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The following has no point to it; I'm just playing with numbers and the Profession skill in the hands of Commoners. Feel free to swipe left if you're not enthralled by this very important thought experiment.
I'm not sure if I got this impression from an AP, a home game, or some other source, and then it could have been from Pathfinder, 3.5, or even d20 Everquest, but for as long as I can remember, I believed a generic commoner, such as a Farmer, made on average 1 gold per year. I was also aware of the money-earning system of the Profession skill, but for some reason, it never really registered for me that a Commoner was using the same system.
The Commoner NPC class gets Profession as a Class skill. Let's assume the Commoner has a Wisdom score of 7 (minimum score in point buy) and 1HD, and puts a rank into Profession. That's still a +2 on his Profession check at worst. With an average roll of 10.5 on the d20, he's getting a 12.5 on his check, or 6.25, rounded down to 6 gold PER WEEK. That common farmer is making a steezy 312G per year!
Needless to say, this made me think. So, I looked up the cost of living in Pathfinder, and found that an average cost of living (lives in his own apartment, small house, or similar location—this is the lifestyle of most trained or skilled experts or warriors. He can secure any nonmagical item worth 1 gp or less from his home in 1d10 minutes, and need not track purchases of common meals or taxes that cost 1 gp or less) is 10G/month. Now, this is just for the farmer himself. Most farms have every member of the family working, but for the sake of stretching these numbers to their limit, let's assume his wife contributes nothing to the farm or income. That's now 20G/month, or 240G/year, leaving them with a cool 72G to save or play each year.
Remember, this is all based on a 1HD Commoner with the lowest Wisdom score allowed in a Point Buy, and no other bonuses, and he's getting by fine while fully supporting another adult! If we assume that point buy is 10, and put it all into Wisdom, add Skill focus (Profession), we're suddenly making 10G per week, or 520G per year. Add in a working spouse, and you can double that. 1,040G/year? Let's add 2 children (and pretend the cost of living is no lower for children), and 40G/month leaves them with 560G, or over 50% of their annual earnings! Once those younguns are old enough to start pulling their weight around the farm, we're looking at one wealthy family! Add a few Masterwork tools (easily affordable), and that's another 52G/year per family member.
As I stated above, I have no conclusion or build, or anything relating to this. I just wanted to put this all "on paper" for my own sake, as well as share with anyone who might also be surprised by these numbers. I guess if there's any sort of conclusion to this, it would be this question: Is this in line with the expected wealth of generic NPC's (even the 7 Wis example), or does crunching the numbers like this suddenly give generic NPC's much more wealth than the system expects?
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Of course a 7 wisdom human would probably be terrible at making financial/life decisions and could have difficulty finding work in a competitive labour market.
An actual farmer in the Game Mastery Guide is a commoner 1/expert 1 with a wisdom score of 13 and Profession (farmer)+9.
It would be interesting to see how this add up in a community.
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I think that the economic system of Pathfinder is a little bit different than the expectations that people bring to the table. In most people's generic-fantasy-Middle-Ages, peasant farmers are basically eating dirt because they can't afford high-quality foods like sawdust, and a "copper piece" is a week's wages. And, to be fair, gold coins were extremely rare and valuable in the historic Middle Ages. Both the German "mark" and the English "pound" were units of account, but didn't actually exist in coin form -- the first English pound that was actually a coin didn't exist until Henry Tudor (Henry VII). Even the silver shilling was a rare coin that few people actually saw. (Indeed, in 1650, hardly the Middle Ages, a person could live comfortably on 5 pounds -- 1200 pennies -- per year).
That said, that was English money and Golarion money is different. If you look at the price list, one Golarion gold piece is worth roughly $100 US in modern currency (or to put it another way, one copper piece is worth roughly a US dollar). Obviously, an English penny is/was a lot more valuable than a Golarion copper piece.
Your hypothetical farmer is thus earning roughly $24,000 per year in modern economic terms. Yes, that's enough to survive on, but it's not a particularly awesome lifestyle. He could, in theory, save $7200 per year, but of course, no one actually saves that much. (Average savings rate in the US is about 4.4%.) The "poverty line" in the modern US is roughly $22,000, so our farmer is above the poverty line. He's in the second quintile of income (meaning he makes more than about 20% of the population).
