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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 3693634" data-attributes="member: 1645">If you compute how much a peasant's labor is worth over his productive lifespan, and you subtract out the cost of (poorly) feeding and housing him -- and you discount those future cash flows -- then you have effectively the price of a slave or the value of a serf in that economy.I think we need to accept that a medieval pre-industrial economy bears little resemblance to a modern post-industrial economy.For most of human history, the average person produced a few hundred dollars worth of goods and services over the course of a year -- as in Africa today or most of Asia or Latin America 50 or 100 years ago.  A tiny, tiny fraction of the population skimmed off the top of all that labor to live in relative splendor but absolute poverty by our standards.  The one thing they could afford was lots and lots of servants, since labor was so cheap.Anyway, we would do better to look at one silver piece as closer to one or two dollars, but to realize that the average person only makes that much per day, while the aristocracy "makes" orders of magnitude more.  The average person can't afford much of anything -- most people are malnourished and live in hovels -- so the monetary economy caters only to the wealthy upper classes who make a show of spending money and demonstrating their status.</blockquote>