I always found oversized money the funniest, myself. I've got this persistent memory of some Germanic or Nordic peoples using stone tablets as an early sort of banknote, with the biggest "denominations" quickly reaching sizes at which "carrying" one's "purse" required several strong men and a stout wagon. Maybe I'm mistaken, though, since the results of a search for "stone money" all seem to relate to "Rai stones
".
===
Regarding my unicornish giraffe, I just came across this beasty
. It has six horns, which admittedly sounds like the wrong sort of trend, but I'm intrigued by its seriously weird skull-shape in general. If something like that can evolve relatively quickly from relatively normally-configured predecessors, then I'm taking that to mean that monoceraffes oughtn't to be particularly far-fetched, either.
edited 14th Sep '12 9:19:23 PM by kassyopeia
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.Evolution produces weird stuff all the time, just look at the naked mole rat or platypus. (Although if i were a platypus, i'd probably be suing everybody for slander and emotional damages all the time) I don't think "too weird" is ever going to be a problem in a story, as long as it doesn't involve something that functionally makes no sense. (like an elephant-sized creature that only feeds on daisies and comes in large herds)
Regarding the large money, keep in mind that carrying around in a purse was not that relevant as it is today. Along with the huge difference in wealth between the classes came huge difference in value of varying coins and notes. The largest not/coin could easily be worth more than everything in a whole village (except the land itself). Even the people who were wealthy enough to have money in such quantities did not need to carry it around, since there is no everyday transaction that requires that kind of cash. That's just for large deals, and if you're purchasing an estate or a boatload of grain or something of similar size, you can take a couple of people along to carry your money. You'd probably want them as guards anyway.
As a swede I also find large coins funny. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copper_currency_in_Sweden
, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_riksdaler
.
I think the largest coin was the 10 daler copper coin weighing 19.7kg(43.43 lb).
But then we invented banknotes.
4
Ah, yes, that must be what I was thinking of earlier. Bronze "coins" instead of stone "banknotes", but otherwise my description was spot-on, wasn't it!
Basically, still as laid out in posts #26 thru #30
. The only aspect I haven't altogether decided on is how money enters circulation, i.e. whether all Builders
with an appropriate skill-set are in effect also Moneyers who have the right to purchase as much antler from the Gatherers as they can get their hands on, and turn it into as many coins as their time allows, or whether there should be some sort of "open minting system
" for the Gatherers to take the antler to instead. I like the latter in that it gives the Gatherers, who take considerable risks in procuring the material, a bigger share of the profit and at the same time the local or regional government some level of control. The again, it introduces additional complexities which I was hoping to avoid - thus the indecision.
It sounds like you need to decide whether you want the antler money to be a kind of shell money
, or a government fiat currency.
Are the governments of your world sophisticated enough to practice monetary policy? Are there legal tender laws?
Having Builders be the moneymakers makes sense to me. Gatherers would still get their share, in the price that they're paid for the antlers. As with all commodities, supply and demand would bring them to a "fair" price.
I don't think it can really be fully compared to shell money any longer once there are prescribed denominations, right? Granted, six-ness is so engrained in the world and the Altlings' minds that nobody would ever dream of questioning whether one coin should be worth some number other than six of the coins of the immediately inferior denomination, so it doesn't take an explicit fiat of any kind to establish that, but it's still something that goes beyond the simple "a shell is a shell, except when it's really big and pretty in which case I want it more" valuation system of Earth's unregulated proto-currencies.
The Altlings' governments, such as they are, are about as unsophisticated as it's possible for them to be while still deserving to be called that. The status quo is fairly idyllic, so most of what they do is simply concerned with maintaining it. Thus, the full extent of their monetary policy would be to pre-empt inflation by refusing to accept all of the antler, or accepting it but then holding back some of the coins, if there ever were a glut, for whatever reason.
