On currency, I think that in the Fallout immediate postwar environment, most everything would be barter. I make this assumption because I think that the war must have wiped out 99% of the population. (That's a seat of the pants figure, just based on how it feels in the 2 games. I lived in California for about 20 years and traveled around quite a bit in that time.) As political entities get set up, some of them would try to adopt currency.
One example is the pre-colonization economy along the Congo river. One powerful coastal area had access to cowrie shells, and these were adopted by their leaders as currency. They traded with tribes further inland for grain, who traded with tribes in the jungle for plantains (bananas) and other fruits and vegetables, who traded with river tribes for dried fish, who traded with tribes in the highlands of copper-rich Katanga for metal implements. The Katanga tribes used copper objects as a kind of currency as well. Throughout this chain, the values of the copper and cowrie currencies varied, but continued to have some value. The big difference is the copper retained more value because it was inherently useful for making things, while the cowries traded far inland were more like fancy beads, mostly good for decoration.
I think the post-nuclear setting all comes down to a spectrum of barter-to-currency, though the games probably don't really allow for this in their programming. Tactics took a shot at a two currency solution, with the Brotherhood using a "scrip" and the wastelanders using ringpulls. There's some threads on it in the Tactics forums.
Workforce
Most people would be involved exclusively in scavenging or growing food for a long time. I think you could only have organized industry once you had a population that was fed, secure, and relatively peaceful...which implies some kind of government, even if it's a kind of self-government.
Agriculture
Agriculture in the US is heavily mechanized, as well as dependent on chemicals (fertilizer etc.) and transportation. Even people living on farms would have to work hard to adapt to a post-nuclear environment. Many of the crops they were used to growing would be impossible to grow without machinery, fertilizer, and pesticides, and what was grown couldn't be processed very well (currently done at plants far away, or near cities). Add in fallout, marauders from cities, and possible climate change (on either a short or long time-scale) and I suspect many people in rural areas would die in the years after the war.
Brahmin ranching would be an inefficient use of resources, but it might be appealing for one of the same reasons it's appealing in the modern economy. Some areas can grow plants used for forage easily, without pesticide, fertilizer, or even irrigation. If there aren't a lot of people around to compete for arable land, then the brahmin can essentially live off of unused (or "waste") land.
Industry
Prewar industry can generally be characterized as consisting of long supply chains, where dozens of separate suppliers and subcontractors make the things that go into something fairly simple. The war in Fallout had to eliminate so many steps in these chains that it is doubtful that most industries could be revived for a long time. If ever. Many might have to be rebuilt from the ground up, partly due to the loss of knowledge of how to make or maintain everything.
Karel's initial comment about people from the 19th century being better off might especially apply to industry. Would having a bunch of non-functional stuff lying around in various states of decay make an industrial revolution take longer? What about the fact that the first industrial revolution, and society's use of resources up through the war in 2077, had made use of many of the most easily obtained raw materials (I'm thinking here of ores and mining) and energy (oil)?
Weapons
I suspect that guns would be pretty available in places outside the US. Some of the survivors of the initial exchange would be military and police personnel, and with a complete breakdown in government and society (not to mention command and control), I suspect they would strap up with all the guns they could find. Eventually, those guns would spread to the survivor population.
Literacy, etc.
Literacy would probably continue to exist in some form as long as people were either a) using written language in their postwar existence or b) trying to use or connect to the prewar world in some way. Taking the Boneyard as an example, I can imagine the Followers being most literate (obviously), followed by the Scavs and the Gunrunners. A few of the miscellaneous Adytowners might have use for reading and writing. I would think literacy among the gangs would be rare.
Again, the level of destruction due to the Great War in Fallout strikes me as being enormous, well beyond what was envisaged by the
various kinds of
plans put together by cold-war governments.
