Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 5692594" data-attributes="member: 54707">I think it would depend greatly upon the  particular setting you are running, and what the various cultures are like  within that setting.  For instance my milieu is set in our world, circa  800 AD.  However wealth and wealth standards in Ravenna or  in Constantinople are very very different from wealth standards in most of  Cappadocia, in Bulgaria, or in Germany, or Ireland.  Constantinople is the richest city in the world at  that time and has a very well developed middle class, as well as wealthy  merchant and trade classes. Some countries and some areas are mostly peasant, or  maybe even pre-feudalistic.  Some areas are extremely well developed and quite  wealthy (given the overall standards of the time, Alexandria for instance is  quite well off) and some areas entirely rural or frontier and almost completely  barbaric and undeveloped and have no sense of wealth in our modern sense of the  term at all.  For some kings a few herds of livestock is  equivalent to great wealth, and to the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire he can  sometimes afford to wage war against the Persians almost entirely out of his own  coffers.   To villagers along the Nile a fishing boat brings  in a decent living, to a merchant in Italy he might possess a small fleet of  trading vessels.  It's like comparing the incomes of modern  Americans to the average income of tribal peoples along the Congo. Ideas of  wealth and assets vary enormously.  However I'm not saying your thread idea isn't an  instructive and useful exercise.   I'm just saying that the various cultures within a  world would have very different rates of exchange and very different ideas about  wealth.   To me though the way I define these things in my  settings is this:  Poor: for the most part the poor  do not or cannot or are not allowed to accumulate assets or capital. Much less  income. Their chance for either economic or social advancement is slim to  none.  Middle Class: in well developed  societies these people can and often do accumulate assets and capital and can  even enjoy some range of social mobility. In very well developed societies merit  may even allow them to rise to the top. Justinian's wife was a former actress,  meaning she was also a prostitute. Yet she was also smart and talented and so  rose to become Empress.  Rich: the rich possess assets  that can be exchanged for money or capital and more often than not they possess  assets which provide an income (in the real and original sense of the world  income, meaning they don't have to actually work for it). In other words, often  through inheritance or grant or title, they possess investments which create  more capital over time. The middle class may have assets but make their capital  by working or trading for it, only in rare cases of very powerful individuals in  the middle class does anyone possess investments which provide a real income.  They also tend to war, fight, and kill to gain possession of other assets and  sources of capital, rather than compete at trade or business for an income (and  that income may or may not be money-based).   So I think of it this way: the poor are those with  no real assets, except basic survival goods, no businesses, trades, or advanced  skills of their own, the middle class has skills and training and businesses of  their own but all of their assets are made by work, not by income, and the  wealthy possess both capital and investments which produce more capital and  additional assets over time.   Money is (mostly) a very modern idea in the sense  of everyone having and getting and keeping money (if they so wish). Wealth was  rarely measured as money to most people in the world for most of world history.  So money is a sort of fantasy overlay on a fantasy idea in a fantasy  game.  In all likelihood most anywhere you went, even if  it were to Constantinople, the poor would be unskilled workers with no  assets and no capital (other than subsistence and survival levels  possessions). The middle class would be middle class because they  possessed useful skills or ran businesses. The wealthy would be wealthy because  they had income and investments and capital.  It'd be about that simple: you had nothing you're  poor. You had a (trade) skill or a business, you're middle class. You had  capital and income and investments (not as we think of as investments now a days,  but mostly holdings, titles, grants, and privileges - such as freedom from  paying taxes) and you're wealthy. That's how it would work most places, in  general. And that would be true in the West, East, Africa, Middle East, or just about  anywhere you could get to. The same basic ideas of no assets (poor), trade  (middle class), and income (wealthy) would apply.  It wouldn't be much like our modern system of both  financial and social mobility which is based around money. Wealth in a fantasy  setting, if that were also based on anything like the typical idea of a more Medieval or post Roman  world would have very different measurements for wealth and  poverty.Money wouldn't determine wealth so much as money would be one of the symptoms of wealth, or the lack thereof.</blockquote>

Verification