Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Silk Road Simulation

On the meta level, I understood that the Silk Road must have been really confusing and trading must have been a challenge because of currency and language barriers.  But it probably got to some level of organization at the end because people did start accomplishing some goals.  I think the Silk Road must have been beneficial to the middlemen societies because they got goods cheaper and were able to communicate with more people. But it probably detracted from societies that were farther away because they couldn't directly get their goods and their goods cost more.  Looking at it over all, it did seem beneficial because people did get their goods and they did sell. 

On the practical level, this didn't work for me because people were all over the place.  We were all confusing each other and of course we were trying to swindle each other because that's realistic. It also didn't work for me because I don't like chaos, it drives me crazy even if I find it really funny. One pro of learning the Silk Road is that we could really see how currency and language barriers were issues.  We were also able to see how geography affected how people could travel, even if we were still in the classroom, we weren't allowed/supposed to go over to a region that wasn't assigned to us. One con of learning this way was that we didn't have enough time to simulate what might have happened over time.  Like one of the cons of this was that we couldn't establish a conversion for the currency.  Over time, I would assume someone(other than our banker because he didn't knew what he was doing) would have created a common currency or a conversion for people to use.  Also, another con was that there weren't like natural disasters and thieves that could have destroyed the traders.  After doing it, I think we would have liked knowing who had what product and how much they wanted to sell it. 

I think we should totally do this again because we all know what we would be getting ourselves into.  

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