some notes on cost of living

[whswhs]

A recent thread has contained some discussion of cost of living and how well it reflects actual living conditions. In particular, there have been comments on cost of living for single adventurers versus families. I've been looking at this for my current fantasy campaign, so I thought I would discuss it, as one possible approach.

This is a campaign set in a TL1 society and world. The base of operations is a city that's largely TL1, but is advanced in a few arts; for example, it has place notation in arithmetic, and has a source for porcelain and blown glass, though not for large plate glass. Its inhabitants are nixies, a comparatively small race, with average ST 7 and about 50% of human food and space requirements. The city is large by TL1 standards, 30,000 inhabitants, but not huge (the biggest city in the world is about 150,000), and is well supplied with food, with both barley and salmon available as staples.

An Average wealth, Status 0 nixie's cost of living is $300/month. This is enough to support a family. Of that sum, three-fourths goes to food (less than the historical average); $45/month goes to nonfood purchases such as clothing, fuel, and furniture; and $30/month goes to rent. Interest in moderately high, since this is a somewhat high-risk society; 20% per year is typical. So the purchase of a house costs around $1800, and it takes about six years at $325/month to save up for one. (This world doesn't have thirty-year fixed rate mortgages.)

With Average wealth being $500, owning a house gives the owner Independent Income 6. This isn't actually a cash flow; rather, it's cash from regular income that doesn't need to be put into rent and thus can be spent on other purchases.

As a simplified model, I assume that the food budget is split into 15 parts. Five parts go to the husband, 4 to the wife, 3 to an adolescent child or a parent, 2 to a preadolescent child, and 1 to a toddler. This is an average and varies from year to year.

Now, suppose a young nixie man hasn't gotten married yet? He probably won't rent a whole house, and he doesn't need more than $75 a month for food. However, that $75 is purchasing food for a wife to cook, and he doesn't have a wife! Similarly, while he can rent a room, he doesn't have a wife to clean it, or mend clothes or bedding, or do various other tasks. So to lead anything like a comfortable existence, he has to pay at a higher rate to get a room in a boardinghouse where those services are provided, at least at a basic level.

For simplicity, I assume that he pays $225/month for his meals, and $90/month for his room. That is, his cost of living comes to about the same as if he were supporting a family. That lets me reconcile the two concepts of "cost of living for a man with a family" and "cost of living for a single man" without too many complications. (This isn't the only way to do this. In present-day America, I would say instead that cost of living for a Status 0 couple was $1200/month, that they both needed to have income sources, and that they had to own various labor saving devices to free up the wife's time for work. That's still not a really good fit, but it's a way to address the issue.)

This is assuming that the single man rents his room by the month. I've set daily rates for rooms, and prices of single meals eaten out, to come to twice as much. That is, the same young man would pay $450/30 days = $15/day for meals (nixies have smaller stomachs in proportion to body weight, so that's $5 for dinner and $2.50 for each of four other meals), and his room rent would be $60/30 days = $2/day. Note that this differs from the figures in the Basic Set, which would have meals (4%) be only one-fifth of total expenditures (20%); that works for modern societies, more or less, but at TL1, food is by far the largest part of living expenses—my 75% figure only works for a prosperous society with highly productive farms and fisheries, comparable to the Nile Valley or the Columbia River.

I don't say that this is the only way to address the issue. But I think it might be an acceptable handwave for TL1-4 societies, with some tinkering with percentages. It goes a little beyond ignoring the problem entirely, without getting into the depths of real economic modeling.

[Andreas]

With such a huge cost increase for food (three times as expensive!), it seems that cooking for others would be a very profitable occupation indeed...

[Verjigorm]

What about organizations for the youth? For example, say a group of hunters who range fairly far from the city. Young men who didn't have their own homes or a wife would join, hunt for a few years, then come back and settle down. Wile hunting, a large part of their cost of living would be provided by their "employer"(though the relationship was probably a bit different), though he would take his share. Rent would be negligible.

Also, communal housing for labor? You work in the fields for me, I provide a place for you to live(with a bunch of other single men) and meals. I take some of your wages out for that.

It just seems odd to me to make a single man's cost of living almost the exact same as a married man: how does the single man ever save enough to get married? Should the single man be considered the same status as a married man, if married men are expected to be the norm? Maybe single men should be status -1 in such a setting, unless they spend the difference to live at a "normal" status.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

What about organizations for the youth? For example, say a group of hunters who range fairly far from the city. Young men who didn't have their own homes or a wife would join, hunt for a few years, then come back and settle down. Wile hunting, a large part of their cost of living would be provided by their "employer"(though the relationship was probably a bit different), though he would take his share. Rent would be negligible.

Also, communal housing for labor? You work in the fields for me, I provide a place for you to live(with a bunch of other single men) and meals. I take some of your wages out for that.

