OH RIGHT that's where that paragraph was going, re: rural vs urban, along the lines of that Coerthas leve.
Money gets its value from your ability to get things with it. The universality of its value today is a product of the reliability of trade networks; you can count on being able to go to the store and exchange $$$ for goods, because they can count on being able to exchange that $$$ to their suppliers for goods, and so on down the line. At the root of it, the value of money reflects confidence in the physical availability of goods.
So, if for whatever reason people aren't confident in their ability to trade a certain kind of coin for Stuff, the value of the coin dives. In the Coerthas example, these rural Coerthan towns can't eat or wear gil - it's a commodity for trading with merchants to get goods they can't produce on their own. Problem is that the snows have fucked up trade routes, so the presence of these merchants is unreliable, and bam presto, taking gil instead of barter is a gamble because it might not get you what you need. The value of gil dives.
And here's where I was going - I would imagine that other frontier-like locations in Eorzea have something similar going on (though not to the same extent as poor Coerthas), where it's common for people to be resource-rich and cash-poor because money isn't super crucial to trade within a small village, just for getting goods from elsewhere. Ever read a fairy tale where grandma pulls a few dusty coins out from under the bed and tells grandkid to go to the city and buy medicine/whatever? Yeah.
Something worth thinking on if you play a character from a remote area.
Money gets its value from your ability to get things with it. The universality of its value today is a product of the reliability of trade networks; you can count on being able to go to the store and exchange $$$ for goods, because they can count on being able to exchange that $$$ to their suppliers for goods, and so on down the line. At the root of it, the value of money reflects confidence in the physical availability of goods.
So, if for whatever reason people aren't confident in their ability to trade a certain kind of coin for Stuff, the value of the coin dives. In the Coerthas example, these rural Coerthan towns can't eat or wear gil - it's a commodity for trading with merchants to get goods they can't produce on their own. Problem is that the snows have fucked up trade routes, so the presence of these merchants is unreliable, and bam presto, taking gil instead of barter is a gamble because it might not get you what you need. The value of gil dives.
And here's where I was going - I would imagine that other frontier-like locations in Eorzea have something similar going on (though not to the same extent as poor Coerthas), where it's common for people to be resource-rich and cash-poor because money isn't super crucial to trade within a small village, just for getting goods from elsewhere. Ever read a fairy tale where grandma pulls a few dusty coins out from under the bed and tells grandkid to go to the city and buy medicine/whatever? Yeah.
Something worth thinking on if you play a character from a remote area.