I agree that Gatherers would still be compensated if Builders act as Moneyers, but I'm not sure how fair that compensation would be. The basic idea behind antler (or some such) as the raw material was that this would be the principal way of compensating the Gatherers for risking their lives every time they venture forth into the wilderness, while the members of the other five vocations stay at home where it's safe. The only other comparably dangerous occupation is the Troopers', and since there are far fewer of those than there are Gatherers, they automatically get compensated in terms of the higher status (and attendant fringe benefits) that that brings with it. I'm thinking that if the split between suppliers of antler and manufacturers of coin were left entirely to supply and demand economics, it might well end up mirroring the relative amounts of time that those two activities consume, which likely leaves the Builders with the dreadnought's share* of the profits.
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light."Proto-currency", that's a good term. I was looking for a term to describe that kind of system, and shell money was the closest I could come up with, even though not ever example uses shells.
I think that set denominations could exist in a proto-currency. The exchange rate could be established by custom and tradition.
I don't really think an 'unsophisticated' government would worry about inflation. Probably the people who would think about things like that would be the Dealers, and they would probably adapt by storing their wealth in another form rather than petitioning the government. The prevailing school of thought in modern times is that a little inflation is a good thing, since it encourages people to spend and invest their money rather than hoarding it. There are definitely people who disagree, of which I include myself, but that is the idea behind modern monetary policy.
Another question is whether or not a banking system exists. If not, there's even less reason to worry about inflation. People have two options to store their money: hoarding cash or buying other things. If everyone hoards their cash, that's going to remove a lot of money from circulation by itself, especially as people die before they have a chance to tell their heirs where the hoard is buried. If everyone puts their savings into land, treasures, slaves, etc, then they won't be affected by inflation.
The gatherers would set the price as a collective. The price of antler could go no lower than the lowest price for which a gatherer is willing to risk his life. The less the builders pay, the more gatherers will eschew deer hunting and gather something else to sell. Thus, a builder who wants to buy antler would have to keep upping his bid until a gatherer accepts it.
I like this explanation for the price of gold from The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre
- Howard: A thousand men, say, go searchin' for gold. After six months, one of them's lucky: one out of a thousand. His find represents not only his own labor, but that of nine hundred and ninety-nine others to boot. That's six thousand months, five hundred years, scramblin' over a mountain, goin' hungry and thirsty. An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the findin' and the gettin' of it.
I'm assuming that when you talked about an open-minting system, you mean that the government would fix the minting fees below what the market would pay. If a gatherer took his antler to a builder to be carved on a private basis, the proportions of their share would be affected by the same market forces that would affect the price of purchasing antler.
Price-fixing usually makes things worse, resulting in either shortages or surplus, but I suppose in this case it would work since the value of antler-money is artificial in the first place. However, this would essentially mean that the government is subsidizing deer-hunting, which is contrary to the goal of controlling inflation. They'd be paying a premium for antler, then storing it in warehouses to keep it out of circulation.
That's if they chose the option to control inflation by holding back coin. If they refuse some of the antler, that completely destroys the idea of being fair to the gatherers. Gatherers would come back from these deadly hunts only to find out they can't sell their antler at any price.
I just had a thought regarding taxes. In a world with as strong of a caste system like yours and a simple government, it seems like taxes could be paid in the labor of the castes. Only dealers would pay in coin. Peasants would pay in food, gatherers would pay in antler, builders would build infrastructure and monuments, and maybe some weapons for the army, troopers would serve in the army*, clerics would preside over state festivals, and maybe engage in some charity work. Basically a variation of a palace economy
.
I don't remember what point I was trying to make.
But hopefully that gives you something to think about.
- Which would be unpaid. They'd support themselves through loot or by taking jobs as bodyguards and bouncers and such in peacetime.
I guess you're right. I was thinking that the higher "denominations" in a proto-currency would have to be things that are either of genuinely higher utilitarian value (a cow versus a chicken) or more desirable for other, less tangible, reasons, like being "prettier" as I suggested above in cases in which money is something that doubles up as openly worn decorations, as was often the case for beads and suchlike. The only real difference between my coins is that the coronets and cusps are rarer than the cents. But that may already be enough to create that sense of increased desirability. After all, the valuation of precious metal currencies is just as abstract (on the demand side, I mean, the added value on the supply side is very real, as your quote illustrates), and there definitely were unregulated currency sytems on that footing.
