Goods & Services

[Ali the Helering]

51 minutes ago, Brootse said:

Diocletian's Edict of prices most certainly didn't "bring the Roman empire to the brink of total collapse". It didn't fix the rampant inflation, and caused some economic distubance, and then was ignored. But for a very short period of time it showed the approximate prices of some goods and services. If we use the untrained worker's daily wage as the baseline -25 denarii + upkeep of about 8 denarii- we can divide the denarii prices with 330 to get RQG Lunar prices.

Some examples of the prices. A Roman cow was worth 5 Roman sheep, while in Dragon Pass the rate is 6.67 sheep per cow. But the Roman cows would have been cheaper for an untrained worker, costing only 60 days of work, compared to the 200 days of work for the Dragon Pass worker. The prices for male slaves are quite similar, 909 and 1000 days of work.

Pick your ancient economic source and go with it.  Those I think make most sense treat the explosion of the black and grey markets in response to the Price Edict as destroying what little remained of the frail stability of Imperial economics.  It was ignored because the damage had been done. 

The prices are a snapshot of the idealised prices desired by the powers that were. Interesting, but theoretical. 

The West Wing had an excellent episode which displayed distancing from the economic realities, as President and Staff are ignorant of the price of milk!