Is there a copper to stag, stag to dragon ratio that’s known? Traditional fantasy rules is an easy 10 copper to 1 silver, 10 silver to 1 gold but that doesn’t hold up with the way the value of a gold dragon has been worked out. (sorry if you’ve answered this, link plox)

Decimalized currency is something of a modern convenience, and it’s not an accident that it spread rapidly about the same time that the metric system, a decimal system of measurement, was being spread by the French Revolution and its belief in human perfectability through reason.

Westeros’ currency is not decimal at all. One dragon is worth:

30 silver moons.
210 silver stags.
1470 copper stars.
2940 copper groats.
5880 copper halfgroats.
11760 copper pennies.
23520 copper halfpennies.

This is a rather bizarre system:

you have two separate silver coins, which is a complication to the minting process (you now need two sets of dies for the silver coins, and you also have to cast the blank planchets in different sizes and/or purities), and probably means you’re losing money that you could have made through seignorage of the more valuable silver coin.
you have no less than five separate copper coins in circulation, which as with the silver means additional sets of dies and different planchets, all for the least valuable of coins and therefore the least possible amount of profit.
the conversion rates are not particularly intuitive. At first I thought the fact that it’s seven stags to a moon and seven stars to a stag was a bit of religious symbolism, but that breaks down quickly because it’s two groats to a star and four pennies to the groat, and so on.
Also, because of the large amounts of smaller coins that go into a larger coin, I imagine it’s easy for vendors to cheat people while making change because it’s pretty difficult to eyeball whether you’ve been given 49 stars for a moon and so forth.

GRRM is absolutely borrowing from the pre-decimalized British currency of pounds, shillngs, and pence, where you had 12 pence (i.e pennies) in a shilling and 20 shillings (or 240 pence) in a pound. If that wasn’t confusing enough, you also had coins that were smaller than a penny (farthings were worth ¼ of a penny, halfpennies were eponymous) and coins that were more than a penny but less than a shilling (groats were worth two pennies and there were also half-groats, threepenny bits existed, as did silver sixpence coins), and coins worth more than a shilling but less than a pound (florins were worth two shillings, crowns were worth five and there were also half-crowns, there were half-sovereigns worth ten shillings, and a half-guinea coin as well). And to cap off this insanity, in addition to the pound, you also had guineas worth one pound one shilling so that gentlemen could pay people with their own special currency.

Reading your Anguy question, how much money was 10,000 gold dragoons actually worth? Was it a realistic pot for winning a contest?

See here for my estimates on the value of a gold dragon.

As for whether it’s a realistic pot, it’s a bit tricky, because medieval tourneys don’t seem to have given out prizes in cash, but instead gave out prizes in jewelry, plate (hence why so many modern sports tournaments have “cups” as trophies), and the like. And without these objects to hand, it’s a bit hard to value how much a “gold vulture” or a “very rich ring” should be valued at, or (given how popular diamonds were in medieval tourneys) how to appraise precious stones in the abstract.

However, I can say that 10,000 dragons work out to something on the order of 6,000-7,000 English pounds (in 1300 CE pounds, that is), which is far, far bigger than any tourney prize I can find an example of.

So I think this another example of math being GRRM’s Achilles’ heel.

So we know about the Reach’s golden ‘hands,’ and I’d be incredibly surprised if the Kingdom of the Rock’s currency wasn’t based around golden ‘lions,’ but do you have any suggestions for the names and metallic content of the Seven Kingdoms’ pre-Conquest currencies? I think I remember the North being a primarily silver-based economy, but ‘silver direwolves’ just doesn’t strike me as a good money name.

Let’s see:

The Reach: as stated, “golden hands.” Notably smaller and thinner than your post-Targaryen dragons.

The Rock: agreed, definitely gold and definitely “lions.”

The Stormlands: I wouldn’t be surprised if the stag as a coin predated the Conquest, given the Durrandon’s once-mighty empire. Perhaps they were once minted in gold, but had to be downgraded to silver as the Durrandon empire waned?

The North: silver wolves sounds good; when in doubt, simplify.

Riverlands: a wild mix of coinage, suggesting the political instability of the realm. I like the idea of the pious Teagues introducing the Star, tho.

The Vale: silver falcons are too close to the sigil to be avoided, I think.

Dorne: Golden suns I think would be almost mandatory.

Iron Islands: “he decreed that gold and silver coin should in future have no value, and ordained that the people should use iron money only…which in weight was over a pound and a quarter, and in value not quite a penny.” And according to legend, dipped in vinigar to make the coins brittle and thus even less useful….