I was thinking they might do the "right thing" (prevent inflation) for the wrong reason (without having any conceptual understanding of what inflation does), simply because of their hidebound "everything is as it should be, so let's make sure nothing changes" mentality.
Definitely not. Being a banker would not be seen as a productive use of one's time, and that's one of the few things Altlings are rather intolerant to. I suppose Dealers could engage in some baking-related activities, like "transferring" money from one location to another, as a secondary activity, which could parallel Dealers who spend most of their time carving genuinely useful implements from ivory, say, making antler money during the remainder.
The only way a full-fledged banking system could come into existence here would be via a religious association, as was more or less the case in Rome, from what I understand - the Mint and the temple of the goddess (Juno) Moneta
were actually the same building, which illustrates that linkage quite concinvingly.
And I currently don't see any reason or need to create such an association, so, no banks on the horizon.
Yes, Madrugada brought up the hoarding issue somewhere upthread already. I claimed there wouldn't be any, but having read about the many hoards of ancient Chinese coins in the meantime, have changed my mind to some degree. Still, the average Altling would consider having more money than one can comfortably carry around to be eccentric at best. Much more sensible to invest most of it in one's livelihood, or at least spend it on something of real utility and value, like high-quality implements and clothes. Our (antiquated) fascination with simply owning a treasure chest full of gold coins should be barely comprehensible to them, ideally.
Exactly. That's the point, the system should reward the risk taken in more than just an economic sense, somehow.
Essentially these would be subsidies, yes, but I don't think the results would be those you outline. Gatherers already hunt as many deer as they can manage. Giving them a better price isn't going to make them hunt more, it's just going to make them wealthier relative to the other vocations. And usually, none of the antler would be stored, the government would merely have that option if for some reason there's a short-term excess of it around. The only reason for that happening I can think of, at the moment, is a Black Year
.
Not quite, since they can always sell antler to Builders as a raw material for things other than coins. That would fetch somewhat less than having it minted, but it'd still put them on an even footing with e.g. a Peasant who slaughters an Ellefant and sells the tusks to that same Builder.
Since, as I said above, the only circumstance I can currently conceive of that could bring about a significant excess of antler would be some environmental disaster causing a mass death of deer, the extra antler would not involve any additional risk to the Gatherers, so this does not seem unfair to me.
Either way, most of the "beam" of each antler isn't going to be turned into cents anyway (cf again post #26
), so Gatherers will already be used to the moneyers or mint only taking part of it off their hands. Inflation-control measures would simply mean that some of the end-bits that would normally be turned into cusps and coronets are refused as well.
Yes, that's how it works in my head, too. At the steading-level (village-level), it's even less formal - there are a few Elect who run things, like a Chief and his assistant/designated successor and perhaps a separate Chief Peasant, and the villagers simply provide them with everything they need to live very comfortably in appreciation for their doing a good job. If they do a bad job, nobody gives them anything, so they'll probably want to retire of their own accord and go back to being whatever they were before they were Elected, rather than having to go through some sort of formal (or violent) impeachment procedure. At the league-level (town-level/regional level), the system of taxation, such as it is, is little more than a somewhat bureaucratized version of the steading system.
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.One question about the "preventing inflation" thing though: would they actually have any idea of the concept? And even if the had, would they care? Inflation is not something cultures paid a lot of attention to until after the mercantilist era (or any sort of sophisticated economics). Compare for example that the single biggest contributor to britain getting the largest empire in history was that the spanish economy was completely ruined by all the gold imported from south america. So, i agree with Topazan that a tribal or medieval government wouldn't worry about inflation, heck they normally wouldn't even have a clear understanding of it. Even dealers wouldn't so much think in terms of inflation but more in terms of fluctuating market prices. Also keep in mind that in that sort of society, money supply is not necessarily the biggest factor determining coin value. Extraneous factors affecting the state or whole region are usually far more important. For example a drought that skyrockets food prices will completely drown out (heh) any noticeable effect of inflation on prices, or if a conflict with another feudal state seems likely, and likely to be lost, foreign traders would try to dump any of the currency they have before it can be invalidated by the state being conquered (driving down value).
