1

It's true that the middle ages suffered from a lack of liquidity, but that's because they used silver and gold as money, so the money supply was limited by available metal.

But then there was a huge silver strike in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, resulting in flooding Europe with "Thalers", 1 ounce silver coins minted in Joachimsthal.

At about the same time, the Spanish began bringing in huge amounts of gold and silver looted from the New World.

The effect overall was inflation, because now there was too much money.

2 Some people have argued that the D&D universe is already in the grip of runaway inflation, considering that some magic items sell for upwards of 100,000 gold pieces. If you figure each gold piece at one troy ounce (which would make them really small, given how dense gold is) and with a troy ounce at 31.1 grams, then that would be 3.1 metric tonnes of gold.

3 Magic screws up everything.

-Spell components take a tremendous amount of value directly out of the economy. Resurrecting requires what, 5k gold pieces' worth of diamond dust? Even a lot of lesser spells take 10 or 20 or 100 GP worth of materials. Some of these effects can create economic value worth the price, but not nearly all of them do.

-Brain drain. What do people with high INT scores do? They become wizards, because why swing a sword or make shoes for a living when phenomenal cosmic power awaits? But like the current educational system in the US, this means that you end up with a lot of people who have got their Wizard Degree but find that their school isn't in high demand (especially the illusionists and necromancers...) They've got enough education to be unemployable in the regular labor market but not necessarily useful skills.

-Rolling from the same idea, this means that by and large, "fix it with magic" is going to be the go-to answer for any problems you run into. Crop failures? Forget introducing the three-field system, just bless those fields! You don't need firearms to arm your militia against encroaching bugbears, apply fireballs until well done! Epidemic make you wish you'd invented the germ theory of disease? Nah, just get the divine casters on the job. Basically, since your educated class is heavily invested in being able to Fix Things With Magic, that's going to be what they do when they run into a problem. This means you don't get a lot of social progression, as wizards don't have an incentive to provide scaling solutions (and in fact have lots of good reasons to prevent things like the spread of firearm technology - they actually did a Forgotten Realms story about that, if I recall correctly.)

-Want to be a blacksmith? Better pray a wizard doesn't set up with the Fabricate spell and drive you out of business...

-Of course, a lot of the Bad Things in the world are there precisely because some wizard created them back in the day. Or because some wizard opened a portal and they came through it.

-They have a nasty habit of not dying, not only meaning that their wealth doesn't go back into the economy, but then you get things like liches making life worse for everyone else.

-On top of that, there's a lot of direct wealth destruction going on. Dragons don't just hoard gold, they raze villages. Necromantic hordes roll over the border areas, leaving nothing alive behind them, and even if they lose the pivotal battle, the land is still fallow for lack of farmers and livestock. Eventually demihumans take advantage of the open space and civilization retreats just a little further...

Of course, if you have to live in a world with magic, you want magic on your side too - otherwise you have to live with most of the downsides of living in a magic world but without any of the good stuff that results. So it's not like one side is going to unilaterally fire all its wizards and clerics... not if it doesn't want to become a "former side" anyway.

But you're not likely to find a Renaissance in D&D, simply because the wizards have massive incentives to wizard, not to spread the power they've accumulated through the populace as a whole... and anyone smart enough to advance society will benefit personally much more from being a wizard, when the other choice is being a philosopher. (And even if you get a few altruistic ones, they get murdered by other wizards who don't want their rice bowl overturned...)

1 "the PC venom displayed in episode 2 is not intended to be seen in a good light"
That's my tentative conclusion as well, after seeing a couple of lines in Episode 4.
I really liked this episode.  Most of the things that annoy me about the new season were completely missing this time.  It really felt, mostly, like a Classic Who storyline in a lot of ways.

 We now know WHY the school had rocket powered lockers. Also: we can assume Jeaune keeps a tutu in his....for some reason.  

 

One can certainly do worse than Takahashi and Terasawa. 

Neither Space Cobra nor Urusei Yatsura were big hits in the US, both had been off the air in Japan for over 5 years when the videos were made, but the videos did pique some interest in anime at the time as they were shown on MTV.

However, it may be surprising to learn that that in 1991 AMVs were not really new. In fact fans had been making them for some years (mostly via Betamax), trading them and occasionally showing them at cons. 

Due their existing long before internet streaming video existed in it's current form, and the limitations of magnetic tape as a medium, very few of the really early AMVs can be found. However, this faded, umpteenth generation copy of one I saw between 1989 and 90 is on You Tube...

It's been 24 years so I'm not sure WHO did it, but I think it was either Pam Buck or Keith Mayfield.  

1 When I lived in Philly and went to the Philadelphia Animation Society meetings, there was a guy named Steve Cunningham, (IIRC) who also made AMV's One of the better ones was Mr. Roboto using Gundam footage.

I always thought it would be amusing to use footage from Tezuka's Bagi set to the tune of Devo's Pink Pussycat.

2 A conversation with an old friend has brought the correction, it was Johnathan Cunningham who made some of those early AMVs that I mentioned.

He also did an awesome masquerade costume of Peace from Wizards.