Immiserizing growth is when a product’s availability increases leading to a decrease in its overall value. In essence, the value of an item decreases as more of it enters the market, so increasing production of, say, wheat by means of a new pesticide which eliminates more pests will give you an advantage over your neighbors and competitors…. temporarily. Soon they adopt the new technology and their production increases. This is the technological treadmill. One person advances, their competitors catch up. It is a constant race to get ahead of the others, but they will, inevitably, catch up.
The issue this presents is obvious. In the race to generate more income, all involved end up generating LESS income by devaluing their goods in saturating the market. For food, this occurs because there is a finite amount of how much food is consumed. Immiserization occurs when the increase in production HARMS the value of your good. In other words, producing more of something is bad if there are not more people to buy the good.
A prime example of this in EVE is the change made to mindlink implants. When the ability to purchase these goods via loyalty points was added to the game, their prices plummeted. A more temporal and recent example was the genolution implants added to each pilot’s redeeming queue. Prices plummeted for those implants as well. A more longterm and dangerous immiserizing growth occurred when CCP began their first changes to grav sites. More easily accessible (no scanning needed), mineral boosts, added and upgraded ores, and the very static nature of large, identical sites which spawn over and over for exploitation…. all these attributes and changes made, in what could be defended as, a ‘means of encouraging self-sufficiency’ led to what may be the greatest, most ruinous, immiserizing growth in the history of EVE.
CCP has made some reductions and removals to the technological treadmill involved with the exploitation of minerals from nullsec. Disallowing the longstanding acceptance of simultaneous broadcasting via ISBoxer (and other tools) removed the very forefront edge of production capabilities. Fleets of thirty Mackinaws in a single grav site supported by onfield Rorquals, all controlled by a single player, had the bulk of their usefulness obliterated by this disallowance. Removing the static belts of ice in all of kspace, placing limits on the amounts within a spawn, and placing limits on the frequency of the spawns all served to placed what could have been effective limits on immiserization. The problem however, is that there is no dynamic adaptation to or encouragement of overall ‘global’ consumption.
Consumption in EVE is finite. Production in EVE is infinite. There are a limited number of players, a limited demand for every item on the market, and an essentially unlimited amount of resources available for exploitation. For some items such as officer mods, the market places a higher value on the goods because availability is scarce, but when it comes to the bulk of actual production in EVE via minerals consumed and turned into ships and structures, consumption is limited and has become MORE limited in the recent years.
One may argue that this is the result of political evolution, that peace and the blue donut led to the stagnation of ‘content’. I dispute this. Political leaders realized either overtly or subconsciously that the further ones borders could stretch and the more peaceful space that could be utilized, the more productive their war machines could be. Far more importantly, political evolution led to the apex of warfare itself. With the Bloodbath of B-R5RB, EVE saw unparalleled destruction of the most mineral consumptive ships in the game. Titans, supercarriers, dreadnoughts, and carriers were slaughtered.
Following the slaughter, the industrial war machines of N3, PL (Brothers of Tangra), and the CFC began to churn out replacement ships. Thus, while nullsec had become more polarized between the East (N3/PL) and the West (CFC) with fewer ‘sov wars’, consumption was still in existence. B-R5RB resulted in the Supercold War between the political ‘states’ where neither wanted to risk their superior fleet capabilities against the other, but sought to escalate their forces against each other without attacking. This Supercold War would have eventually broken, and broken in only one way violence had CCP not intervened in the mechanics of force projection, and began the Dark Age of nullsec.
There is no arguing around the fact that the EVE economy is completely and utterly based on war and conflict. Consumption of items only occurs indirectly via the accomplishment of ‘content’. In what may have been goodly intentioned initiatives to increase nullsec content and destruction, CCP patched the game with Phoebe to eliminate the aggressive and defensive powers contained within jumpcapable, capital ships. From here began the Dark Age. Useful in defending a limited area of space, capital ships became stagnant items within their nullsec domains. In the singleworst economic decision in their history, CCP effectively removed the biggest consumptive portion of EVEcapital production and destruction.
The end of battling slowcat fleets, blapdread fleets, etc. vastly reduced the amount of mineral consumption in the marketplace, and production capability remained insignificantly reduced. Phoebe almost neutered the usefulness of jump freighters as well, which would have had a drastic, negative effect on the value of t2 ships as well. While nullsec exports of minerals could have continued essentially unabated on account of the low volume of highend minerals, the logistical bottleneck of purchasing t2 ships in Jita and exporting them into nullsec would have been dramatically increased had jump freighters been given the same fatigue and distance limitations of carriers and dreadnoughts. The problem is, that while CCP abated and amended the jump freighter mechanics so as not to severely nerf the logistics of moving goods, they did not abate their nerf to subcap destruction.
There is no method of removing the desire for peace and prosperity from a person. Perhaps they did truly want to see more localized fighting as there was in the ‘old days’ of EVE nullsec, but in introducing Phoebe, CCP severely removed the bulk of subcap warfare capability.
Skirmishes between the roaming Superpowers and entrenched entities such as Provibloc have always existed; they are not a new result of Phoebe. The political evolution of EVE pushed warfare to its apex in not only capital ships, but subcaps as well. The rapid deployment of armies is an integral part of warfare. Jump bridges yet remain an important part of the backbone within the political entities. In attempting to fracture the East (N3/PL) vs. West (CFC) mentality, CCP instead fractured and destroyed ‘content’ itself. Perhaps they genuinely believed that a lack of sustained conflict was a bad thing. Perhaps they had no longterm, economic knowledge of how apex battles such as B-R5RB compared in consumptive force to former, sustained conflict. Their reasoning matters little now.
The problem that EVE faces is not how to encourage localized conflict. The problem is how to encourage GLOBAL consumption and/or reduce the availability of raw materials to match existing consumption. There is no local market in EVE. Period. CCP tried and failed long ago to decentralize the economy of EVE from a single station. The market shifted to a new station Jita 4-4, Caldari Navy Assembly. Jita prices define every price and value in EVE and are even the primary marketplace for goods so rare that they are literally one-of-a-kind (e.g. t2 blueprints).
CCP has exacerbated the problem of immiserizing growth for high-end minerals (and their ensuing products) with the new sovereignty mechanics. A mining index which affects how secure one’s space is ensures a permanent stress on the market. No one will mine for nothing. The amount of time required is extensive (and as the value of minerals decrease, your time becomes more undervalued), yet every owner of space will want the bonus to security which mining yields. Sadly, unless the consumptive force of the global market increases, mining may yield little of value in nullsec EXCEPT its yield of added sovereignty security.
[End of Part 1]
References:
Bhagwati, Jagdish. “Immiserizing growth: a geometrical note.” The Review of Economic Studies (1958):
201205.
Kaplinsky, Raphie. “Immiserising Growth–Note# 2.” (2007).
Levins, Richard A., and Willard W. Cochrane. “The treadmill revisited.” Land Economics (1996): 550553.
