If you ever read the Tough Guide to Fantasy Land by Diane Wynn Jones, one of the things she hammers is the bad economics of many fantasy worlds. This can apply to science fiction, too, but I’m going to focus on fantasy. Say, a room costs X silver coins per night. Depending on the setting, your character is probably getting fleeced so badly that the next morning he’s going to be checking himself for clipper marks and an ear notch. How big of a coin is that silver coin? What is the exchange rate of silver to other things? How do characters “make change?” As Adam Smith put it in the first volume of On the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, making change for or with a cow … doesn’t work well much of the time.
The good news is that most readers will be happy with consistent handwavium, so long as it is consistent, or characters comment on price and exchange fluctuations (“So much for the new silver mine making everyone rich. Look at how high prices are!”) The bad news is that you do have to be consistent.
In the original Start Trek, and Next Generation, the replicator had made money exchanges obsolete. So wealth had reverted to Ye Ancient Standard, that being land. And one suspects that people found ways to barter for home grown produce and other novelties. It just wasn’t clear on screen. Handwavium worked, since the economics of the government wasn’t a major plot point.
On the other hand, the Merchant and Empire novels start out as economics with a dash of fantasy and who-dun-it. Since the protagonist was a businessman, that part had to be spot on. So did weights and measures and exchange rates. I knew I’d done it right when a reviewer who is a currency trader said that two passages in particular reminded him of his day job. To do that, I drew on the history of the Hanseatic League, business histories and accounts of trade and currencies of the early Middle Ages, visits to museums over the years, and articles about coins and coinage in academic journals. You probably don’t have to go to that length. For the WIP, well, I now know more about the cloth trade of the Hanseatic League and medieval England than I really needed to. But again, one of the two main characters does that for his living, so … In that series, and that world, getting the details right was vital.
In general, up until the Early Modern Era (1650 or so) in Europe, low-value coins were small, and made of copper. Copper is easy to work, common, and didn’t have many other uses (unlike iron, or lead, for example.) Silver coins came in different sizes with different values, some as small as my pinkie nail, others as large (if not as thick) as a US or Canadian quarter or EU twenty cent piece. Contrary to what most fantasy novels suggest, gold coins were very, very rare. Sometimes governments only minted them to commemorate the coronation of a new monarch, or another event of similar importance. Then they would be used as a sort of token of honor rather than currency. Bills of Exchange might refer to the value in gold coins, but the amount of real gold in circulation was tiny. Silver moved far more freely, and everyone knew how to check coins for adulteration. Debasing the currency is an ancient and dishonorable tradition among governments world wide. As soon as word got out that, oh, Saxony was messing with its coinage, up went prices to balance the lower silver content. behold, inflation. Ditto in certain areas when Spain poured silver into the regional economies during the Eighty Years War.
Land was always the foundation of value, then precious metals, then scarcity and novelty. Anything from “way away” tended to have a higher price, both for transportation and desirability as an exotic. Especially if it was both novel and useful. Enter fabrics from far away, even if they were “just” linen or wool that was different from what people had back home. Fabric traveled huge distances, even within Europe, with certain weights and grades being more desirable at different times in history, or even in a decade or so. Furs also traveled long distances, with thicker and darker pelts more highly prized, and ermine* (sometimes) the ne plus ultra of pelts. But sumptuary laws put limits on who could wear what, when. The medieval was a visual world, where people were supposed to tell at a glance—literally—who was inferior and who was on top. A servant who looked like her mistress threatened the proper order of the world and of society.
So, going back to our in-story traveler and his friends at the inn. What is he going to pay? You have what sort of coin, what the value of that coin is as compared to goods, the location of the inn (big city during a trade fair, rural area during harvest when things are plentiful, well traveled road or back of beyond), the local exchange rate, any regional rules about just price** and costs, if people trust strange coins, what else the traveler has that might be traded for or exchanged for space for the night and a meal … And I’m going to stop here before this becomes an essay on economic history and trade. No, the author doesn’t have to lay all those cards out for the reader. But if the author is going to be consistent in his or her story, there needs to be a list somewhere, or reasons given for oddly high or low prices.
Which is why handwavium is generally your friend, as long as you are consistent. But if you charge a gold coin for a night’s stay, there’d better be a very good and unusual reason!
*All the white furry capes with little black dots you see in the 1700s? Ermines. I almost got a handful of the hides several years ago, back when Tandy Leather was still around, just for fun. I should have.
