Architectural history talks about the invention of apartments! Burrows are hard to build - they require less technology to do at all than a house does, but more technology to bring up to modern standards of comfort, so modern burrows are pricier than modern houses. Apartments are cheaper, because while they're even harder to build you can get a lot of them stacked on top of each other and use the same land footprint many times, and they make cities denser, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways.

It's neat how they're able to build so tall! And they've noticed a few things about city living that he hadn't, that's interesting. He's also noticed a few quirks of the architecture in town that he wants to know the purpose of.

The architecture teacher is happy to talk about that! That's for weatherproofing - that's for decoration - that's a notch to put a sign in, which people use to stake out their positions in public debates or to put up seasonal remarks or if they run a business out of their home - that's a consequence of elevators - they don't need chimneys because they do not tend to cook with open flames, but with electric stoves, at least in the home.

Neat! And he likes how it all works together, aesthetically.

Next: economics. Which will hopefully be fun; he has only the vaguest idea what economics even is.

The economics circle is about capital and investment.

That's pretty interesting! He's not sure how much of it works at home - some, obviously, not every trader on the road is carrying their own goods - but it's a fascinating glimpse into how things work here.

He watches for an opening to ask about price fixing and eventually finds one that's only somewhat awkward.

"Ah, price fixing! That's not illegal, exactly, but if people find out you've been colluding to make anything expensive, especially food, that's a good way to make a lot of folks very angry. Forty-five years ago a number of butchers were found to be colluding on the price of the most popular cuts of spren, so they wouldn't have to mark down the rest of them as much to get them moved along, and six of those butchers were hospitalized and two eaten entirely in the ensuing protest and riot. Also, more topically, two other people managed to collect startup capital to open their own butcher shops from aggrieved customers and now run the two largest butchery chains in this region. It is speculated that people would be less upset if you were just colluding about the price of nonessential luxury goods, though."

"Are there any other problems with it besides the public perception issue?"

"Well, it prevents the market from doing the things markets are good at - finding efficient frontiers of price and quality based on everyone making the trades they benefit from and not the trades they don't benefit from. Means more gains from trade accrue to distributors and fewer to consumers."

So not ideal but not a huge problem. "That answers my question, thank you."

"Mm-hm!" And she answers questions from the girls about how you prove to investors that you can make their money back, or how you can tell before investing in something that they can make your money back.

Maybe he'll give it a try sometime, if he ends up staying here for ten years with more money than he knows what to do with.

Next up: Personal finance. So what is the deal with scrip?

Apparently on this planet scrip was invented before money. Women - who used to almost all own their own herds, before specialization got really going, though they sometimes paid others to mix their spren in with the other herd and look after them both together - wanted to be able to send their mates and kids on errands. They wrote IOUs entitling the bearer to some meat belonging to the issuer, since in this era meat was more of a commodity - this was before they had the technology to raise spren away from the smell of people, so it all tasted about the same and nothing else they did made all that much difference in its quality. But bearers didn't always want to redeem that right away, and scrip has an expiration date - you don't want someone to come knocking years later demanding six hooves pronto even when you've since fallen on hard times. So they'd trade it to people who did want meat within the relevant time frame. Cash was invented later.

The advantage of scrip over cash is that if the issuer is suspicious of you she can check your story and make sure she approves of all the steps that led to your possessing her scrip. If you stole it, you can't redeem it. If her mate was spendy in ways she doesn't approve, you can, but she will know not to trust him on errands in the future. Cash is far harder to trace because it doesn't expire and it doesn't have stamps on it saying what steps it's passed through since issuing. Sellers will take cash even under dubious circumstances but may refuse scrip if it expires before they can redeem it, or if they suspect the issuer will have left instructions at the bank that will render its redemption disputable.

That sounds like it makes it risky to take scrip, as a merchant who doesn't want to do a background check on every customer.

It can be! Of course, a bank that has to send home a lot of angry merchants will stop helping the offending issuer, but most sellers have to expect some losses in expiration or dispute, and accordingly charge more in scrip than cash to cover it. Small businesses sometimes rely on knowing everybody who shops there individually.

Huh. Well, if that's how they do things.

(...hmm... he'll ask now while the novelty of being in class with a human lets him get away with a bit more:) Is there anything he should know about how scrip works when traveling? Since he expects to be doing a lot of that.

Some banks are particularly far-ranging and people who expect to travel a lot usually bank with one of those, or use cash.

That's easy enough, at least.

Next: gods and religion in Oerth. While he does have a lesson plan, he expects this to go best if he spends most of his time answering their questions; of course, they won't have much to ask questions about, yet, but does anyone have one already anyway, from whatever rumors have been going around?

"I heard that gods like diamonds? I told my mom we should buy some diamonds and now we have some but I don't know why anyone would like them."

"How does a god be of a thing? What does that mean?"

"I'll get to that in a minute," he tells the second one. "Buying diamonds is a good idea, though I really don't know how long it'll be before we can get in touch with my world, and until then there's just me who can do anything interesting with them. As to why gods want them, there's two parts to it. One is that they're rare; one of the things the gods are looking for is proof that you're asking for the spell because it's important to you, that you aren't wasting their time, since the spells that use diamonds take up their time, and that's valuable. That's why you can use other things, too, for those spells; diamonds aren't the only way to prove that. The other part of the reason is that different gems have different magical properties, and gods are inherently magical beings - like how it's easy to pick up a cushion and hard to pick up a rock the same size and not really possible at all to pick up that amount of water by itself, gods have an easier time seeing and working with some gems than others, and diamonds are one of the easiest - you're asking them to do extra work to take anything else, and sometimes it won't be worth it to them, or maybe they just can't, if they're too busy."

"Diamonds aren't that rare. Alexandrite is rare and it changes color."

"What are they so busy doing?"

"Why does it have to be important to you to work? Couldn't they get secretaries to figure out whether things are the sort of thing they want to do or not?"

"They do want us to be able to do the things we need diamonds for sometimes, or they wouldn't offer those spells to begin with; I assume they're pretty happy with how often they're asked, how it is right now."

"I'll get to that in a minute, too, hold on."

"Gods do have secretaries, sort of! That's one of the things that clerics like me are for. It's part of our job to learn what our gods value and how they like things to be run, and go out into the world and help that happen. They still don't talk to us very much - that's costly, too, and some gods have thousands of clerics - but they usually do a pretty good job of making sure we have the resources we need to do things, and if it turns out that the thing that needs doing is to cast a spell for someone, we'll cover the cost."

"You're a secretary?"

"Wait, if you're a secretary why do you need diamonds to prove things are important, can't they just fire you if you bother them with things that aren't important?"

"It's more complicated than that, but a little bit! Clerics do lots of things for our gods."

"They can fire us, but they try not to; talkers with the potential to be clerics are pretty rare, and we're useful to them. And it'd be hard for them to personally let us know how important something had to be to be worth bothering them, especially since it's hard for us to understand which things are hard for them and why they're hard. This way none of us have to figure any of that out; whether the situation is important enough to buy an expensive diamond for is much easier, and it sets things up so that our judgement is right often enough that they can trust it."

"Why are you rare?"

"If somebody else buys the diamond then it could be anything, couldn't it?"

"They could just give you a budget. A magic budget."