Caveat: I know nothing about economics except that economists are unable to reliably predict anything about the economy. I'm writing this as a starting point / ongoing conversation.
The average person in the Great Basin has no base needs they cannot meet for themselves. A single bout of Conjuration will easily provide one with enough food and drink for a week. Even if it's not on your standard spell list, you can still use Reserve to cast it. You're a little tired one day out of seven. A nice warm secure shelter is likewise easy to build for yourself - each region should have a fair number of buildings in its Canon of Form.
Higher-level needs, on the other hand, are not as easy to accomplish in the Basin. You can conjure your own cabin/cottage and hermit up, but there are monsters and dangerous shit out there in the world. You can't figuratively turtle up all day to defend your house; you'll go crazy. You probably want to be in a community of some kind, preferably a city-state. Human beings also want things we're often not comfortable exchanging money for - buying an intimate relationship is a very different thing than paying for sex work.
City-states and larger groups do have a lot of needs that aren't necessarily easy to meet. If you're a city-state and you're rimward from the Black Sand Desert, your mana is going to be death-tinged. Unless you love necromancy, you need to clear that, or pipe in more normal mana. That takes a lot of work.
So my current thoughts are:
- At the level of individuals, people have little to no need for money. They might use it in some cases (from what I've read pure-barter economies basically never existed in our own world), but a gift economy might be more common, where you give away the things you can do because all the people you know also do this and everyone benefits.
- This probably varies by civilization. The Guild would definitely have money, and people would use it to pay taxes if nothing else. Glimmermere would almost certainly eschew money even at the civilization level, because their "territory" is free and their people can shape it to their will.
- Money mostly changes hands between civilizations and city-states. I've got a fakey-fake unit of currency, the Thaum (hat-tip to Terry Pratchett). On paper, each Thaum is supposedly one person-day worth of untainted mana (though one person's "untainted" is another person's "very useful"). It's a large unit of money. Nations trade Thaums for territory, for aspected mana flow, for specific other favors.
Oh, also, in my brief research into this I found out that Maslow was a horrible person, so if anyone has a better reference for what humans generally need than his hierarchy of needs, feel free to point me that way.
Comments and suggestions are welcome.
