The Slavery Attractor

When I started writing The Sewing Circle my first story for the Grantville Gazette. I had no real notion of what economics was, except it was boring and not all that important and perhaps a bit less scientific than astrology. I didn't know what the Federal Reserve did, or even what effect banks and banking had on the economy. I hadn't read Smith, Keynes, Marks or Friedman and I hadn't even heard of Hayek or Ricardo. Ah, the good old days.
But my characters needed to deal with the economics of their situation, so I had to figure out how it would affect them. I had to know what economics dealt with so I could see how it would affect the story. And, as it turned out, I needed to know the same thing for later stories. So for the last ten years I have been studying economics on my own. Reading what the great minds of the field thought. In that reading I learned that a lot of the assumptions in economics were based on looking at the field through the prism of statistical analysis.
"The Slavery Attractor" is a look at economics through the lens of chaos theory, and I have worked rather hard to make it as short and as clear as I could manage. The article is only around eight thousand four hundred words and makes very little reference to hallowed experts. This is not a learned discourse on what the experts have said about economics. It's a simple look at economics and how they work.