Happy Tuesday all you lovely people who haven't joined the subreddit and are reading like beautiful social flutterbys, and also Happy Tuesday to everyone else of course, thank you for sharing your time with the Solar Research Council today, hahah!
We continue our macroeconomic treatise disguised as fanfiction today by looking at how the SRC expanded out of its own planet, and took over the critical moon of Nar Shaddaa, which was still functioning as a minor tradehub, mostly for the corporations of less than stellar reputation.
Shameless plug, I talk about this in more detail, and fill in some of the blanks on my YouTube channel. Link to the channel, betas for my writing, as well as original philosophical work, are always up one writing cycle earlier (currently 4 days) on my subreddit at r/MinimalistMusings/ (Note the capitalization.)
Remember: "Peace is bad for interest rates."
Note: I am aware that shareholders are also stakeholders, hence the need to clarify that both are consulted, especially since the latter is a superset that contains a lot more varying interests.
The Rise of the Solar Research Council
The very first decision taken by the Solar Research Council (SRC) on Evocar was the formal reconnection with Nar Shaddaa. While there was intermittent communication, and even trade in the century of disintegration, formal political connection was lost. Now, as Evocar itself slowly redeveloped, the historical connection with Nar Shaddaa needed to be rebuilt, and the moon brought back into political union with the planet itself. Without control of Nar Shaddaa, it would be almost impossible to expand the bubble of civilization within a sector of anarchy.
This proved to be more difficult than the SRC had imagined. The breakdown on Evocar had left the slave population in control, and given them time to rebuild. But while Evocar itself was essentially worthless, having no real industrial output after being stripped by the Hutts, Nar Shaddaa remained a semi-important center of industry. And thus, even as Evocar was slowly recovering, with new forests and grasslands reappearing on the surface, the moon was still embroiled in vicious clan and corporate wars. Thus as the SRC looked out into the system, the first move was to gain a large foothold on Nar Shaddaa.
Here, the SRC leant on the expertise of the various trading houses. While not always entirely above board, the traders, by necessity, had contacts and business interests on Nar Shaddaa. It was because of those connections that several crucial pieces of gear necessary for terraforming were acquired. And as the situation on Evocar slowly improved, the power disparity between industrialized Nar Shaddaa and Evocar slowly disappeared. Already, much of the raw foodstuffs necessary for maintaining the, still enormous, population of the moon came from the big agricultural estates on Evocar.
Thus, leveraging the relationship already in place, the trading companies began to expand operations, moving into value-added services like ration packaging and distribution. This expansion generated enough good will, and gave enough cover that, under the guidance of the council as a whole, several Research Institutions set up their own branch on Nar Shaddaa. However, instead of focusing on primary, cutting edge research, these institutions instead focused on teaching.
Styling themselves as *Universities*, these schools offered free education to all workers of the various SRC-associated corporations, as well as subsidized classes for other inhabitants of Nar Shaddaa. Interestingly, the first classes offered at the Universities were not intense technological fare, but rather theories on business administration, ethics, law, macroeconomics, and humanist philosophy.
Within two human generations (50 human years), the foothold of the SRC was firm. The Universities, and the food processing companies had spawned a series of local initiatives. Backed by the impartial courts set up within SRC-dominated sectors, businesses had the confidence to expand and know that their investments were not at risk of being expropriated with no cause. One of the most successful businesses was founded by a graduate of the first cohort.
A young Twi'lek whose parents sacrificed themselves to save her from a slave ship, her hard work brought her to the attention of a company scout. Without expectation, a scholarship was granted to her upon recommendation, and with food and board paid for, her natural intelligence soon found great application in the University. The core of her business was frighteningly simple: She realized that no matter how powerful, waste disposal was a problem for everyone in the *pungent* layers of Nar Shaddaa. Her solution was equally interesting: Instead of centralizing the cleanup, which would be inefficiently costly, outsource and collectivise it.
