how do the economics of the of the lost cities work?
If 1 Luster is worth 1 million dollars, and every elf has ten-million lusters, that works out to about 10-trillion dollars per elf. The best estimate I could find says that there are about 19.9 trillion dollars on earth. Since there are about 1 million elves, that means there are about 10 trillion lusters (10 quintillion). since the sum of a type of money has a fixed value that would mean that a luster is worth 0.0000199 dollars, it would take one thousand lusters to equal 1 cent.
there are four possible justifications for this. I will put them in order of least to most likely
1.Over all of elvin history, only about 199 billion lusters have entered circulation, therby making the effective worth of each luster over ten million dollars. 2. The council uses strict price control methods to (effectively) force the luster to be worth ten-million dollars.
3.since people dont really work for money in the lost cities, they just price things as if the luster was worth ten million. ( this answer opens a whole other can of worms about economics)
- Shannon Messenger was not factoring in economic theory when writing a single line for the first book of the keeper of the lost cities series, and just wanted to convey that each elf had effectively infinite wealth.
Does anyone better at economics than me have any better in-universe explanations for this?
(Edit: if answering the poll, dont choose option 4, it exists to trap those answering without reading this)