Mar 15, 2010

What is worth? part 2/?

Continued from the first part

Now that I have the outlines of how the economy works, I need to work out how much everything is worth. Let's start from the farmer: How much is the net-worth of farmer's produce? Let's say that it's 10 bweepers/day spread over the entire year(I'll just assume that year is 365 days, for now. I may change that later). How much of that goes to himself and his family as food? In a village probably 2/3 people are farmers and their families(who also help running the farms), there's a smith, a major, a healer/magic user and the rest are hunters. In a village there's between 100 and 300 people total, averaging about 200. In a city, on the other hand, there are no farmers. How many capita/city? Considering technology level and limitations of caves, a reasonable number would be...I actually have no idea.

Hmm. Apparently a typical medieval city had about 300 000 inhabitants. Considering the limitations of caves(you can only have so much empty space in a limited volume without risking cave-ins, even with supporting structures. Of course the amount is bigger relative to volume close to surface(how deep do the caves extend? And how close to the surface will there be cities? what about villages? Yet more things I'll need to figure out. The more answers I figure out, the more questions there are), I think the number will have to be drastically lower. 50 000? That should be good enough approximation for now(I'll probably need to make another post about this sometime. Luckily the number isn't really vital for now(which begs the question why I just spent about quarter hour trying to figure it out), so I don't have to do that now).

So, a village has about 200 inhabitants, city 50 000 and there are 100 villages to one city. That means the amount of farmers to everyone else is about 100*133:100*67+50 000 or 13 300:56 700 (which rounds to about 1:4). Hmm. Even considering hunters(which will number around 7 000) the number of food producers is pretty low. Less than 40% of the total population. I'm not an expert on medieval economics, but that seems pretty low. Of course, there's magic involved in the equation, but it shouldn't effect the food production. Or should it?

half hour later...
After throughout research I finally stumbled upon this wikipedia article, which indicates that peasants could live with only 20% of their produce or less. So the numbers seem to be just fine.

Now, where was I...Oh, right. So an average peasant produces 10 bweepers of value per day. Since there is 4 other people who also need farm products, he uses 2 bweepers worth of that himself. That means that he gets to sell those 8 bweepers worth. Boy, is he going to be rich! That's almost 6 thrones a year(5.84, to be exact)! Yeah, right. I bet he doesn't even know what a throne looks like. Tune in next time to see what happens to all that money.

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