It kind of ties in again with my previous comments about money not actually being used that much. If you have, as we have today, a huge network of traders accepting the same currency, that stabilizes it greatly. One grocer cannot simply decide to devalue it on his own because people can just go to one two corners further down the road. But the less traders you have involved the more volatile and arbitrary the value of the currency becomes. If there's not millions of actors in financial transactions everyday but only thousands, and maybe only three or less banks, then that's a very different situation.
edited 28th Sep '12 7:30:05 AM by McKitten
As I said in ![]()
(second paragraph from the top), they wouldn't have to understand inflation to prevent it, that would just be a natural outgrowth of their cultural conditioning. Then again, maybe I should take your repeating Topazan's point as a strong hint that I should just stop worrying about this aspect.
I can see why they would need to be subsidized. A group that continues doing the same work even if no one pays them isn't going to have much bargaining power.
edited 28th Sep '12 11:51:05 AM by Topazan
I can see why they would need to be subsidized. A group that continues doing the same work even if no one pays them isn't going to have much bargaining power.
Bother, now I'm going to have to actually explain some of the deeper background, which I somehow managed to avoid so far. Ah well.
The Altlings' economy is collectivist rather than capitalist for the most part. By which I mean that most of the time, people in all vocations work for the common good rather than for personal profit. Illustrative scenario: The Chief Builder of a village decides one day that several new roundhouses need to be built. The walls of those houses are made from adobete (short for adobe-concrete) bricks which consist of clay, sand, dung, and a certain type of tree resin that makes it much more durable than ordinary adobe. To get all of these, they simply tell the other vocation Chiefs that they need them, and they in turn tell some of their lower-rank vocationers to go get them. So, a team of gatherers might be sent to the nearby clay pit to get a boatload of clay. A team of dealers might be sent out to trade something the village does have an excess of (more clay, perhaps) for sand, which it does not. The dung comes from the peasants' mammoth herds, of course. And getting the resin is a job for a second team of gatherers. In "return" for doing this, some of the villagers get to live in the new houses. And partake in the communal meals. And ask a builder to make them new tools if their old ones break. And so on. Except that the Altlings don't think of the one as being in "return" for the other, but of both as being part of the natural order of things. This overlaps significantly with what you suggested about taxes above, needless to say.
It's during the remainder of their time that people are free to work for money, and it's only for things beyond the communally provided necessities that the money they thus earn is needed for. This is what I meant when I said that "gatherers already hunt as many deer as they can manage": When they aren't doing some unpaid errant or not working at all, they mainly go hunt deer, because that's their best source of disposable income. The meat can be sold, since game is considered a luxury item and so doesn't go into the common pot (except for seasonal feasts, perhaps), the antler can be sold or even directly minted, the skins... I dunno, mammoth hides might be a bit too tough to use as leather in some cases, so deer leather might be considered an essential and thus still be requisitioned. Anyway, there might very occasionally be other things for a gatherer to do that are even more worthwhile, but generally, hunting deer will be it.
On the one hand, a typical Altling doesn't quite have the same mindset as a typical human. Doing something that would benefit themselves at the cost of harming the community, or even something that simply contravenes religious strictures or secular customs, causes them considerably more moral qualms than it does us. So, for the vast majority of cases, Builders simply wouldn't dream of doing any such thing.
On the other hand, the penalty for breaking this kind of law would be social ostracism. On the face of it, that wouldn't be quite as bad as being outlawed was in Medieval Europe, because nobody would actually try to physically harm the perpetrator. But materially and emotionally, it would probably be worse, exactly because ordinary village life is that much more communal than was the case here. The emotional impact may even be serious enough to cause deteriorating health or, in extreme cases, death by nocebo
.
On the third hand, the best way I can currently think of to make coins harder to counterfeit would be to colour them with a rare pigment that's not used for anything else. That way, the criminal builder would have to conspire with at least one other person, a gatherer, to obtain that ingredient. In a society in which criminal tendencies are as rare as the previous two hands outline, such a conspiracy would be exceedingly difficult to arrange, it seems to me.
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.If the gatherer's basic needs are taken care of by the village, there's no reason they need to gather antler if the reward they're offered isn't worth the risk. When the price of antler is low, they could spend their time in leisure, training, or ritual.
