How boned is the Westeros Economy?

You know the funny thing about wars? A lot of people die fighting them. You know the funny thing about Westeros? They fight a lot of wars there. The lore of the Targaryen dynasty is basically just them burning down half a continent and then putting down a series of rebellions from people who didn't like them doing that until they were finally overthrown. And a lot of sibling love. Then the new king was such a monumental failure that there were two more major rebellions during his reign, one of which got him assassinated by his own wife and spiraled into a multifaceted civil war wherein five different men declared themselves to be king and then they ravaged the countryside and the whole fiasco took over seven seasons to finally come to an end. But that's not important. The really important thing to wonder is how much did this damage the economy? With cities being sacked and hamlets being burned down left, right, and center, the market must be in a real tizzy. Investments are up in flames, tax revenue is in free fall, and who knows how everyone's 401K is doing after the Night King forced half the north into an early retirement. Things are terrible and they will continue to be terrible for the foreseeable future. Make that my campaign slogan. War isn't the only issue though. The Seven Kingdoms were kind of set up to fail what with their feudal rent-seeking. And now that Bran the Broken is king, he has a very long and difficult road ahead of him. Speaking of which, let's have a word from this video's sponsor, Hungry Minds. Do you like books? You're watching my channel so you probably do. So today I'm here to tell you about a very special book. It's called The Book, The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization. This isn't a regular book. This is a captivating illustrated encyclopedia of humanity's greatest discoveries and inventions. It's the size of my torso and over 400 pages long. It covers everything from medicine to sailing to electricity and military matters. Every page is full of beautiful artwork and fascinating information about the world. No matter what topics interest you, you'll find something to like about this. It's not just a history or a science book. It's a magnificent and aesthetically pleasing work of art. There's even an ARG in there, a real treasure hunt with clues hidden in the book, and you're just going to have to read it yourself if you want to find out what I mean by that. I'll give you a single hint though. Look for the symbols. Check out The Book here for 10% off using this link. The Book, The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization by Hungry Minds is a luxury coffee table book packed with handmade illustrations and mind-expanding ideas. If you're into unique gifts, premium books, or just love going down rabbit holes, this one's for you. So, the first hint that something is wrong in Westeros is their money. According to Ser Duncan the Tall, around the time of the hedge knight, three gold dragons is enough for a common person to live a good life for about 1 year. And that gives us a general idea for how much their money is worth. In the United States, in order to be considered solidly middle class, you have to have a household income of about $56,000 per year. Although this number does change a lot depending on how you measure it. Please note that a peasant in a pseudo-medieval setting would have fewer things to pay for than a modern person. They would have to pay for food, shelter, and vengeance on their enemies, but they weren't shelling out for a Netflix subscription. So, three gold dragons a year is probably less than $56,000 per year. But in Game of Thrones, which takes place around 90 years later, Sandor Clegane wins 40,000 gold dragons in a single tournament, and he spends pretty much all of it on wine and ladies of the evening. So, all that money is gone only about a year and a half later. Did he really spend enough money to live a good life for 13,000 years in only 18 months? How did he do that? But it gets even stranger. At the same tourney, Petyr Baelish makes a bet with Renly for 100 gold dragons. And he says for 100 gold dragons, he could buy a dozen barrels of Dornish wine or a night with an expensive prostitute from Lys. >> Now, what will I buy with 100 gold dragons? A dozen barrels of Dornish wine or a girl from the pleasure houses of Lys. >> One night with a high-class lady costs enough for a person to live a good life for over 30 years. Based on previous estimates, that would be around 1.6 million dollars. Even a wealthy nobleman couldn't pay that much. The only way that would make sense is if there had been some sort of massive inflation over the past 90 years. And some of you may be thinking, James, my guy, George R.R. Martin doesn't mean all of this literally. As an author, he frequently uses dramatic irony and unreliable narrators as a storytelling tool. So, many aspects of the story and setting are up to interpretation. Expecting the numbers to add up is a fool's errand. Just go off of vibes and you'll be much happier. To them I say, shut up, normie. This video is for pedantic nerds. So, if the currency is less valuable than it used to be, why is that? One possible explanation is that the currency has been debased, meaning that there's less gold in them than there used to be. It might be because there are other metals being mixed in with the gold or maybe the coins themselves are just smaller than they used to be. This is possible, but I can't find any evidence in the text to support this. So, the explanation would seem to just be straight-up inflation, something that absolutely none of us are familiar with. In the modern world, we have what's called fiat currency, which isn't attached to anything. Central banks can, in theory, print as much or as little as they need to to maintain a healthy economy. When things are slow, they print more. When things are heating up too much, they print less to avoid high inflation. Currency in Westeros is coins of precious metal, silver, gold, and copper. Inflation and deflation do exist for currencies of precious metals, it just works differently than it does for fiat