As Decimus pointed out, most people, especially most people with low Wisdom, are probably not great at making financial decisions. Almost by definition, I would expect our farmer friend not to be saving a lot of his money and more likely, be blowing his disposable income in various ways that are not formally part of the cost of living.
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The lifestyle options don't include tithing, medical expenses, cost of ancillary buildings like barns and stables, cost of livestock, or equipment repair/replacement. That stuff will eat up the farm family's surplus pretty quickly. Also, while an assumption of rolling 10.5 is fine for looking at a whole year, a few bad rolls in a row could leave our farm family somewhat hurting in the short term, especially if combined with other expenses coming at the same time.
We've all had those nights where the d20 wouldn't roll above a 6.
The lifestyle options don't include tithing, medical expenses, cost of ancillary buildings like barns and stables, cost of livestock, or equipment repair/replacement. That stuff will eat up the farm family's surplus pretty quickly. Also, while an assumption of rolling 10.5 is fine for looking at a whole year, a few bad rolls in a row could leave our farm family somewhat hurting in the short term, especially if combined with other expenses coming at the same time.
We've all had those nights where the d20 wouldn't roll above a 6.
I believe the lifestyle options do include tithing, since they explicitly include the very similar expense of taxation, and I put medical expenses in the same category as food and rent (hence also included).
As for the rest, what you make with your Profession roll is net profit, not gross, so it's all swept under the rug.
And while 10.5 is a bad assumption, the farmer is free to take 10, yielding very similar outcomes.
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The Profession skill abstracts a lot of details and doesn't differentiate between a salary and an owned business. The latter implies that you have a large startup capital, loan payments, and operational costs that must be paid for from your income. Earning a salary would mean your money is all take-home. My assumption has always been that Profession says what you can bring in, and if in your game you want to track running your own business, then you need to work with your GM to figure out your initial startup and annual operational costs.
Returning to farming, breifly: Farms in the U.S. bring in quite a bit of money, but net profits are still low because profit margins are low, and much of that goes to reinvestment into the farm itself (buying and maintaining equipment, upgrades, expansion, etc.) It's pointed out in the thread that Fuzzy-Wuzzy refers to that a typical farmer--as in one who owns their farm--is not really living large because much of their wealth is tied up in equipment. They have a decent standard of living, but not necessarily a lot of free cash or liquid assets.
Amusingly, by RAW you can do that week's worth of farming in the middle of winter and do just as well as in harvest season. :)
Well, sure, but there are circumstance bonuses and penalties. :)
Farmers have plenty of work to do in the winter, too, which generates income. It's not what the layperson think of as "farming" but it's stuff farmers do (e.g. animals, wine and/or beer, crops that can be stored for a long period of time, and so on). The least productive time for farmers in terms of income is early to mid spring. Lots and lots of work planting and tending to crops, nothing being harvested, and no time to do anything else.
I would also observe that "lives in his own apartment, small house, or similar location" doesn't necessarily describe the property needs of farmers. I would imagine a significant portion of the farmer's income is used to either pay rent or mortgage on all the additional property you need for farming (fields, pastures, orchards, etc.)
The tax man cometh
Something that I think should be remembered: All of those things that adventurers are looting? Somebody made them. Somebody gathered the resources, refined those resources, and then put them into the final product. (Sometimes with many more steps in-between)
Some of that is going to be from nobles/bandits (a bit redundant, I know :P) extorting people from their wealth and then combining it into a more concentrated form (generally magic items).
Anyway, ultimately all of that wealth was produced by fairly normal people (for that universe, where even a first-level character is superhuman in at least a few respects) at some point, and far more was destroyed.
There is a great deal of wealth being produced every single day on Golarion.
Still, keeping people alive is rather expensive. Food, medical care, "please-don't-kill-us-or-steal-our-stuff" bribes, payment to adventurers to kill off those people threatening to kill them or steal their stuff...
I also think it's worthwhile to note that most wealth is going to be in things like their house, animals, their business, and other non-liquid investments.
Also: Only the head-of-household pays for the highest cost of living. Everyone else in the household can get away with a lower cost of living, so that's a money-saver.