**”Just price” applied to goods needed for survival. The community and the Church set the highest price that could be charged for certain foodstuffs. It did not always take into account market realities, but trade and merchendizing had always been somewhat suspect in Christianity. Merchants didn’t add to value, exactly, they just moved things around. Breaking into a warehouse and taking out the vital goods, then leaving the just price for the food taken, was not seen as a crime in the same way as pure theft was, even if the retailer might disagree.
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “How Much for Stew Again?!? Economics in Your Worlds”
One of my references, when it came to mentioning the prices of items in 1840-1860 Texas was Frederick Law Ohlmstead’s account of traveling there – because he mentioned the going price for all kinds of commodities that he encountered constantly.
It’s nice to keep small details based in historical realities.
In the Brother Cadfael mysteries it is pointed out that to the Welsh straight theft is THE crime of crimes, worse than killing someone. I don’t remember which book unfortunately. The English did not agree.
Stealing a man’s goods or tools for his livelihood doomed him and his dependents. Just killing him left something for his family, even it it was very little. You can see something similar in places where horse-theft was a death sentence, as was tool theft, but cattle stealing was punished with jail time.
TX had a law stating that stealing a man’s horse “or other conveyance” justified deadly force. It was on the books until a few years ago when someone was acquitted under it for shooting a repo man.
Pity…
Salt or spices could be weighed and traded, such as the Roman “Salary”. And barter is time honored, too. Work for goods in some cases.
In a fantasy world, the bard might trade entertainment for a couple of hours, for a simple meal and a place to put a bedroll. Or a fighter might chop wood. Or a ranger might bring some fresh meat in to the inn and trade it for cooked food…
Lots of ways to use the barter system, and it’s not based on actual value, but perceived value. Look at food prices in Alaska during the gold rush.
In one of David Drake’s Lord of the Isles books, one of the characters gets punted back in time.
Part of what really sold that bit, was, while in the contemporary period, everyone used coins, in the early age, everything was metals by weight. He patron had given her a solid gold pectoral to sell for its equivalent, and instead of coins, she got back wedges of silver, copper, and even iron.
And every establishment had some form of little scale, some more fair than others.
Which is where the existence of magic / gods makes a difference. In Alma’s Merchants series, those “others” would be discussing things with Maarsdaam of the Roads or M’Lord Scavenger’s temples….. and possibly with the gods directly.
Did they have anything to check for purity?
Have a folk tale: an old blind man came to the smith with gold, saying it was three [units]. The smith saw it was a little more, but agreed it was three, paid him, and made out the receipt. Then he found it was, in fact, lead plated with gold. Angrily, he hauled him before the judge, only for the old man to heft the bag and say he thought it wasn’t his, because it was more than three [units]. It was weighed, it was more, the judge dismissed the case.
I think the gold changer did: I seem to recall he put the pectoral in water to see just how pure the gold was, remarking it was so pure that it was said that merely touching it diminished it.
I don’t recall if the shop keeps did anything specific to test purity. She was only there for probably less than an afternoon. Enough time to make change for the pectoral, eat lunch, and pick up a war chicken as her bodyguard.
His books do tend to be rather event dense.
AD&D openly stated that the prices were greatly inflated — similar to a gold rush — on the grounds that the continual influx of monster hoards produced this. (The purpose was to simultaneously allow impressive hoards and prevent the players being able to buy the world for cash down.)
There was a Roman emperor who succeeded in producing an economic boom by being proud of his victories and issuing a lot of small coins with “[name], you conquer!” This made making change much easier.
Since it’s the end of the day I can make a sideways comment… The fiber world right now has a very peculiar aspect to it. A 7 oz skein of acrylic (not wool) that you buy at … Walmart … can be a relatively cheap $4. Real wool from the same brand might be three times as much – $12. At a fiber festival you can buy 4 oz skeins of hand painted wool yarn (might be 25% nylon) for forty dollars ($40), more or less. Large wool buyers will pay less than a dollar a pound for fleeces and toss them into a great pool of fleeces that is then processed. Or you can sell a fleece at that festival for anywhere between $20 and $150 depending on what kind of sheep and how dirty it got and how soft the fiber is. There’s an insane differential.
The ability to mass process and produce materials makes an enormous difference in per-unit cost. But if you want a specific quality or shade, then things get interesting. When archaeologists tried to recreate an early Iron Age textile, they had to hire a hand-spinner to get the correct twist and sturdiness of the thread for the warp (lengthwise threads). No modern yarn or thread was sturdy enough.
It’s the Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel story, in a way. Also, I spin, and I can’t even now deal with the idea that the fiber for the sails on Columbus’ boat was hand spun. Mind blowing.