"...not food, because outside of cities everyone grows their own food," says Tonia, "and lots of them bring it to the city to market."

"Only one shoe-seller, though."

"And even cities might have only one fifth circle wizard who can cast Teleport for you, or one fifth circle cleric who can Raise Dead."

"Well, I can see how the fifth-circle wizard could end up quite wealthy that way, but surely a shoe-seller must be much wealthier still.  After all, while most people probably don't use Teleports, everyone needs shoes, and the shoe-seller can charge whatever they want for them."

"...you don't have to have shoes," says Tonia.

"I bet the fifth-circle cleric wants shoes, though, so maybe the shoe-seller can set shoe prices incredibly high and capture all the money the cleric got by Raising Dead."

"Well if he can Raise Dead he can also cast Mending on his own shoes, or buy them secondhand off someone else, or go disguised so the shoeseller thinks he's just a random laborer."

"Yes, people often do have a lot of other trades they could make, or other people they could trade with, if somebody else tries to capture too much of the gains from trade.  You want to give them some incentive to stick around, and keep playing the game."

"Sure. The shoeseller mostly picks his prices but he doesn't have absolute power or something." Absolute-power: a simple two-syllable word in Taldane.

"Does he not?  He can just put up a sign saying the price is now a hundred million billion gold pieces.  Nobody can stop him."

"The costs of finding some other solution are high but they're not that high. He gets to capture almost all the gains-from-trade as long as the gains-from-trade are smaller than the cost of going to the next town over or something for a cobbler. But in practice they are, so he gets to capture almost all the gains-from-trade."

"All right, if that's really true, I'm now a bit confused.  If I imagine how much value everybody in a town gets from having shoes, compared to not having shoes at all, it seems like it should be an amount more than ten times greater than the amount to set up a new cobbler's business.  And how is the cobbler capturing most of the gains from trade when he's selling shoes to the cleric, who might be deriving ten thousand gold pieces of value from being able to wear shoes at all?"

"The cleric buys his shoes in the city, when he gets called into the city on important cleric business," says Tonia. "And how would you set up a new cobbler's business, you don't know how to make shoes, and if you tried he'd just lower his prices until you starved, and then go back to raising them."

"Okay, so... you don't actually have the thing, where everybody getting ripped off would pool some money, start a new cobbler in business, and refuse to buy from the other guy for a while even if he lowered his prices."

"Pool what money," says Tonia. 

"The money that everybody in an entire city would have otherwise needed to buy overpriced shoes."

"Twenty households in a village. The poor half haven't got any savings. The rich half have a couple of family heirlooms they'll sell if it's a drought, and a healing potion for if the woman's dying in childbirth and the cleric's out of town, and they don't even use it if the baby's dying, no one's so rich to use healing potions on babies."

Keltham closes his eyes for a second and reminds himself that afterlives are a thing and you can talk to the people in them right now.  It's not like the babies are being cryosuspended.

"A village that size shouldn't have its own shoemaker, then, unless shoes wear out really fast.  You buy shoes in town when you go there to sell whatever you make, or the person who buys whatever you make in the village, brings shoes over to sell when he travels to pick it up.  Or am I wildly off-base on how that would have to work?"

"...that is a town, twenty households."

Twenty families is a RELATIVELY LARGE GROUP HOUSE.

"Pretend I just said city, instead of town, then."

Tonia shrugs. "I don't know how it works in cities."

"Shoesellers compete in cities," Meritxell says. 

"But eighty, ninety percent of Chelish people live outside the cities," Carissa says. It's true in Taldor and she looked up whether it was true in Cheliax, too, because it might be an important difference if it were different, and Cheliax keeps but doesn't publish statistics on that and it's also true in Cheliax.

"No, I mean, does a town of twenty households have one person who's a shoemaker."

"Yes," says Tonia. "He doesn't only make shoes, he works in the fields at planting and harvest time just like anyone who can walk, and tans leather for the shoes but also for anything else you want leather tanned for, but yes, the town has a shoemaker, because it's too far from a city for people to go there for shoes. People farther out come to the town for the shoes."

"And this person is much richer than everyone else in the town because he can charge whatever he wants for shoes?  Serious question, I am actually trying to grasp how Golarion works here."

"No. He can charge whatever shoes are worth to people but that isn't enough to make him rich because no one else has much to spare so shoes aren't worth all that much to them. He's richer than people who have to buy shoes from him, mostly. And then he just gets spread out more ways because more of his kids live." Unless he kills some but Tonia has learned they don't do that in Taldor.