currency. The value of gold and silver does go up and down, their values are just subject to different forces. Broadly speaking, capitalist economies are designed to grow and expand constantly, like a cancer cell. And as the economy grows, the supply of money needs to grow as well in order to facilitate more transactions. If the economy grows faster than the supply of money, then the value of money goes up and you get deflation. Deflation means that the value of the currency is going up and that means that prices go down. In the short term, deflation is good for consumers because it means that the value of their wages is going up. However, this encourages them to save money instead of spending it, which means businesses aren't making any money. In other words, it slows the entire economy. And given time, that causes depression, and then everyone loses their jobs, which causes a different kind of depression. If the opposite happens, where the supply of money grows faster than the economy, you get inflation. The advantage of gold is that there's a finite supply of it. You don't need to worry about a central bank printing too much money and devaluing it. Right? There is more gold constantly entering the Westerosi economy though, from the Westerlands, the holdings of the Lannisters. The Lannisters have been in charge of the Westerlands for thousands of years and they've been mining gold and silver the entire time, making them very wealthy. As they mine more and more gold, the supply of currency gets larger. There aren't more goods and services to spend that money on though, and since population growth is glacial in a world without modern medicine, there aren't more people spending it. This means that there's more money chasing after the same amount of goods and services, which means that the cost of those goods and services is going to rise. This happened to Spain in the 16th century. They conquered most of the Americas, then they mined a bunch of gold and silver very cheaply and brought it over to Europe. All the people who used to own that gold and silver just handed it over. That was nice of them. This expansion of the money supply caused inflation and raised the price of basically all goods and services, which made things like war much more expensive. The Spanish crown had to take out massive loans at very high interest rates and eventually it was unable to fulfill its obligations and it went bankrupt. This got so bad that Emperor Charles V abdicated the throne and let everyone else deal with the consequences of his bad decisions. What a nice guy. This contagion spread to the rest of Western Europe, too. Inflation was everywhere. Although in their defense, they didn't really understand economics the way we do today, nor did they have the proper tools to deal with it. The point is a sudden influx of wealth can, paradoxically, crash the economy if it's not handled correctly. The Lannisters' source of wealth, the mines of Casterly Rock, is slowly strangling the rest of the continent. Somehow they managed to print more money without a money printer. And during the reign of King Robert, the realm was put into serious debt, around 6 million dragons worth. So he was bringing in a lot of money from outside places and spending it mostly in King's Landing and the Crownlands. That means inflation was probably worse there than it was in the rest of the country. So when Petyr Baelish says that 100 gold dragons buys a lot less than it used to, he might only be referring to the capital region. The problem might not be as bad elsewhere. In fact, based on what we see in the books, that's exactly what happened. Salladhor Saan charges Stannis Baratheon 30,000 dragons per month to hire his 24 ships, meaning 30,000 dragons is enough to pay for hundreds of sailors as well as all their provisions and have some profit left over for Saan himself afterwards. I guess gold just has more value in Essos than it does in Westeros. Remember, international trade in this world is very limited. The only things that Westeros would be buying from abroad would be luxury goods for some of the nobility and the occasional sellsword, which means most of the gold being mined at Casterly Rock is not leaving the domestic economy. Whatever the reasons for it, there does appear to be very bad inflation throughout the Seven Kingdoms. However, according to Tywin Lannister in season 4 episode 5 of the TV show, the Lannisters' last gold mine has run dry. >> Our last working mine run dry 3 years ago. >> This is bad for the Lannisters, but good for everybody else. Could the problem sort itself out in time? I doubt it. Let's look at Sandor Clegane's budget for his 40,000 dragons. Could he really have spent all that money in so little time? King's Landing is the largest city in the Seven Kingdoms and something of a hub for international trade. So, if you want to buy something, it can probably be found there. There are probably ladies of the evening that cost to the equivalent of several thousand dollars per night. I am not going to research that for a YouTube video, though. My browser history is suspicious enough as it is. I'm just I'm just going off of vibes and guesswork here. So, let's just say that if Clegane spent money on that every day for 18 months, he could probably spend about 6,000 dragons on it. Again, I'm just going on vibes here. He would still have 34,000 gold dragons left, enough to hire 24 ships for an entire month, apparently. If 100 gold dragons buys a dozen barrels of Dornish wine, then that means each barrel costs approximately 8.33 gold dragons, which means that the Hound's remaining 34,000 dragons would buy 4,081 barrels of wine. So, unless he was drinking 7.44 barrels of wine a day, he must have spent that money on something else. Or, the prices went substantially higher during the War of Five Kings, and that's the most likely explanation. But, why did the prices go so high? In a word, shortages. Supply and demand are the ultimate drivers of price in any sort of market. When there's less of something, but the demand stays the same, the price will go up. Everything in a feudal economy ultimately derives from the labor of the common folk. With half the country on