What stage of the DTM would Roshar be in?

[solarcat she/her]

Hello everyone, I have been trying to figure out what stage of development on the Demographic Transition Model Roshar would be assuming it is relative to real life. I know their world is so different than ours, but I'm curious to know what you guys think. I'm currently reading words of Radiance.

Edited June 8, 2022 by solarcat93

[Frustration he/him]

Well infant mortality would be pretty low because there aren't a lot of real diseases and medicine is increadibly advanced. However most families don't have a lot of children so.

I have no ides.

[Rg2045]

16 minutes ago, solarcat93 said:

Hello everyone, I have been trying to figure out what stage of development on the Demographic Transition Model Roshar would be assuming it is relative to real life. I know their world is so different than ours, but I'm curious to know what you guys think. I'm currently reading words of Radiance.

Can you give a quick summary or at least a link to what you mean? This seems like a really interesting question 

[+Invocation]

9 minutes ago, Rg2045 said:

Can you give a quick summary or at least a link to what you mean? This seems like a really interesting question 

I think they're talking about this:

Spoiler

And honestly, I don't think this could apply at all to a lot of cosmere worlds, but Roshar especially. Their birth rate is abnormally decreased due to Investiture suffusion and their death rate seems far too variable to be relied upon for any sort of placement on this thing. Magitech being so common changes a lot of things as well. The cosmere might have their own version that you could probably make, but good luck fitting them anywhere on one built for our world.

But if I had to pin them somewhere, it'd be stage 2 probably.

Edited June 8, 2022 by Invocation

[Returned]

36 minutes ago, Invocation said:

But if I had to pin them somewhere, it'd be stage 2 probably.

I think that that's a good guess. They have pretty good urbanization in many places, and Sebarial talks about having factories (well, manufactories) which mass-produce goods more cheaply than the other highprinces can manage. We can guess that they probably aren't machine driven (energy is still a problem until very recently, with advances in fabrials), but they've definitely learned to appreciate scalable industry.

Add to that that they've long had Soulcasters to make a lot of production (food and other) much easier and faster, and now have access to nearly the full suite of Radiant powers, efficient Stormlight-driven farming, and advanced fabrial technology and I think they'll hit mature industry pretty quickly. But I agree that the peculiarities of Roshar suggest that their population won't change in the ways that the DTM chart suggests; they already seem deeply unusual (relative to the real world).

[Treamayne]

2 hours ago, Invocation said:

But if I had to pin them somewhere, it'd be stage 2 probably.

I would lean more toward an in-world version of Stage 3 if only because: (spoilers through RoW)

• Spoiler

   

  • Stage two is the population growth, which for Roshar would have been expansion Shinovar region after arriving on Roshar; as well as each post-desolation recovery
  • The stable population platform seems to be indicated in the fact that areas like the Unclaimed Hills and Shattered Plains remained largely unexplored for millennia prior to TWoK, which indicates little need to expand urban populations and rural farming communities
  • The lack of planetary tilt and Earth-like seasons diminishes the seasonal affect (long winters with little work) of population growth

   

   

[+Invocation]

14 hours ago, Treamayne said:

I would lean more toward an in-world version of Stage 3 if only because: (spoilers through RoW)

•   Reveal hidden contents

   

  • Stage two is the population growth, which for Roshar would have been expansion Shinovar region after arriving on Roshar; as well as each post-desolation recovery
  • The stable population platform seems to be indicated in the fact that areas like the Unclaimed Hills and Shattered Plains remained largely unexplored for millennia prior to TWoK, which indicates little need to expand urban populations and rural farming communities
  • The lack of planetary tilt and Earth-like seasons diminishes the seasonal affect (long winters with little work) of population growth

   

   

Spoiler

I can agree that they're heading toward Stage 3 with the new fabrials Navani is making and the Rhythm growing, but I'm fairly sure that the only reason Roshar's population is stable is because they've maxed out what they can do with the methods they have available. They're far from the kind of population growth that would spur things into full Stage 3 in my opinion, since places like the warcamps (which had a larger population than Kholinar) were entirely dependent on Soulcasters and would have starved without a constant influx of emeralds to keep that viable. Now that they have the gemstone/Rhythm farming, they're about to boom in population once the Odium stuff is taken care of (or put on pause, or just temporarily found an equilibrium) since they'll actually be able to support that. 

 

[Treamayne]

2 hours ago, Invocation said:

 

  Hide contents

I can agree that they're heading toward Stage 3 with the new fabrials Navani is making and the Rhythm growing, but I'm fairly sure that the only reason Roshar's population is stable is because they've maxed out what they can do with the methods they have available. They're far from the kind of population growth that would spur things into full Stage 3 in my opinion, since places like the warcamps (which had a larger population than Kholinar) were entirely dependent on Soulcasters and would have starved without a constant influx of emeralds to keep that viable. Now that they have the gemstone/Rhythm farming, they're about to boom in population once the Odium stuff is taken care of (or put on pause, or just temporarily found an equilibrium) since they'll actually be able to support that. 