Still, if the society is that traditional, the price could be set by custom, like "the gatherer gets 9 coins for every shill the builder makes."
I'd imagine if the government you described was determined to control inflation to keep things the same, they'd do so with price controls rather than monetary policy.
edited 29th Sep '12 1:04:50 PM by Topazan
Indeed. Towards that end, the best approach would be an ordinarily open mint that closes down completely when an excess of antler is detected. That would make gatherers quit risking their lives for something that's not currently needed right away, instead of the gradual decline in supply that would result from a gradual decline in prices offered by Builders.
Yes, that's what I had in mind either way. Even easier would be to give one or two of the three types of coins to one party and the other one or two to the other. As in, the customary price of or fee for minting one antler would be a coronet, or all the cusps, or something like that.
Why? Isn't that the more complicated and more disruptive approach?
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.I was trying to say that the risk involved in gathering the antler would be built into the market price at some level, but your society is clearly not a free market driven one, so it doesn't matter. I'm just saying, if you want to have a currency that the government doesn't control at all, it can be feasible.
That sounds like a good way of doing it.
I feel like I'm not giving enough credit to the intelligence of ancient people, but I'm basing this assumption on my mmorpg days. When people saw prices were going up there would be some who would say, "The crafters have gotten so greedy! And merchants are driving up the price by buying items then selling them for a higher price! Why don't the G Ms crack down on this behavior that's ruining the economy?" It took some patience to explain to them that what was ruining the economy was that everyone was constantly pulling sacks of gold out of dead monsters and had very little to spend it on.
Is easy to imagine that in a traditional society the idea could arise that X is "supposed" to be worth Y, so anyone charging more is wrong.
I guess the real question I have is how do they measure inflation to know when to cut back?
Good point, that. Any method of "counting money" seems ridiculously complicated compared to simply going to the league market and seeing what things cost this season. Let me try and think things through from that angle.
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.If they over hunt and create to much money, they will also lower the total number of money animal in the wild. This would make them harder to find/track and at some point people would start to hunt something else instead.
This means that they can only make X money per year if they want to keep a stable population of money animal. The loss of money would probably be percental over the total amount of money in circulation.
If they create 1000 money/year, and around 0.1% of the money get lost per year the total number of money in circulation would stabilize around 1,000,000.
edited 30th Sep '12 2:06:06 AM by m8e
Hah, those are bases I already covered earlier on in the thread. Overhunting isn't even a theoretical option, since my humanoids aren't actually the apex predators of their ecosystem once they enter the wilderness.
I did the calculations of the amount of money in circulation at a given time in posts #21 and following
.
ps: In English, the adjective derived from "percent" is "percental", apparently (it's not my first language either; had to look that up). I've never seen it used though, so one would presumably express this idea in different terms - simply "fractional", perhaps?
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.Anyway my point was that the change in the money animal population could stabilize the money(inflation).
Doesn't actually have to be overhunting. A bad crop year could also lower the number(population density) of these animals as they also get less food. If the price of potatoes or whatever goes up the price of coins does it too.
On bad years people would probably also hunt easier prey which strengthens the value of money by pretty much the same amount as the price for food. The price of other things can then be connected to the price of food.
In other words the price of horn would always be X and X can pretty much always buy Y kg of potatoes, W liters of breew etc. But on bad year when the price of food would go up they hunt rabbits or whatever and sell the meat/furs instead because on those years it takes more time to catch a money animal.
edited 30th Sep '12 3:09:26 AM by m8e

The funniest currency i know of were cocoa beans in south america. (while they used gold as wallpaper)
An interesting thing about currency based on material value (which it was when minting rights got sold) is that it can actually still be valued slightly more than the pure material. Even if a coin represents not much more than a certified amount of valuable metal, getting one from a known mint, as opposed to just a raw nugget of silver or gold, means an assurance that it really does contain the claimed amount of gold/silver, saving the one accepting the coin the hassle to test that himself. (Which is annoying, since you need to measure both mass and density to be sure, and at least mass and solubility for a quick&dirty test)
This also allowed some early currency trading, since two types of coins might be valued differently even though both are nominally the same weight&metal.