFT AND SHOULD NOT MAKE IT INTO THE FINAL VERSION)





## Limitations and Failure Modes

This framework has real weaknesses:

**1. Idealization:** I'm describing ideal Kofusachian trade. Real implementation could devolve into:
- Favoritism/nepotism masked as generosity (서비스 for in-group, screw outsiders)
- Tribal loyalty masked as "good faith"
- Corruption masked as "principled lawbreaking"

**2. "Only burns you if doing wrong" is dangerous:** Who decides what's wrong? This is uncomfortably close to "no bad tactics, only bad targets." The trader who frees slaves is heroic. The one who breaks contracts because "buyer seemed sketchy" is just unreliable.

**3. Scale under scarcity:** What happens when abundance runs out? Does the system collapse? Revert to Abadaran contracts?

**4. Bad actor detection:** You say "don't trade with bad-faith actors" but how do you identify them before they burn you once? Reputation systems - which are just Abadaran mechanisms under the hood.

**5. The need for social technology:** There's a "Geeks/MOPs/Sociopaths" problem - you need ways to excise not just bad actors but people feeding off the generosity cycle without contributing. Or you kill them with kindness (make the high-trust environment so nice that leaving seems like a loss). Or maybe someone hungry and stealing is legitimately trapped and could be pulled out with help.

The risk: people claiming to be Kofusachian while actually being self-serving without principles. Corruption masked as "principled flexibility." This is why the 서비스/generosity/gift-giving matters - it's costly signaling of good character and abundance.