"Relatively stable quantities, easy to make coinage out of, has been valuable for a long time. If you flood the market you'll screw some things up, if that's what you're wondering."

"You should probably do fiat currency!" He starts explaining this.

"Lets you use all your precious metals in more interesting applications," says Isun. "Which matters because only metal holds enchantments well."

"Does your magic require gemstones, a lot of our advanced spells do and we're not that close to running out or anything but we surely eventually will."

"Nah, they're just time consuming."

"Ours aren't, especially. And they're a lot cheaper now thanks to Ismat.'

"It'll only really crash when more than a few people know how to do it."

"Can anyone learn?"

"Maybe? It could be it only works in our world or something irritating like that. But I'm not a wizard, I'm just very good at making jewelry."

"And how does one become a wizard?"

"Years of study. Smart people can all do it. Again, it's possible it's not learnable here."

"How smart?"

"The smarter quarter of people can get anywhere, though you have to be smarter than that to be really good."

"And your population might be stunted, intellectually, if you're preindustrial and don't have good sanitation and so on."

"Sanitation affects intelligence?"

"Childhood illnesses and parasite load do."

"Air quality, exposure to educational enrichment, heavy metals, once a parent of one of Kaloa's classmates told me purples were probably mostly stupid due to not getting screened for allergies and being constantly slightly poisoned..."

"Why would people not screen purples for allergies?? ...or were they being an idiot."

"They were being an idiot!"

"They were probably trying to be friendly, claiming intelligence differences are mostly environmental is the sort of thing you hear from very caste-progressive greens. But it's not actually accurate.  - you will see some dramatic gains from not poisoning your population, though."

"We should check whether magical healing heals that sort of thing."

"Makes sense. How common is it?"

"Even poor families can usually afford a healing spell if someone's dying, and not otherwise. In small towns a cleric might do healing for free, if there is one at all everyone's probably gotten touched up a healthy amount. In the city poor people are likelier to do without because the cleric always can sell it. Rich people will have magical healing on hand for childbirth, broken bones, that kind of thing. It's possible that low-level cure spells can't help with heavy metal poisoning but, say, Heal can, which would have interesting implications."

"Interesting implications like what?"

"Depending on how large the gains at it might be worth paying the person who can do Mass Heal to do it to packed rooms of people."