fire, peasants are producing fewer things like, you know, food. They're also producing fewer luxury goods like Dornish wine. This means that the price of all those goods is going to go up. And with bandits everywhere, transporting these goods is also going to become a lot more difficult and dangerous and therefore more expensive. Robert's Rebellion, in which the Targaryen dynasty was overthrown, took place approximately 17 years before the War of Five Kings began, and that was a big war. Look at this map that shows how spread out the notable battles were geographically. They were fought in the veil, the riverlands, the stormlands, and the crownlands. Every single one of those battles involved thousands of soldiers who, in addition to killing each other, engaged in more than a little rape and pillage of the countryside. Every peasant they killed was one less person that could grow food. Every farm they damaged would produce fewer crops. Every village they depopulated would cease to pay taxes. Every time people are killed, the economy loses the value of their labor, which is definitely the biggest tragedy of war. And those were just the big decisive battles. Gods know how many smaller skirmishes happened or sieges or raids on lightly defended areas. The damage would have been widespread, to say the least. Armies in Westeros are logistically a mess, as well as being very, very undisciplined on average. When they march through an area, they strip it bare of everything, most notably food. Historically, this is accurate. Before modern transportation and preservation techniques were invented, food couldn't be transported very far from where it was produced. When armies marched, they not only took food, but if things were bad enough, they took the seeds that farmers were going to plant for next year. Meaning that the next year's harvest would be smaller and more people would starve. And since armies came from all over Westeros, all corners of Westeros would be affected during the rebellion. It would probably take at least an entire generation for things to stabilize and get back to where they were before. Again, this is definitely the biggest tragedy of the situation. Then there was Greyjoy's rebellion only six years later, which ravaged the coastline of the Westerlands and the Riverlands. And the Iron Islands, but those were terrible already. What I'm saying is the War of Five Kings would have kickstarted another famine before the realm even had a chance to recover from previous wars. Even before the Mad King Aerys decided to test if Rickard Stark was fireproof, there were a ludicrous number of rebellions and civil wars against Targaryen overlordship. And these wars weren't relegated to a single region. They were widespread all across the Seven Kingdoms. If someone was born in the Seven Kingdoms anytime after Aegon's conquest and managed to live to be elderly, they'd probably have witnessed or been party to warfare in the area they lived in. They'd also spend plenty of time hearing about wars elsewhere in the country. Based on all this, it seems like ever since Aegon's conquest 300 years ago, the foundations of Westerosi society have been broken down over and over again without ever getting a chance to properly recover. The economic foundations of their lives have been eroding for centuries and no one has made any effort to restore them. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that compared to 300 years ago, Westeros has fewer people, fewer populated villages, more wilderness, and less fertile land being cultivated. That makes sense when you remember that winters last for multiple years there. The people don't have a chance to save or build up any sort of wealth to save for an emergency, which might be fine if there weren't so many damn emergencies coming from all these wars. Maybe a small foreign dynasty that imposed itself on a large, geographically and culturally divided region through blatant force of arms was never going to be beloved. Maybe emphasizing how foreign they were drove a wedge between them and everyone else. Maybe feudalism is an extremely decentralized form of political organization that lends itself to underlings growing too powerful to effectively control and therefore to civil wars. That could go some way to explaining why the small folk hate the Targaryens so much. >> They're incestuous aliens, don't care. Blood magic isn't tyrants who have burned our lands, enslaved our people. The only honorable thing a Targaryen can do for this realm is finish on his wife's tits. >> So, King Bran the Broken has a lot to fix as Lord of these seven, sorry, six kingdoms. He's going to have to deal with large-scale banditry and small-scale rebellions. He's going to have to rebuild the crown's ability to collect taxes. He's going to have to reestablish the state's monopoly on violence and let people go back to living their boring, unexciting lives. That's a lot. That's a lot of difficult tasks to complete. What's the good news though? What does Bran have going for him? The kingdoms seem to have decent roads, at least between major population centers. That'll facilitate trade. Their sailing technology is pretty advanced, too. They can move around very, very quickly. They don't need to worry about any outside invasions anytime soon. The wildlings are pretty much shattered and the dragon queen who hates slavery and love slavers is dead. At the beginning of season 2, Petyr Baelish says that they have enough grain for a winter that lasts 5 years. Based on that, we can assume that they have some way to preserve food far longer than medieval Europeans could. This means that they can store it for a long time, but they can also transport it a long way. So, they can take food from safer regions and take it to more war-ravaged ones. The Reach is the most populous and fertile region of Westeros and it avoided the worst of the fighting. There will need to be some rebuilding there, but the biggest source of food is secure. King Bran could set up a distribution network to bring food from areas like the Reach to places where the inevitable famine is far worse, such as the Riverlands. In medieval Europe, the price of grain doubled for