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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6495797" data-attributes="member: 4937">With that I can totally agree.  Even more so, the sophistication with which we can discuss economics and the understanding demonstrated here is something completely beyond medieval ability to elucidate.  Some of them might have 'got it' intuitively, or had complicated and round about ways to talk about it, but for the most part they just didn't have the language to talk about purchasing power parity or the insight to see coin as a commodity.  Medieval economic systems were tumultuous in ways that we'd find really strange.  The custom of having 1 silver piece be the wage of a laborer, was something designed to bring stability to a chaotic system, and dated back into antiquity.  But at the time, they would have thought about this as if the silver was something inherently valuable, and thus reliable and desirable to have.  The idea that the price of silver itself could change, or that the silver was only valuable because it represented a day's labor, wasn't something likely to occur to them - often with disastrous results.  To understand how this lack of understanding impacted society, it's useful to consider the economic turmoil that resulted when drastically different economies suddenly got brought together - most notably the extreme case of the paleolithic North America meeting the early modern Europe.  When this happens, we see seemingly bizarre economic transactions occurring where it is clear to us that one side is getting cheated even though a free exchange is being made and no 'con' is taking place in the normal sense because the cheated party in this case knew exactly what they were buying.  What they didn't know, and couldn't grasp, is that they were really buying and selling labor at grossly unequal rates.  What they valued in terms of their own labor, was virtually valueless to the other side of the transaction in terms of their labor.  The price of a commodity had drastically changed, and one side hadn't yet realized it.  Both sides thought they were making a profitable transaction.Hopefully, if we ever find ourselves orbited by aliens wanting to do some commodity exchange, we keep this in mind.</blockquote>

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