McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Fictional Econimics
Griffyn612:
Redacted for reasons. :-X
Farmerbob1:
The use of consumables as currency isn't limited to salt.
Look into how Japan used rice as currency. They couldn't make coinage work, and kept going back to rice over the centuries.
Griffyn612:
--- Quote from: Farmerbob1 on July 27, 2015, 09:41:42 PM --- The use of consumables as currency isn't limited to salt.
Look into how Japan used rice as currency. They couldn't make coinage work, and kept going back to rice over the centuries.
--- End quote ---
The thing is, rice has a direct and obvious value to everyone. Regardless of social standing, everyone can eat rice. Farmers can plant rice.
Salt didn't. It was like the platinum of its day. It was highly valued due to its scarcity, but it wasn't the only currency. Throughout most of history, there was still gold and silver used for regular transactions.
This is an exerpt from Wikipedia.
--- Quote ---It has long been assumed that metals, where available, were favored for use as proto-money over such commodities as cattle, cowry shells, or salt, because metals are at once durable, portable, and easily divisible.[43] The use of gold as proto-money has been traced back to the fourth millennium BC when the Egyptians used gold bars of a set weight as a medium of exchange,[citation needed] as had been done earlier in Mesopotamia with silver bars.[citation needed]
[43] I I Rubin, 'A History of Economic Thought', translated Donald Filtzer, Ink Links, 1979 (original Moscow, 1929)
--- End quote ---
Since magic is a consumable currency, like salt or rice, there's no economic value for a society. A nation can't claim worth based on consumables alone, as they're not consistent.
Perhaps in a world of magic, magic itself is readily available. But if magic currency were the only currency, and a war suddenly depleted the Guild/nation's reserves, then the citizenry would be left to an unregulated barter system for everything until sufficient resources could be re-gathered to reform the currency.
Farmerbob1:
Wouldn't a reduced supply in the face of normal or accelerated need in a rice-based economy just be inflation? Each unit of rice has a value. If there is less rice, the value goes up. Sure, if it gets too bad, everything goes into the crapper, but gold also fluctuates in supply as well. A new gold mine, or gold shipments lost at sea, etc. If the price of staple food and goods goes to extremes for whatever reason, economic shenanigans happen, even in a gold economy. The great depression took place when the US was on the gold standard.
In a high fantasy scenario, I can't imagine many ways where normal coinage or raw materials would be viable for an economic base. People could counterfeit it too easily.
What I could imagine is an actual trade in mana itself. Magic potential. You might be able to take it from other people, but you literally couldn't counterfeit it.
Magically gifted people could be rich, if they wanted to be. Magical creatures might be absurdly rich, if they wanted to trade away their magic to humans for goods.
Dragons might simply hoard magic power, making them highly irritable. First you bother them, then they realize they have to expend magical power to kill you? *grrr*
Magic potential would then be a great deal like a rice economy. People would buy commodities with it. With effort, anyone could make/grow some, but most people won't bother if they aren't good at it.
Griffyn612:
--- Quote from: Farmerbob1 on July 28, 2015, 02:53:23 AM ---Wouldn't a reduced supply in the face of normal or accelerated need in a rice-based economy just be inflation? Each unit of rice has a value. If there is less rice, the value goes up. Sure, if it gets too bad, everything goes into the crapper, but gold also fluctuates in supply as well. A new gold mine, or gold shipments lost at sea, etc. If the price of staple food and goods goes to extremes for whatever reason, economic shenanigans happen, even in a gold economy. The great depression took place when the US was on the gold standard.
In a high fantasy scenario, I can't imagine many ways where normal coinage or raw materials would be viable for an economic base. People could counterfeit it too easily.
What I could imagine is an actual trade in mana itself. Magic potential. You might be able to take it from other people, but you literally couldn't counterfeit it.
Magically gifted people could be rich, if they wanted to be. Magical creatures might be absurdly rich, if they wanted to trade away their magic to humans for goods.
Dragons might simply hoard magic power, making them highly irritable. First you bother them, then they realize they have to expend magical power to kill you? *grrr*
Magic potential would then be a great deal like a rice economy. People would buy commodities with it. With effort, anyone could make/grow some, but most people won't bother if they aren't good at it.
--- End quote ---
Gold reserves attributed to a nation's wealth wouldn't be shipped by cargo ship (unless it's WW2 and you're shipping your valuables to the U.S. to keep them out of Nazi hands). It sits in a vault and waits to be used as needed. Your can't do that with consumables like rice. If one nation tried to pay another with rice, and the other nation is in a gold standard, then the rice nation would be laughed away.
Using solidified magic is certainly more stable then perishable goods, but it'd still be susceptible to depletion via necessary use in some circumstances. The same for gold being paid out for aide or services, except that gold can be used in credit. A nation literally using its magical reserves in war would leave it's citizens without any monetary units until it could be replaced.
I don't know any more about Quantus' world then what he's shared, but in the system I'm proposing, getting rich off of gold alone would be pointless, since the higher value is the magic gems. Those that could use magic well enough to make fake or counterfeit gold wouldn't see the point. Their world would received instead around the gems, which would be policed by the Guild. And the only violation there would be passing off unauthorized work as the standard, which they would punish with impunity.
So if war broke out, and the magic was needed to fuel weapons and such, the citizens would still have coinage to use day to day. Magical reserves might dwindle, leaving some unable to power gadgets and tools, but the food makes could remain open.
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