Thus she built an entire ecosystem on the HoloNet (the "*app*") connecting those with an excess of waste, with those who had the time and capacity to move it. The system started within the SRC-dominated sectors, and very quickly the ecosystem had generated knock-on effects for her home. Unlike other so-called gig companies of the time which were more legalized slavery contracts, the "Wasteling" app did not take more than 5% from any transaction. This, combined with the application of standardized base pay for distance travelled, and a distribution that made it possible for workers themselves to subdivide the larger items, allowed everyone to be far more efficient, which in turn stimulated the local economy of the SRC sectors at the same time as effectively beautifying it.
After an initial angel round that saw her valuation double of what her bankers thought, the business hit exponential growth. Quickly, as the most egregious displays of waste were removed, the *app* shifted focus to include other types of work, including recurring services like cleanup and organization. The idea was, while maintaining a certain amount of waste disposal, the add-on services would generate more waste to ... dispose.
In less than two human years, the *app* had become ubiquitous through SRC space, and was looking to expand outwards. Through careful diplomacy, and backed by guarantees from the SRC-affiliated banks, the app soon reached most corners of Nar Shaddaa. Interestingly, a poll two decades later cited the *app* as one of the main reasons for pulling themselves out of poverty, and the first exposure to the philosophy of the SRC.
It was during this time that economic integration started to pull more and more sectors towards the SRC. With the *app* acting as the vanguard, service companies throughout the SRC sector started appearing all over Nar Shaddaa. Because they were run with a professionalism built on years of slow cultural improvement, SRC banks and law firms soon became the neutral arbiters of much dispute in neutral space.
While this cultural creep slowly eroded the old power structures, much of Nar Shaddaa was still deeply involved in the unsavoury aspects of corporate gang warfare. With the tacit approval of the Central Committee, SRC-owned corporations entered into the fray via carefully chosen joint ventures with the more amenable incumbents. While business was business, and profits were instrumental in the continued growth and development of the nascent political entity, to the SRC, business was also one of the arms of diplomacy. This was reflected in the strength of representation, in the form of permanent seats, that the various trading houses had on the Central Committee.
Thus even during the more adventurous ventures, one of the key goals was to instil good corporate governance in the local partner. Through carefully aligned incentives, the join ventures were encouraged to develop according to the governance model (i.e. stakeholder-shareholder equality) mandated by the SRC. In this model, executives were given a generous, but small stipend during their tenure, with shareholder-approved, vested compensations only paid out in instalments during 10 years after the end of their term. This particular model ensured that not only would executives plan for the medium-term of the company, it also discouraged the phenomenon of the consolidated executive, seeing the corporation as a personal fiefdom.
Cumulatively, the effect was to demonstrate the power of governance and rule of law on the proper functioning of corporations and the shared prosperity they can generate. Within twenty years, SRC-affiliated joint ventures acquired significant market share in their respective sectors, from 30% of the luxury furniture market all the way to 80% of the food sector. To remain competitive, many competitors were forced to adjust corporate governance structures, with the result that even with little input from the SRC directly, executives retired from SRC-backed ventures brought their knowledge and skill to the rest of the industry.
This had the effect of extending SRC jurisdiction ever further into Nar Shaddaa. Corporations based on the SRC governance model tended to use courts based on SRC law, which were generally considered incorruptible due to the amount of resources were poured into the judiciary by the government on Evocar. This was possible as not only were there no real concepts of nation-states or borders on the moon, almost all corporate contracts signed in the SRC-model tended to specify the courts where disagreements on contractual terms could be resolved. That these specified courts were almost always practising the SRC version of corporate law only underlined the advantages of the process.
As a result of this extending power creep, within a hundred years, the city-moon was divided roughly into two segments. The larger of the two remained a place of lawless, cut-throat corporate warfare, with a Gini coefficient approaching 0.9. However, in the SRC dominated half, the Gini coefficient had dropped to 0.5; while this remained much higher than the aggregate 0.25 seen on Evocar itself, the difference between the two halves of Nar Shaddaa was obvious. With the accidental leak of the equality data, the integration processed accelerated as ever more population defected into the SRC half, resulting in a complete integration of the Moon within another century.