@llde
I also refuse the fact that men were inherently better schemer becouse numbers.
That's simple statistics. Assuming that a persons abilities are normally distributed (which for all we know with our current knowledge, holds) a bigger sample size will produce more abled bodied individuals. Neurology also has shown than men tend to be more extreme in their abilities than women, e.g. you have more highly intelligent men, than women, but also more dumb ones; or to speak in mathematical terms: The standard deviation of a given sample taken from a representative group of men and women with respect to ability, is bigger for the "men" sample.
Yes she is (IIRC wan't stated that she was a duchess actually?), however isn't actually required to hold authority for that
We are not directly shown that she is a countess in her own right, but we can infer it from the other peoples interactions and Connie's internal monologues, as well as the overall presentation of people with titles in this manga. As I have said this manga is in one part very much post WWII in thinking: That is that people regardless of gender may acquire titles without problems. In real life many women had problems being stylized since many European countries used the Lex Salica as base for rules of succession.
Well connected and rich families can (and actively did in some cases) slander and damage a family finance trough various means.
Of course they did.
Humans are bastards after all. But you forget the overall situation: The debt's of Connie's family were taken over by Count Randolf and a sudden increase would raise many an eyebrow and at least prompt a deeper inquiry into the source of debt; especially considering that's what the count is doing as a living.
So you'd have the ability to actively forge documents and not just slander a family and hope for some opportunistic loan sharks.
Since most of the debt comes from Connie's father loaning other people money and thus being in need of loans himself we can also rule out the tributary system; which is unlikely in the first place. A sudden increase in tributes à la "I've altered the deal pray I don't alter it further" were highly uncommon. First this implies that the setting would be set in a feudal society (which it is not). Seconds tributes were required to be confirmed by the estates and were raised highly irregularly, that's why taxes on goods were popular (but that's not what we have here). Adam Smith was the first to define the concept of regular taxes and the French revolution finally implemented it. Assuming that the setting is set around and post French revolution, it's highly likely that the only tax that needs to be paid is on income.
So in the end there's no way, except forgery, to increase the debt of Connie's family -- and for that you need to be higher in the hacking order.
Even inside Europe there were a lot of differences of noble society.
That wasn't my argument. I said: You can't use something non European to make analogies to a clearly European setting. And as much as many European states differed in how they did thing, more than two-thirds was pretty much the same.