Is the golden Dragon a practical coin given its immense value? The vast majority of the population will never see one (ala Pate) and those who do use them, such as rich merchants and nobles, could they not more simply and safely use promissory notes or letters of credit backed by banking houses etc?

Sure it is. Let’s leave out the fact that we see plenty of people using gold dragons – Dunk, for example. Let’s just do a thought experiment.

A load of bread costs around three coppers. Assume that everyone in King’s Landing eats a loaf a day – which is pretty close to the statistics we have of ancien regime France, for example – that’s 1.5 million coppers that bakers are getting, which works out to about five thousand pounds of metal, on a daily basis. Trying to store that much metal is a giant pain, but it gets a lot easier when you can turn that 1.5 million coppers into 26,785 stags or 127 gold. I guess the point I’m getting at is that when you’re thinking about currency, in addition to thinking about different economic classes, you also need to think about different economic scales – even if most people aren’t throwing around gold on a regular basis, there’s a lot of economic activity in aggregate and having different denominations makes that easier.

Now, as for why those denominations are metallic rather than paper…well, let me recommend Extra History’s series on the history of paper money:

The quick version of a very long and complicated history is that it depends on social and economic organization and levels of trust. With regards to the former, it comes down to this: how many people are there for whom this given note is going to be useful? Yes, merchants and nobles might be doing enough business that they’d be able to use a letter of credit from a given merchant, but what happens if that merchant or noble needs to buy a horse from a farmer who’s never been to King’s Landing, let along Braavos?

With regards to the latter, before governments get into the business of printing money, you’re basically taking it on trust that the particular bank’s or merchant’s or nobleman’s notes are worth what they claim to be, and you run the risk that a bank failure or a bankruptcy or fraud (because the potential for fraud with letters of credit and other notes is huge) leaves you with nothing.

And it gets even more complicated, because there’s no standardization, and so you have to discount the value of the notes of this merchant or this bank, which makes valuing the notes or making change or basic stuff like that really complicated. When I was in high school, my family sometimes went on trips to Old Sturbridge Village, a living recreation of an 1830s New England village. One of the places you could visit in the village was their bank, and I remember being shown these massive ledgers where bankers would record the different bank notes they have seen and what they think the notes were worth, and it’s a huge undertaking.

Whereas gold coins have the advantage that they can be weighed and assayed to figure out how much the coin is worth, so you don’t have to do any of that. And as MMT theorists have pointed out, there was another advantage to coins: they had the government’s stamp on them saying what the coin was supposed to be worth, and they had a relatively steady value based on what the government would pay for goods and services, and how many coins they would accept as payment for taxes.

That being said, the gold standard is insane, fiat money is a huge advance in human civilization, but it took a lot of work to make it possible.

About the taxation calculations, you’d said average yearly incomes to be about 3-5 dragons for the average person. Could you tell me how you arrived at that figure? Given that a proper warhorse in times of war costs approximately 1 dragon (Jaime’s estimate in ASOS), annual income of 3-5 dragons seems rather overly generous.

I took it from here:

The stableman gave him three gold pieces and the rest in silver. Dunk bit one of the gold coins and smiled. He had never tasted gold before, nor handled it…the heft of all that coin in his pouch made him feel queer; almost giddy on one hand, and anxious on the other. The old man had never trusted him with more than a coin or two at a time. He could live a year on this much money. (Hedge Knight)

So according to Dunk, 750 silver or three and a half gold (which he got for selling one horse, btw) is a good year’s income for a smallfolk like himself.

And since we see that a heavy meal of “lamb…as good as any he had ever eaten, and the duck was even better, cooked with cherries and lemons and not near as greasy as most. The innkeep brought buttered pease as well, and oaten bread still hot from her oven,” plus four tankards of ale works out to a handful of copper (when a loaf of bread costs three coppers normally) less than a silver, we can begin to get a sense of what kind of standard of living one could have one two silvers a day.

The reason why I took five gold as the high end is that the Hedge Knight happened a hundred years prior to the present of ASOIAF, and you would have gotten some inflation over that period.

But let’s take Jaime’s example: a fine warhorse works out to anywhere between a third and a fifth of a yearly income for a smallfolk – taking the average income in the U.S today, that horse is worth about $9,000-15,000 – which is pretty high, considering that the “American Association of Equine Practitioners estimates the minimum annual cost of owning a healthy horse — not including stabling costs — to be at least $2,500.”