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[Aelisha]

It is also likely that Holders maintain favour with their commoner subjects by allowing the services of slaves (house keeping, child care, mundane tasks such as shopping and logistics around the local town).  So long as the well being of the slave and responsibility of ownership has a transferable element, and the beneficiaries of delegated slaves are god fearing citizens, it is possible that a 'household figure' could represent the dispersal of centrally owned slaves to the subjects of that authority. 

Amarr society is far more complex than mere slave, serf, commoner, noble, holder tiers.  The interplay between holders and their less socially powerful peers is likely a large driver in where slaves end up - so long as they are being raised in the name of god and Amarr of course.

This reasoning is purely focused on domestic slaves, not industrial, specialist or other subdivisions a post-space-flight society might require or desire.

[Louella Dougans]

The average number owned by a Holder would be thousands or hundreds of thousands of slaves. There's nothing about the 2.3 number that could be used to determine the ratio of commoner families to Holder ones.

but there is.

If you're told there's 2000 slaves, and 1000 Amarr, and the average number of slaves owned by a Holder is 10, then you can work out that, there are 200 Holders, and 800 Non-Holders.

Source seems to tell us there are about 23 Tn slaves, 15 Tn Amarr, and the average number of slaves owned by a Holder is 2.3, so there must be 10 Tn Holders, and 5 Tn non-Holders, more or less.

and those numbers don't make sense to me.

[Lyn Farel]

It feels just like a number they threw because it sounded fun at the time they wrote it...

Not the first thing like that in Source afaik ?

[Aelisha]

TBH having even close to half of your population enslaved is asking for trouble unless you have a massive synthetic/automated population corralling them.  Eventually the 49% are going to figure out they can bring down an Empire just by taking the lash over swinging the scythe for as long as it takes. 

Rome suffered serious slave revolts with a far smaller (proportionally speaking) slave population compared to their plebeian and higher classes. 

[Samira Kernher]

The average number owned by a Holder would be thousands or hundreds of thousands of slaves. There's nothing about the 2.3 number that could be used to determine the ratio of commoner families to Holder ones.

but there is.

If you're told there's 2000 slaves, and 1000 Amarr, and the average number of slaves owned by a Holder is 10

We aren't given this information. Nothing in Source says anything about the average number owned by Holders.

and the average number of slaves owned by a Holder is 2.3

Source does not say this. All it says is that there are 2.3 slaves in Amarr for every household. This number does not mean that every household actually has ~2 slaves, and it does not mean that every Holder has only ~2 slaves.

The number might be wrong, but where it is wrong is in overestimating the amount of households. What you can't get from any of these numbers is the ratio of Holders to commoners, because none of these numbers say anything about Holders.

[Louella Dougans]

only Holders own slaves.

[Arkon Sarain]

only Holders own slaves.

I feel like you may be taking the "Average number of slaves per household" too literally, to my mind it is just a useful phrase that could be easily changed with "Average number of slaves per free Amarr" etc.

All it is meant to do is to frame the mean value that follows it.

For example:

Free population of Amarr = 21 Trillion
Enslaved Minmatar = 10 Trillion

Calculating a mean value is simply a matter of dividing 21 trillion by 10 trillion, which gives us 2.1. I could then frame that value as either 2.1 Minmatar slaves per household, or 2.1 Minmatar slaves per free Amarr citizen, etc.

[Ibrahim Tash-Murkon]

You can't take the number of slaves and the average number of slaves per household and figure anything out besides the number of households. Those numbers tell you nothing about the true distribution. You could have one household with every single slave and 8.7 trillion households with zero, or 8.7 trillion households with 2.3 slaves and one without, or 4.35 trillion households with 4.6 slaves and and 4.35 trillion with zero, or 8.7 trillion households with no slaves and every slave in the empire is kept in a massive warehouse owned by nobody. In each case the statistic 2.3 slaves per household stands true because it tells us nothing about who owns the slaves or the ratio between holders and commoners or anything else it only lets us know the answer to the division problem "Number of Slaves"/"Number of Households".

[Samira Kernher]

only Holders own slaves.

The 2.3 number has nothing to do with actual ownership.

"There are 2.3 slaves for every household in Amarr" does not mean that every household in Amarr has 2.3 slaves, or that every Holder has an average of 2.3 slaves. It means that IF you were to take the entire slave population and divide them up evenly between all free people in Amarr, there would be enough slaves for every household to have ~2.

So, you can get a rough idea of the number of households of any social class from the number. You can in no way get a ratio of Holders to commoners.

[Aelisha]

only Holders own slaves.

In theory my landlord owns my house.  Doesn't mean I can't pay for services rendered or facilities offered.  I imagine that slave delegation works similarly, though possibly less for cash and more for social capital and prestige.  that and a slave housed with a subservient free-citizen is a cost mitigated. 

[Samira Kernher]

only Holders own slaves.

In theory my landlord owns my house.  Doesn't mean I can't pay for services rendered or facilities offered.  I imagine that slave delegation works similarly, though possibly less for cash and more for social capital and prestige.  that and a slave housed with a subservient free-citizen is a cost mitigated.

Holders leasing slaves to commoners is canon. It's called a Custodial Servitude Contract. That doesn't have anything to do with the number being discussed here, however.

[Louella Dougans]

So, you can get a rough idea of the number of households of any social class from the number.

And that number is wrong and unworkable.

[Aelisha]

It does if ownership is actually counted by household instead of Holder, not only in the figures we have but in terms of who legally has 'custody' of a slave.  It is entirely possible that statistically speaking a household 'owns' a loaned or rented slave, with the 'responsibility' of the Holder as the true owner being the pursuit of reparations for crimes committed should the entrusted parties abuse their ownership.

As it is getting a little 'testy' in here I'll bow out.

[Ibrahim Tash-Murkon]

So, you can get a rough idea of the number of households of any social class from the number.

And that number is wrong and unworkable.

I think Sami meant "you can't get a rough number". The only number than can be derived is the number of households, nothing about their class divisions.

[Samira Kernher]

So, you can get a rough idea of the number of households of any social class from the number.

And that number is wrong and unworkable.

Then it's wrong and unworkable. The end. Errors can be made.