Would it be worth it for Sunspear to enhanced its harbor and use the Greenblood to pull trade away from Oldtown? What would a ruler have to do and how soon could such a project be pulled off?

I don’t think so.

First, Sunspear isn’t on the Greenblood (it’s a good bit north of the mouth of the Greenblood), so it would really make more sense to build up Plankytown (which sits at the mouth of the Greenblood.

Second, as far as I can tell, there is no harbor at Sunspear. Indeed, when “Princess Nymeria and her ten thousand ships made landfall” near Sunspear, she did so “on the coast of Dorne,” beaching her ships rather than anchoring them at a harbor.

Third, it’s not clear how easy it would be to pull trade off of Oldtown from such a location. Yes, you have the Greenblood, but those waters reach their terminus in the middle of the Dornish peninsula and it’s a long caravan route indeed to get into the Reach or the Stormlands. By contrast, Oldtown is located in a much more populous market and has access to the great heart of the continent, either taking the Roseroad up to Highgarden (which then gives you access to the Coast Road and Casterly Rock) and then to King’s Landing, or taking the Mander as far north as Silverhill and as far east as Tumbleton or Grassy Vale.

Someone may have already asked this, but who would come out ahead if every kingdom tried to implement your Economic Development Plans more or less at the same time? Is it just a case of the-rich-get-richer where the Reach and the Westerlands ride their advantages to economic supremacy, or do the poorer kingdoms (the North, Dorne, the Stormlands) have some hope of catching up?

Discussed somewhat here and here.

It’s not just the case that the rich-get-richer; economic development can rapidly shift who’s rich and who’s not both inter- and intra-regionally: look at how England shifted from a relatively poor nation into the economic and financial powerhouse of Europe due to the commercial and industrial revolutions, or how the economic balance of power within the U.S has shifted over time (the Industrial Belt becomes the Rust Belt, the South moves from the “Nation’s #1 economic problem” to the Sunbelt, the factory towns of New England that have become hollowed out when the factories moved away).

My thinking is that the winners and losers have a lot to do with two main factors: timing and advantage:

When it comes to commercial infrastructure, getting there first gives a given region a huge head-start over their rivals, as was seen historically with the Erie Canal putting New York ahead of Pennsylvania and Virginia when it came to capturing the new east-west trade with the Midwest.
It also matters, on an industry-by-industry basis, whether a given region has an absolute or comparative advantage in that industry. So for example, the North is going to be very difficult to beat in the wool and woolen garment trade once it captures the higher valued-added segments of the industry, because it has such a large amount of land that’s suited to pasturage. Yes, the Reach is large, but you’d be giving up a lot of agricultural productivity by shifting over from cereal crops, fruits and veg, and dairy farming to sheep, so that raises the opportunity cost of investing in that industry. (On the other hand, the Reach might have lower opportunity costs when it came to linens or cotton.) Likewise, the Westerlands are probably going to be hard to beat when it comes to finance or metallurgy.

Why do you think House Manderly was able to build a thriving port on the mouth of the White Knife when all the other houses that held the Wolf’s Den ultimately failed to last?

White Harbor was “built with the wealth that the Manderlys had brought with them from the Reach.” The previous occupants of the Wolf’s Den simply didn’t have the money to make the heavy up-front investments necessary to make the city secure (not only does White Harbor have the original Wolf’s Den and the much larger New Castle, but it also has city walls around both of those, and seawalls protecting the harbor, making it really, really hard to assault) and attractive to commerce (White Harbor might be small, but it’s got a double harbor with protective walls, jettys, a respectable shipbuilding industry, etc.)

Once those investments were made, they eventually more than paid for themselves, but it would have been hard for a lot of the smaller houses who held the Wolf’s Den after the Greystarks were brought down to make them in the first place. Moreover, the Manderlys had the advantage of making those investments at a time when the North wasn’t fighting wars against pirates and slavers on the one hand, and the Vale of Arryn on the other, so they had the opportunity to make their investments stick without seeing them burned to the ground.

Is the Wildlings being so under developed significantly due to culture, ie refusing to organize into larger polities and shunning wargs who could be useful in many ways such as hunting better? After all the Thenns have managed to have a sophisticated civilization despite living in the same environment and there was even hardhome. If say hardhome was never destroyed and both it and the thenns managed to expand to a greater degree and open up trade with northerners could they have managed to create a society capable of matching other planetos ones politically and technologically?

Man, people are really, really interested in economic development of a region that’s really not suited to economic development.

No, wildling underdevelopment is mostly not due to culture, but the fact that A. most wildlings lack very important technologies like agriculture and metal-working, and B. Beyond-the-Wall is an incredibly harsh natural environment that doesn’t allow for much in the way of surplus food – this forces most people to spend their time on acquiring the necessities of survival, makes specialization difficult if not impossible, etc.

Of the wildlings, really only the Thenns have managed to maintain the level of technology (bronze-working, subsistence agriculture) that the First Men had back in the Dawn Age, and I’m pretty sure that’s only because the Valley of the Thenns provides enough of a protection from winter storms to allow for crops to be planted and harvested.

Two questions regarding your endgame: 1) Will there be a new monetary policy in Westeros such as the fiat system? 2) Will Westeros strengthen or weaken ties with Essos?

Not sure what you mean by my endgame…if you mean the end result of my Economic Development Plans, then here’s what I think:

Gradually. Note that pretty much all of my plans include the development of finance and banking. With that will come an expansion of non-metallic financial instruments being used in the economy: letters of credit, banker’s drafts, cheques, and bank notes. It will take a while for these things to spread beyond the relatively narrow confines of the urban bourgeoisie, however, even with an active state promoting the use of them by making them legal tender for taxes, for example.
Absolutely. Again, pretty much all of my plans involve expansion of commerce with Essos, albeit with a very keen eye toward climbing the value added ladder as quickly as possible. In the long run, it’s not good for Westeros to be a natural resources exporter only.