All of that certainly takes place. In fact, in my campaign, Nergul is handling things in that way with the servants at her house/inn; they get rooms, meals, probably clothing, and modest cash payments. The dollar amounts are a notional way to represent the actual transactions. I've gone into much more detail, but I'm using the dollar amounts as a starting point, and they may be convenient for a campign where the GM doesn't want to give a lot of detail.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Andreas

With such a huge cost increase for food (three times as expensive!), it seems that cooking for others would be a very profitable occupation indeed...

That's an interesting point, and I have to think about how it works. A fuller response will be delayed.

But let's look at what's in the Basic Set. On one hand, a Status 0 man, with CoL $600, must pay 20% of his CoL per day to stay in an inn, hotel, or the like; that's $120. On the other, he must pay 4% of his CoL per day to eat out; that's $24, with $12 for dinner and $6 for the other two meals. That comes to $3600 a month for staying in the inn, and $720 a month for eating.

It's not explicitly stated, but I think it may make sense to say that the $3600 includes the $720. That suggests that food is about 20% of CoL, which is plausible for around the early 20th century, though not for either the Middle Ages or the present day. If it's true, though, then food as a share of CoL for someone who has a fixed place to live comes to 20% of $600, or $120. That's a really huge ratio. And even if you adjust the assumptions, you're going to come out with a big ratio, though maybe less than six to one.

[Verjigorm]

i assumed the dollar amounts were just place holders. I can't imagine there's a lot of things that work as currency, so it's all quite informal.

Is there a form of cash?

One of the things that amazes me right now is that during the height of the bronze age in the "middle east", tin was imported from cornwall, england. The inhabitants of cornwall at the time didn't make bronze themselves, and appear to have had a mostly stone age technology base, but they apparently engaged in long distance trade with the bronze age supper powers of the time.

What did an egyptian merchant offer to them in exchange for their tin? Similarly, how did the amber trade work?

Low tech economies amaze me.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

It just seems odd to me to make a single man's cost of living almost the exact same as a married man: how does the single man ever save enough to get married? Should the single man be considered the same status as a married man, if married men are expected to be the norm? Maybe single men should be status -1 in such a setting, unless they spend the difference to live at a "normal" status.

It's a simplification, I admit.

But let's look at that single man. His CoL is $300; his pay from an Average job is $325. So he can put aside $25/month. Since a house costs $1800, he can pay for one after saving for six years, which is comparable to the Biblical seven years that Jacob labored to get a wife. Such long courtships used not to be unheard of; they were the big reason that "engaged" was a formal social category.

Or he could, as you say, live in a shared room, splitting the cost with another young man, so that each paid $15/month. That would give him $40/month toward that house, and 45 months waiting time.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

i assumed the dollar amounts were just place holders. I can't imagine there's a lot of things that work as currency, so it's all quite informal.

Is there a form of cash?

Yes, there is: Silver by weight. There's also gold by weight, for large transactions; it fluctuates against silver, but not extremely, with a rough average of 12:1. But that's a cultural matter. The same logic would work for any medium of exchange, and could at least be applied suggestively to barter economies, or to gift exchange economies that have no concept of "trade" within a community.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Andreas

With such a huge cost increase for food (three times as expensive!), it seems that cooking for others would be a very profitable occupation indeed...

Well, here's the thing. Let's look at my figures. A single man at Status 0 earns $325 a month, and has cost of living $300, of which $225 goes for food, if he has a room in a boarding house. The cost of buying the raw foodstuffs would be $75; so cooking meals for one person earns $150/month, or $5/day. So the cook's pay is on the order of $150 per tenant; four tenants will earn $600 a month, or Status 1 pay.

If you use the implied 20% of cost of living going to food in the Basic Set, then $60 of that $300 goes for food. With the same 3:1 ratio, you have $40/month per boarder. So you need 15 boarders to cover the wages of one Status 1 cook, or 7.5 for one Status 0 cook.

That all seems to drop out of the much larger share of output being food at TL1 than at, say, TL6.

It seems to follow from this that eating out is a lot more affordable at TL6 than at TL1. There may be only a handful of restaurants and they may cater to the prosperous.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Note that this differs from the figures in the Basic Set, which would have meals (4%) be only one-fifth of total expenditures (20%); that works for modern societies, more or less, but at TL1, food is by far the largest part of living expenses.

Which is a big part of the problem with Basic Set CoL, because if you're using constant dollars, keeping the price of the standard basket of food constant is about as fundamental as it gets. There's some variance in what's in the food, but mostly in ways that makes it more expensive but easier to prepare at higher TL.

My back of the hand estimate is that a realistic number is roughly:

• Food: $100-$200/mo. Not particularly TL variant.
• Expendables, Maintenance, Rental, Upkeep: up to 5% of starting wealth for the wealth level you live at; usually less at higher wealth levels. Has no correlation with status, it's just a case of "more stuff requires more maintenance".
• Advertising, Appearances, and Patronage: up 5% of starting wealth for the status level you live at; usually more at higher status levels. The exact split between those things is setting dependent.