Hi Hanuman,
My apologies, I thought I posted this late Saturday night but apparently not.
In past posts I've suggested 600 B for the peep population, with a low of 400 B, but the high seems more likely than the low, while the current RoH's has been put at around 300-400 B.
I think others have tried to make the point that the huge burden of the Dolists indirectly emphasizes the relative strength of the underlying economy in being able to cope at a better than minimum level, rather than simply collapsing, despite all the socialist garbage the legislaturists had hobbled and sabotaged it with.
You're quite right that the early textev all referred to Haven 'only' having over a hundred systems while still being the second largest human polity [the Andermanni were fourth, so who was third?], but back in '06 the MWW [RFC] detailed the new republic had peaked at just under 270 systems, just under double the ~135 [plus some strategic bases IIRC] it then had [without adding those held by the SKM before Thunderbolt], since Eloise let at least half leave if they wanted to, which they did for obvious reasons, though some saw advantages to being part of such a huge potentially rich free trade economic engine like the republic of old.
Then there are a couple of pearls or posts IIRC, that mention '200+' who left for maybe ~350 systems tops.
One of the pearls explains that 30-35 of those ~135 inhabited systems are well industrialized or 'first tier', plus about the same for 'second tier' for `70 industrialized systems that must be defended, plus 35 more that are economically neutral, then some 30 'economic sinkholes', NTM the strategic bases and colonies of Haven herself from way back when etc.
The population of Haven was listed as 23 B someplace during the first war, not surprising when it was over a billion barely a century after it was first settled in 1309 IIRC, with some of the daughter colonies also with huge populations.
RFC has used a gradient of population decline over distance [ie the time of habitation] for the explored galaxy with several dozen core 'old league' systems having well over 30 billion in CoS [with the exception of Beowulf], while the verge is down to around 2 B; though the TQ averaged 1.5B in WroH, it had jumped to over a billion more in SoS or tSFtS, yet Haven should still be somewhat above that average.
Keep in mind, if the dolists had simply become self supporting rather than trying to become spaceship constructors, the effect on the internal economy would have been profound, since Pierre or somebody makes some reference to Haven having to import food at some point.
Beside a 'back to the earth campaign to build spaceships' [by eliminating the BLS], that renovated wasted or marginal land, I've imagined the dolists taking over abandoned mines even on or in the system's moons etc, to make Haven and the rest of the dolist centered systems self supporting.
Throwing millions if not billions of semi-enthusiastic warm bodies at other resource production bottlenecks would probably also have some good results.
The restored republic still isn't rich, WroH refers to it's citizens as still impoverished compared to even the poorest Manticoran, while in AAC Secretary Giancola rhetorically asks his brother and senator, Jason "what doesn't involve the military these days" [IIRC], who responds "not much" indicating the concentration on military production.
Given the 1200 SDP's we know they were then building or had completed, at ~M$40B each that's only M$80 each for 600 billion, not pocket change perhaps but still probably affordable to a society willing to buy war-bonds etc.
Given the relatively few million peeps killed [2-3M?] in the first war, the anti Manticoran hate should be considerably diminished even further when the new RoH administration explained in some detail how the CPS lied about almost everything, including providing the very people who did it to confess and explain all the details might reduce the amount of manipulated anger that Eloise and Theisman probably saw as a problem to any long term peace, so I expect they were on this before they got to know High Ridge.
From the textev, Eloise & Co aren't too worried about anti-manty feeling at the moment, given how the peace treaty sailed through Congress etc.
I suspect the restored constitution probably has several provisions preventing the re-occurrence of Dolism and the welfare state, something that reformed and now proudly independent Dolists probably strongly support.
L
hanuman wrote:400 systems? Really? Oh, then I was certainly waaayyyy off course.
Okay, so with an average system population of 2 billion, and given the new info (for me) wrt the number of systems and that several (many?) of them are uninhabited, we get more or less half the population total I estimated. So, 300-350 billion. I told you guys my estimate was uninformed.
Still, the point I made is still valid. A vibrant, growing economy requires a productive and innovative economically-active population. The PRH economy was clearly neither vibrant nor growing, but it has managed NOT to collapse for a long time (I remember that Mr Weber wrote in the companion that was included in the first anthology that Haven had started its economic experimentation well over half a century before Honor's birth - once again, I might be wrong, but I don't own the book so I cannot verify my facts).
The fact that the PRH economy has managed to stay solvent for so long before it reached the critical point beyond which the financial strain of supporting payments to the Dolists could no longer be carried without complete economic collapse, means that there had to exist at least a significant economically-productive class that could ensure the continued solvency of the economy.
Also, the critical point beyond which economic collapse would have become inevitable did not come around because that productive class had suddenly disappeared. Rather, the PRH had become too large, and in the process had destroyed too much of the productive capacity of its newly-conquered subjects, for its economically-productive class to carry all the weight of keeping its economy solvent - even with the inflow of loot from those new conquests.
But the point is that such an economically-productive, educated and skilled class had to exist, and that it had to be significant in number, for the PRH economy to have remained solvent for so long. So once the Dolists started to respond to Ransom's propaganda campaigns and started to enter the work force again, there were still enough skilled personnel to retrain the new workers.