  I can see that, but also consider that the warcamps are very much the exception, not the rule. IRL, if a "staging base" is located in an otherwise low-to-zero population area, then it is also entirely dependant on outside food sources. That doesn't mean the country and culture fielding the army has decreased on the DTM scale. When you except the Warcamps, Alethkar proper has been population stable, as far as we know*, for a while. I know I'm only considering the population aspect, not the technological and medical aspects so it is not a complete picture by any means. And Alethkar is only one of many nations, so I doubt all nations on Roshar are at the same point in the scale (Kharbranth is likely firmy in Stage 3, for example, if just due to medical care and population stability). 

 Though, in my last post I forgot to mention that one major factor that should be considered is how much the Highstorms affect DML considerations. Without a Lait or other formation to protect aganist storms, you probably can't have a new city crop up. Farmer's can't just move and settle an unclaimed area for farming unless they have a way of protecting themselves and crops from storms. 

A generalization of "most regions are late stage 2 or early stage 3" is probably as close as we can get without culteral/regional/statistical information we don't yet have. 

 

*What I mean by this is that there have been indications of large population growth/decline in any interludes or flashbacks - except the random massacre or three. . .

Edited June 9, 2022 by Treamayne
SFC

[Duxredux he/him]

I agree with Returned that Roshar will be very difficult to put at a specific stage because so many rules are broken on Roshar. Soulcasters are not a technology that can be mass-produced as of yet, but with a source of gemhearts to replaced when broken, Soulcasters can create civilization with pretty much nothing else. Food, shelter, clothing, medicines, etc. can all be obtained or refined from basic Soulcast products, while the Highstorm provides water and Stormlight. 

Minor Oathbringer spoiler:

Spoiler

I don't remember the exact number, but either 1 or 2 Soulcasters can sustain the food needs of most of Kholinar.

When you can literally build and sustain an entire city with Stormlight, gemstones, and a Soulcaster, a bunch of other rules get thrown out the window. This gets even more complicated on a global scale when you factor in that not every Soulcaster can create every product, so groups that had access to food producing Soulcasters had tremendous advantages. Yes, everything else, medical training, industrialization, farming, that all can grow after the fact, but Soulcasters can be a backstop and could bring back a city from complete destruction and economic collapse. Shallan's family was saved from financial ruin by possessing a Soulcaster. It's why even though most can't utilize Spheres for their intrinsic Soulcaster value, the economy and money system is based on gemstones, particularly what they can produce.

 

What does this all mean in terms of the DTM? Hand a Soulcaster that could create all the essences to a group in stage 1 with a manual, and if they were careful I think they could jump very quickly to stage 4 in the scale of these things. Knowledge and gemstones are what would limit them. The carrying capacity in this case would be determined by the availability of the proper gemstones harvested from animals or mining. For groups that don't have a Soulcaster, then they have to learn agriculture, shaping crem, etc. and may follow a less unusual DTM trend.

Edited June 9, 2022 by Duxredux
clarity

[cometaryorbit]

The existence of large unclaimed areas, as @Treamayne points out, is really quite interesting. Now that's probably partly due to the pretty hostile-to-humans nature of far eastern Roshar - but still, these areas were part of the Silver Kingdoms and are actually *unclaimed* in modern Roshar, not just unsettled. (As opposed to say northern Canada and the interior outback of Australia, which were claimed pretty quickly when colonial powers arrived in the region, even though not really settled - some parts of arctic Canada away from the coast, eg the Barren Grounds, are still effectively unpopulated - but the land is certainly not unclaimed, and hasn't been for centuries.)

[DiePie]

(I'm only looking at Alethkar here because Kaladin's flashbacks are the only look into birth rates we have)

I was pretty sure that Isaak (the in-world person) remarked that infant mortality rates were high on Roshar, but I can't find the quote so I'm just going to assume he was actually talking about era 2 Scadrial and I'm just being forgetful.

But anyways, while Scadrial def follows the DTM, I think Roshar is designed specifically to avoid those similarities to our world. As noted above birth rates are already low, though we don't have exact figures, the fact it never comes up in Kaladin's flashbacks, combined with the removal of the common forms of death (mainly contagious diseases) means that I'll assume it's as low as pre-industrial infant mortality rates get. However I do want to bring up that death rates among early adults is atrocious in Alethkar because of the Vengeance pact. We see people being regularly conscripted/joining the army within Kalidin's flashbacks. And it's safe to say that the constant fighting (a battle every few weeks, with the thrill) would mean that few of them return home. I also remember at some point, a character saying that half of the eligible men in hist hometown enlisted in the army when Alethkar went to war on the shattered plains, obviously that's not indicative of much, he's probably exaggerating and that was a rather abnormal time. But it still helps develop my point that there was a lot of battle-field casualties.

Which, side-note, is something I like about Alethkar's culture is that this sort of prolonged mortality rate is what normally causes polygamy, however, women are needed as scholars, and other roles that involve writing and in the Ardentia. Which means that there isn't as large of a gender imbalance, and not as much pressure for people to get married.

Getting back to my main point, the birth rate in Alethkar has to be above what we would normally consider replacement rate (it's an average of ~2.1 births per women in the US today) in order for the country to maintain a stable population. However, the end of the world isn't going to last forever. At some point the desolation will end and that increased birth rate will lead to a baby-boom. So if I had to place it on the DTM, I would put Alethkar in stage 1, about 10 years away from stage 2, though it's probably more analogous to the post WW2 baby-boom than the DTM, because infant mortality rate is already so low.