I love Davos, but we’ve seen so little of him acting as Hand that I didn’t feel I had enough to work from. 

But I really, really love Davos and will be happy to do a followup essay if TWOW gives us Davos more engaged with politics.

Well, there’s a couple different ways that it would work:

• The tax and coinage system.  This is how the Modern Monetary Theorists explain the evolution of currency: kings mint coins and exchange them for food and other goods at a certain rate when they need to feed their armies and their courts, etc. and they don’t have enough grown on their own lands. Likewise, kings can insist that you need to pay your taxes in coin. These two things establish a demand for currency, and lead people to be willing to exchange goods for money in their private dealings as well as their dealings with the king.
• The nobility: on a lesser level, the same thing happens with the nobility. They get taxes in kind for the most part, but there’s a limit to how much food they need to keep their families, servants, and soldiers fed, and nobility tend to buy a lot of stuff you need to buy with coins: nicer-than-homespun clothing, metal-ware, pottery, glass-ware, spices and imported food and drink, lots of services from specialized craftsmen, etc. And so a lot of noblemen act as de-facto merchants, collecting raw materials and selling them in bulk for coin.  
• Urban demand: even in a rural society, you’ve still got 10% or so of the economy that produces manufactured goods and is much more in the market economy than self-sufficient farmers. So if you’re a farmer and you want to buy things you can’t make yourself, you need to get your hands on some coin – and one of the things a market society produces is merchants who exchange goods for coin and try to arbitrage prices. 
• Foreign demand: there’s less commerce in agrarian societies than industrial societies generally, but given that climate and culture lead to various specialization, you get a good deal of regional and international trade no matter what. And while you can trade wool for wine, money makes trade so much easier.

Yes and no. That explains why they haven’t done it in the last 300 years. Not why they haven’t in the previous 7,300 years that they were Kings of the Rock. “Honor loan agreements or we invade you” works fairly well, as the Iron Bank has found out. 

I’m maybe the worst person to ask about this, because I picked up my knowledge about economics very randomly and completely outside of the context of a traditional economics course (my day job is the history of public policy). So mostly I know a lot about the history of economic theory as it applies to public policy. 

Some recommendations:

Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 Years is good on ancient stuff, bad on modern.

Polayni’s Great Transformation should be required for citizenship. 

Eichengreen’s great on monetary policy. So’s Greider on 70s and after. 

Skidelsky is great on Keynes if you don’t want to read the General Theory yourself. 

Yuval Yonay, Daniel Rogers, Nancy Cohen, Rosenof, and Richard Parker’s biography of Galbraith are excellent in helping to explain how economics got from Adam Smith to the 20th century.  

Certainly, within the boundaries of the Westerlands, I think the Lannisters can issue their own charter and enforce it. Essentially the way Tywin did, right before the Rains kicked off, but with more legality attached. 

Enforcing it outside of the Westerlands – might be a trickier problem. The Lord Paramount of the Reach might or might not recognize a loan agreement with, say, House Rowan, but they’re going to look askance at you sending out soldiers to enforce repayment, and be dead against the Lannisters trying to take possession of land in the Reach as compensation. Likewise, who decides how courts rule on contract law in a case involving a merchant from White Harbor – the courts in Lannisport or the courts in Winterfell? 

So you probably would need cross-Kingdom agreements or a royal charter to iron out the disputes that touch on issues of sovereignty.

Yeah, I could see that; more Roose than Ramsay. Certainly the use of terror to cow one’s enemies was right up Vlad Tepes’ alley. 

The Hooded Man is Tyler Durden. 

Actually, I think that’s kind of one of the more realistic elements. Development doesn’t take place at the same time everywhere, so some places are behind the times and others on the cutting edge. The battle of Agincourt, very much a part of the Middle Ages, took place a hundred years after the start of the Renaissance. The refeudalization of Poland was contemporaneous with the English Civil War. Etc etc.