Prompted by the current “Explain English Money to Me” thread in GQ. With weird / complicated / illogical foreign monetary systems, in contrast with one’s own country’s eminently sensible and understandable ditto, having long been a subject for comment and humour; I have been trying to think of instances in published fiction, of this device / trope / call it what you will – and to my surprise, not come up with much.
I’d thought of Dennis Wheatley’s war-cum-spying-cum-swashbuckling novels featuring Roger Brook, his Napoleonic-era James Bond equivalent; particularly the first in the series, in which a very young Roger is living by his wits, alone in France shortly before the Revolution. I seemed to recall in this book, the French currency set-up at that time being portrayed as hyper-complex and crazy, giving our hero some trouble: looking back at the book showed that my memory was at fault – in fact there is in the narrative early in the book, a quick guide to French money circa 1783. This shows it as no more strange than its British counterpart at the time; even if strange in a different sort of way. Essentially, 24 livres aka francs, make one louis; the livre / franc is divided into a certain number of sous, and there are a couple of other coins worth a different number of livres / francs, than 24. (Googling the “real thing” in France at the time, shows that Wheatley was actually simplifying – in real life the system, if the word is applicable, in France then: looks like a demented foreign currency dreamed up by a not-very-subtle satirist.)
On the Harry Potter scene, J.K. Rowling makes the wizards’ currency markedly different from non-wizarding ones, and numerically eccentric: 29 copper knuts make one silver sickle; 17 sickles make one golden galleon. All in metal coins, of course – wizards have a penchant for the old-fashioned, and don’t “do” simple-and-systematic-and-convenient: that sort of crap is for Muggles.
I’d be interested to know whether any fellow-posters can furnish further examples in fiction – would tend, one reckons, to be on the light / humorous side – of strange and mind-bending foreign currencies, thought up for comic effect.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy describes the ningi, a unit of currency where 8 ningis make one pu. A ningi is trangular coin, made of rubber, and each side is six thousand and eight hundred miles long.
From a previous life…
The Book of Mormon goes through a long explaination of their monetary system. As I remember it, the system had money worth 1, 2, 4, 8 and so forth.
As an aside, the Harry Potter wizard money system isn’t as crazy as it first looks. Since they deal entirely in metal coins anyway, it’s reasonable to suppose that they used to be on a pure specie system, where coins were just standardized ingots of the precious metals, and the values of the different metals fluctuated against each other. At some point in the probably recent past, the Ministry of Magic decided that constantly-changing exchange rates were too much of a headache, and officially froze the exchange rates at the values they happened to have right at that moment. And at that moment, it happened that silver was worth 29 times as much as copper, and gold was worth 17 times as much as silver.
Warning: I only saw Cowboy Bebop on US TV, I haven’t read the manga or anime et al. Within that caveat, woolongs really annoyed me. Bigest problem: three decimal places – 10.000. So what is that tenth of a woolong worth? Not much, a pizza costs 7000 woolongs [ref: Woolong | Cowboy Bebop Wiki | Fandom] Then they just arbitrarily switch the decimal/units separator – comma and period. Just so our heros go for the 50,000 woolong bounty (fifty thousand) only to discover, woops, we meant 50.000 woolog bounty (fifty woolong, zero tenths, zero pennies, zero 1/10’s of a penny.) Really government, you thought you had to make it that clear?
If you change the size of coins, then what do you do about all the old coins still in circulation?
And doesn’t John Wick use ordinary real-world money like dollars and euros?
EDIT: Arkcon, are you sure you’re interpreting that correctly? If a pizza is seven thousand woolongs, then the bounty they thought they were getting was just over seven pizzas’ worth. It seems more likely that the cost of the pizza was seven woolongs, and the decimal point there was just understood.
Real-world money certainly exists in John Wick’s world, it’s what “normal” people use, and the bounties all seem to be in normal real-world currencies, but face-to-face monetary interactions in his weird assassin’s demimonde seem to exclusively involve the gold coins which Snarky_Kong references. And, as Snarky_Kong indicates, the rate seems to be one coin for…pretty much anything. Maybe there are subtle denomination markers we don’t see, but it sure seems like one cocktail is 1 Coin, disposing of a body is 1 Coin, emergency medical services is 1 Coin, etc.
I wish I understood anything at all about economics, because it seems like such a system could actually work. You have 5 coins, you can get five services. Out of coins, no services. You do one service to earn one coin. You end up with finite resources to acquire finite services so there is a kind of balance–nobody can just hoard coins unless they are actually providing services. I wonder if this sort of system could be incorporated into a RPG to see how it plays out over time.
But not all services are equally easy to provide. If I can get one Coin for serving someone a drink, or one Coin for flying them across the Atlantic, then why would I ever choose to be a pilot when I can earn so much more for so little effort as a bartender?
That reminds me of the post-apocalyptic society in season 2 of Future Man. Everything there did cost one coin. A ratkebob? One coin. A house? One coin.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had “gold pressed latinum”, used by the Ferengi and other non-Federation worlds. It came in slips, strips, and bars, implying some sort of three tiered system like old British money, although I don’t think they ever established the values of each tier in relation to the others. But really the “crazy” part was that in one episode it was reviled that the Ferengi consider gold basically worthless, and the valuable part was the liquid latinum contained therein.
Well, it’s not just any bartender. It’s a bartender specifically working for the secret assassin world. I figure it’s more of a job you get recruited for than apply (please no spoilers for John Wick 3).
All this was allegedly engraved on plates of gold by an ancient warrior/historian who carried those plates across the American continents because 19th century Americans really needed to know the details of Nephite currency.
Like the joke about what a hooker is paid to do, I imagine a John Wick-world bartender isn’t being paid a coin to serve a drink, he/she is being paid a coin to keep silent about what they see & hear in the bar.
“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” You do what you love, and if anyone wants what you do you get a coin good for…anything, provided by someone who loves doing what you’re paying them for. Seems like a good system actually. Dunno how it buys groceries or deals with the day to day minutiae of life. [/spoiler]
In Robert Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, one of the cultures had a currency whose smallest denomination was the “minim”.
In the middle ages, usury was forbidden. Christian and Muslim merchants were not allowed to ask for interest on a loan. So you would see contracts which said something like, “On the first of January, I will give you xxxx Scottish pounds. At the end of February, you will give me yyyy Dutch guilders.” The religious authorities could not really punish you for that. But if you look up the prices of the metals, and the exchange rates of the currencies, you find that the merchants were paying exactly the same interest rates that they would have paid to an infidel moneylender.
