"Apparently!"

Karen finds a book in Greek and presents it to Minor.

"Thanks!" he says, and carefully puts it in his bag, and says, "our culture probably is superior to theirs but if it is, they'll adopt ours voluntarily. If you can only get people to adopt it by kidnapping their kids then that suggests it's not."

"How'd you get all the way to 'probably'? Especially when 'ours' is the one that kidnaps kids apparently?"

"Well, okay, the kidnapping kids isn't. But I think people here mostly live longer and healthier and have more education and have invented more stuff."

"Yeah, probably. So they should pick up how to do that and we can go 'okay, we will learn from how you don't kidnap kids, also how do you make all those potions' and it doesn't have to be one culture winning or anything."

"But if one does win that's okay, as long as it wins by people liking it better."

"Sure." Pause. "Well, if they like it for good reasons, there are probably dumb reasons."

"Okay, true."

"How long will it take you to go through that Greek book?" wonders Karen.

"A week, maybe, depending how much homework we get."

"That History essay we're supposed to do is so long, I don't even have very tiny handwriting..."

"She hasn't marked me down for opinionated ranting digressions yet so I'm just doing a lot of that."

"Yeah, I never have problems coming up with enough to say, it just takes a while and I'm not a very fast reader in Greek. Yet."

"I just don't feel like anybody should care what I think about goblin rebellions, it's awkward trying to think of things to say that aren't just 'what I think'..."

"I mean, someday Timothy's going to rule the world, goblin rebellions might come up, it'll be useful to have thoughts on all the ways people've tried to handle them and which ones did and didn't work..."

"I think I'm probably missing something about goblin rebellions because it doesn't make sense that we let them handle all our money when they keep, you know, rebelling, and we keep doing the sort of thing that makes them want to rebel. I guess they haven't destroyed the economy over it yet."

"Maybe we should consult Aaron for paper ideas, he can talk about this stuff for hours."

"Ooh, that might help."

So they go and track down Aaron, who is working alone and does not want to be interrupted until Minor says "why do we let goblins run our financial system?" and then his eyes light up.

"So, first thing, it's not hard to run a financial system but most societies are astoundingly bad at it, wizarding societies in particular because magic lets us patch a lot of things that would otherwise make it obvious how terrible a system is. Have you guys thought about what money, actually, is? Why it works?"

"It's a thing everybody agrees to want so you don't have to figure out what the seamstress's grocery list looks like before you can get new robes."

"Yeah! So, everyone agreeing to want something breaks down if you can fake it - transfigure it, adulterate gold with other stuff, etcetera - or if we happen to discover a really abundant supply of it. Discovering some is actually okay. I don't know why yet but that happens all the time and works fine and actually if you don't discover any that works badly. But you kind of want to have pretty predictable amounts, and people can't be able to fake it. So one thing you can do is have a government whose job it is to throw people in Azkaban for faking money and assert ownership of all of the gold in the world so they can dole it out in the right amounts if a lot of it is suddenly found.

Except governments kind of suck, and throwing people in Azkaban is an awful way to manage your money supply, and no one's figured out how to do the doling out in the right amounts - that's why the aforementioned is a bad idea, it's not why we don't do it, I don't know why we don't do it but it's not because everyone understands it's a bad idea -"

"I think the Muggles just use paper money."

"What, how does that work, why would people agree to want paper?"