Stratsky Foundation for Economics and Insurrection

There are academic institutions you do not wanna find yourself in a dark alley with, and the Stratsky Foundation for Economics and Insurrection is in the top five on that list. In fact, it's probably the only one in the top five; the next four backed off it give it some room.

Founded in AES 876 by Anton Stratsky as the Strastsky Foundation for Economics, the Foundation's original mandate was to help manage the struggling logistics of the Compass Republic. That right there is probably why things turned out the way they did. Pretend you're an economist, and you've got a bunch of equations where one set of numbers greases the wheels and the other set dumps a bucket of wrenches in the machinery and burns the whole fucking country down. Yeah, yeah, I know it's a mixed metaphor, shut the fuck up.

Point is, within ten years, His Dread Majesty is knocking on the front door and asking for some help with a rival in the Assembly. The economists shrug—it's just a different set of numbers for them—and get to work. By 891, global trade is a flaming dumpster fire, the Panark Fleet's on the verge of implosion, Selestei's declared war on livestock in general, and Shaster's named economics a pentad field because how else do you explain all this fucking witchcraft?

You gotta admire the pair on Dr. Stratsky. Amid international calls for his Foundation to be disbanded, he goes and fucking rebrands as the Stratsky Foundation for Economics and Insurrection. The surge of notoriety put the Foundation on the map for every pentad academic from the Double-North Pole to the planet's ass. Applications tripled over the next two years and then doubled over the following decade, which of course only pissed off the global community even further. It's only gotten worse. Hell, Ulgrav was even threatening to bomb them a couple decades back until Santanna bribed us with a trade deal. But it probably wouldn't have gone any further than threats, because no one wants to have to deal with their exports drying up and their imports suffering massive price inflation.

Today, the Stratsky Foundation remains the only advanced degree program for economists looking to pursue their bloody work. Not for lack of trying, of course, but the main problem with trying to compete in this field is that your competitor is the Stratsky Foundation for Economics and Insurrection. Of the last four attempts to start an economics foundation, three went broke right off the bat, while the fourth experienced an uprising by the staff, who cornered the president and, according to local reports, "stabbed him to death with their pens."

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Gwen Hanson, PhD