roughly every 50 miles that it was transported. In Westeros, the price increase should be far less acute. Remember, famine isn't what happens when there isn't enough food to go around. Famine is what happens when there are large numbers of people who are unable to procure enough food. Famous famines like the Holodomor and the Irish Potato Famine occurred in areas that were exporting food as their population starved. The lack of calories wasn't the issue. Economic forces and government policies were the issue. And Phytophthora infestans. Can't forget that. If he's smart about it, King Bran can resettle people from overpopulated regions like King's Landing to places that were depopulated during the war and get those places making food again. Obviously, they would need oversight and teachers to make sure they didn't screw this up, but it could be done. And even if agricultural land needs to be repaired and recultivated, the oceans should be fine. In coastal regions, people will have to devote more time and labor to fishing for their caloric needs. In some areas, that will make up for the lack of crops. In other areas, that will just lessen the severity of the shortages. Either way, it helps. If Bran can manage all this properly, then the famine in the south should go from catastrophic to merely severe in a single harvest. Remember, the north declared independence, so Bran doesn't need to worry about feeding them. They're on their own. Good [ __ ] luck, Sansa. And here's another fun idea to help repair the economy. Universal health care. No, really. Downstream of famine is large-scale malnutrition, which makes populations more susceptible to disease and then plagues start. During the Irish Potato Famine, far more people died of famine-related diseases than of starvation. According to some estimates, hard numbers are difficult to come by with this sort of thing. The point is, plenty of Bran's subjects will be in need of medical care. The maesters all receive advanced medical training, which is one reason that every lord in Westeros keeps a few close by. But, maesters receive training and education in a wide variety of different areas, which is why it takes them so long to earn their chains. If someone studied at the Citadel learning only medical stuff, they could, theoretically, learn their trade much quicker. My proposal for King Bran, educate a few hundred boys and girls in medicine and then send them to the areas most affected by disease outbreaks. They can educate peasants on ways to prevent infectious diseases from spreading, as well as provide treatment for those who need it. Their knowledge of medicine seems to be way more advanced than real-world medieval Europe's was, so they could do a lot of good this way. This might cause some problems, but it would help to stabilize things and endear the king to the peasantry. It would be the first time most of them had a leader who even pretended to give a [ __ ] about them, and that would give him more of a support base from which to govern from. So, here is my list of policies for King Bran to implement to fix the Westerosi economy. One, send in his armies to take care of the bandit problem and make travel safe again. Two, redistribute food from areas with a surplus to areas with a shortage. Three, resettle abandoned land to grow more food. And four, fund the creation of maesters to act as public doctors and prevent the spread of diseases. If all goes well, famine and plague will be fixed, the crown's position will be more secure than it was before the war started, and commerce will be thriving. Or at least not actively being murdered. The problem is that all of this is going to be expensive. Like, stupid expensive. Luckily, so many lords died during the war or committed crimes that could see them stripped of their titles that there will be tons of land up for grabs. And in feudal systems, when that happens, that land usually reverts to the ownership of the king. Bran could personally hold onto that land and use the revenue it produces to fund all of these big projects. The land would be spread out across the six kingdoms, though, so Bran would be unable to run it himself and would have to assign it to someone else. Ideally, someone progressive-minded and willing to help him with his reforms. If Bran is smart about this, he could expand the power of the throne substantially, which would lead to rebellions being less common, which would lead to greater stability overall, which would then lead to a healthier and more robust economy for generations to come. Aegon V basically tried to do the same thing before he died in a dragon-related fire. Even if everything goes perfectly, though, this would be a lifetime's work. Luckily, King's Landing avoided the worst of the fighting in the last war, and things should be stable there for the time being. It could serve as a bastion of stability for Oh, holy [ __ ] Yeah, maybe everyone is just sort of screwed. Oh, well. Thanks again to Hungry Minds for sponsoring this video. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. Aloha. Thanks to everybody who watched this far. Do you see all these names here? I mean, if you're only listening in another tab and not watching, you probably don't see them. But, if you are watching, you see all these names here. These are my patrons, and I want to give a special shout out to them as well as my $10 and up patrons. Three Cat Day, Arthur D Gonzalez Martin, Carolina Clay, Chaotic Entity One, Chris Gold App, Hey It's Haley, Lexi Delorme, Lord Tiebreaker, Psych XS, Toa Michael, and Yunha Park. All of these people, their support means the world to me. And if you watch this at all, your support means the world to me, too. If you want to help grow the channel and help support me further, so I can keep doing this, don't forget to rate the video, comment, and subscribe if you haven't already. Or, you can, you know, become a patron or a channel member. You know, you get early access to videos and bonus content. Starts at $1 a month. But, you know, if you don't feel like doing that, no hard feelings, I guess. I just won't be able to eat without you. Or something like that. I don't know. Whatever. Have a nice day. Bye.