Money. How much of it, who has it, what do they buy with it, what do they waste it on?

Your wallet is now full of ebony credsticks chased with Orichalchum.

What do you do?

Buy a at least three metric tons of ammunition for a plethora of different firearms and pay teams and teams of runners to exterminate the world's dropbear population. But that's just me.

Nooo, save the drop bears!

Kill them! Kill them with fire!... Before they kill all of us.

Buy the moon.

Retire on my own private island. Settle any old scores via Chimera.


Again, define wealth. Purely materially, there might be more, but then again, with so much recyceling going on, notmuch at best. However, since there was VITAS, and many, many people died, and all kinds of wars and destruction, I'm half inclined to say 'less', if intellectual wealth and wealth in workforce counts.


It's concentrated at the top, but less in the hands of certain people, more in the hands of legal entities like megacorps that, usually, are public or shared private property. The social divide is much sharper than in today's West, more like in today's Brazil or South Africa. Not to say there are no oligarchs and other super-rich tychoon style people around, but it's not like there's more of them than today. I'd expect there to be less.


Megacorp things, mostly.

As for individuals ... depends on the individual. Dragons, spirits, sasquatches? Lots of things. Lots of weird things. Humans (thinking of Roxborough and Spinrad, this term is used rather loosely), however ... all of the points mentioned, to some degree.

You realize there is actually someone that could, today, lay claim to a huge portion of the moon, right?

Of course. But, if I suddenly had stupid amounts of money, that's what I would probably do with it.

Then you'll be pretty angry when Chairface Chippendale writes his name on the surface with a laser.

I'll only cry myself to sleep that night.

I choose to be the return of the great Art Dankwalther death to Saeder-Krupp never think small!

Destroy the capitolist-based economy! Smash the money-loving fools! Gggrrr! (Now read that in a russian accent.....)

Yeah, that worked out great for Art.

He only got half way done.



He bought a lunar rover no one had seen in 40 years, and just a few months ago it was spotted.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-0...sian-rover.aspx

#1; Don't tell ANYONE how much cash you've actually got. Spend ONLY enough to keep suspicions off you.
#2: Reduce the drop-bear population to manageable levels without eliminating the species, & keep them there.
#3: Make sure the excess cash is safe, but can be accessed in an emergency.
#4: Make a few discrete (meta)humanitarian investments.
#5: Go into semi-retirement.

Well the global GDP (real wealth) has trended upwards since we started recording fancy statistics like that so I suspect that it would continue to do so in the 6th world. Even when the global GDP decreases such as during a major recession or depression the overall trend has been upwards.

As for where that wealth is concentrated I suspect that the 6th world actually has a fairly well established and sizable 'middle class' that serves the important function of consuming what they produce to as to drive profits. That said though, globally I'm positive that there is huge inequality. Even today, a UN report I read a few years back said that the top 1% of the global population owns 40% of the global 'wealth', while the bottom 50% of the population shares 1% of the global wealth.

Pay everyone to kill Harlequin. After kicking him in the balls. Or just kick him over and over and over and over and over and I HATE HARLEQUIN.

Buy the Shadowrun licence and pay the freelancers.

You win.

Given that the limits of modern technology are readily available and relatively inexpensive, I'd have to say that there is much more wealth by the time of Shadowrun. The megacorps are also hugely wealthy, able to spend millions of nuyen each year on Shadowruns to compete with other megacorps, indicating a vast amount of disposable spending.

Obviously there are a few people who do have vast amounts of wealth, putting even our modern multi-billionaires to shame, for example Lofwyr, who is the sole owner of a megacorporation that dwarfs any corp. we would have today. By example, Bill Gates, for a while the richest man in the world, was only a shareholder in Microsoft.

As for concentration, I'd imagine that it actually is quite smooth. There are the fabulously wealthy (various immortals), those on their way up (Damien Knight, et al.), and a number of corporate owners who are trying to reach the higher levels. After that, there's the vast middle class, and I'm sure that more than a few corporate executives overlap other corporate owners.

The problem with the SR universe is that there's a long tail at the poorer end of the spectrum. There are a lot of poor, and there is extreme poverty for many of them. But it's no different than the world today, except that the poor are widely distributed, rather than being concentrated in third world countries.

Things I would do:

Upgrade all my ware to Delta or epsilon and shove move in with an eye to long term utility as well as the reasonable expectation that I could win a fight with an an adult dragon or an urban assault vehicle moist of the time.

Bribe a few important people to like me.

Begin making the world a better place through judicious applications of murder, begin construction of secret bases and lairs.