Sorry, another question. Where/why/how did medieval cities tend to develop?

There’s a huge literature on this, and there’s no one right answer, but…

Where – Medieval Cities developed around pre-existing (usually Roman) cities or settlements, cathedrals and other centers of worship, major castles/the courts of kings and major nobles, significant points on rivers, roads, and passes, and ports.

Why – usually to offer specialized goods and services to a place where permanent or steady demand existed. So at cathedrals you get stonemasons, makers of stained-glass-windows, candlemakers, etc. And those people in turn need brewers and bakers and butchers, etc. Nobles need smiths, tailors, clothmakers, clerks, lawyers, moneylenders, etc. And so and so forth.

How – usually a combination of the gradual accretion of population and the acquisition of a charter.

On your Dornish economic plan, how long would it take to pull the Torrentine into that valley and make it fertile? One generation, two? Your plans are great but can be undercut by having stupid kids (Quellon, Viserys II, etc) seeing the desert bloom and a forest of acacia rising up agaist the red sands has a dramatic effect.

At least a generation, and likely more than one, although it’s likely an iterative process where you’re gradually diverting more and more water and pushing it out further and further, so it’s not like you only receive the benefits at the end of the process.

But yes, that’s always a danger with elite-directed reform, especially in systems where political power is inherited. Unlike more broad-based systems, where you have institutions that can provide continuity of policy far longer than the span of a human life, you get these sudden and often wrenching changes when there’s a change in personnel (as it were).

After a large war with high civilian/peasant casualties, I’d assume that agriculture would be disrupted. In order to get more people back in the fields, would it be feasible for people living in city slums to be offered farming land if they were willing to relocate to it? They’d lack the knowledge required for farming, but, realistically, could that be taught to them in large numbers? If so, would the lords of cities filled with the poor consent to it, glad to get rid of them?

Offering vacant land to new settlers is a historical thing that happened, but not particularly city-dwellers. Remember, pre-modern societies were (for the most part) almost entirely rural.

So instead what you’d see is offers being made to landless agricultural laborers, younger sons who aren’t going to inherit the family farm, farmers from neighboring regions.

Say you were Quellon Greyjoy prior to Robert’s Rebellion and you had just “freed” the remaining thralls on the islands. Given the relatively infertile nature of the II’s soils, would it be a wise move to convert most of the farmland into pasture for sheep, similar to the Highland Clearances of Scotland? I think that for a Lord wishing to promote better relations with the greenlanders, this is a smart move. Thought?

I don’t know if the Iron Islands has the landmass to make wool exports a viable economic strategy, especially when you’re right near to the North which can outproduce and outcompete you in that market without stretching.

As I said in my post on the Iron Islands and econ dev, I’d emphasize ironmongery, commerce, mercenary work, and organized crime.

Does House Arryn have any lands, either direct or through a vassal house, on the western side of the Mountains of the Moon (excluding the area west of Wickenden? I’m particularly interested in the region of the SW corner of the Bite? Various sources (Wiki, ridiculous WorldoIaF maps) indicate that it belongs to the Arryns, yet my common sense and the canon history of the region (pre-Conquest, through the Targ’s reign and the novels themselves) all point to this being near impossible. (1)Thoughts?

Continuation of my Q about the SW corner of the Bite: (2) If this region belonged to the Tullys, would it be a good location for a port town in the context of your Economic Development Plan for the Riverlands? (3) If it is House Arryn’s *cough!, would it be worth the trouble to get your hands on the lands?

1. I’m assuming you mean that strip of land along the coast immediately south of the Sisters, and not the part of the Riverlands along the kingsroad (which the Valemen tried to capture during the reign of Rolland II Arryn, who was defeated and later beheaded by Tristifer V Mudd).

It’s a bit tricky, because that land doesn’t always exist, depending on the map. (Incidentally, the World of Ice and Fire map of the Vale is completely rubbish – somehow putting the Mountains of the Moon smack-dab on top of the Vale proper, to the east of the Bloody Gate) Some of the various book maps, for example, as well as Tear’s fan map (which GRRM endorsed pre-Lands of Ice and Fire), show the mountains coming up right to the coast as opposed to having this decent stretch of level ground.

Now, I don’t think it’s that impossible for this land (if it exists) to Arryn rather than Tully – for one thing, it’s substantially to the east of the Mountains of the Moon, which seems to have been the historical boundary between the Riverlands and the Vale. It’s also really close to the Sisters and the northernmost Fingers, suggesting that historically those lands would have been in the orbit of either the Sunderlands or the Coldwaters or the Belmores or the Lynderlys or the Corbrays.

2. As a port…eh. It’s got a couple problems in that White Harbor and the Sisters are already-established competitors really close by, so you’re going to struggle to get off the ground. Exporting your goods into the Vale itself is going to either involve sailing all the way around the coast, in which case why not cut out the middleman and sell to Gulltown directly, or an incredibly expensive and risky mountain portage. If instead you want to export to the south or west, you’re going to run into some pretty steep rent-seeking from the Riverlords (especially the Freys if you want to access Seagard’s port), and it’s not really that much of a time saving compared to just going to White Harbor and taking the Kingsroad all the way down.

3. It honestly depends on how productive these potentially non-existent lands are. The Riverlands aren’t exactly wanting for farmland, and they have easier ways to access the Narrow Sea through Maidenpool and Saltpans and the like. And it would be very hard to hang onto them, because they could be pretty easily cut off by a force landing from the Sisters.