We haven’t had oil long enough to do the exercise.
In 500 B.C. in Babylonia apparently an ounce of gold would buy you 350 loaves of bread. It’s roughly the same today.
Augustus paid his centurions about 40 ounces of gold a year in 0 B.C. Today the median wage is about the same.
I don’t disagree about the booms and busts, I’m not saying that a gold standard is a solution.
The fact that pricing in gold is stable over millennia even within an order of magnitude is pretty cool. Certainly no fiat currency could say the same even on a 100 year scale.
>Certainly no fiat currency could say the same even on a 100 year scale.
No one holds fiat for 100 years, so it's a silly thing to worry about. No one hold currency even 25 years, so again, irrelevant. Fiat is designed to make pricing predictable and smooth out the booms and busts that gold causes. It's designed to be slightly inflationary to avoid deflationary spirals. Fiat has been the most stable economic basis in history. There never was a goal that a loaf of bread is $1 usd for eternity. There is a goal that inflation targets around 2%, and the resulting stability under this system allows loans to have lower interest, for businesses to make longer term financial plans, and for solid expansion of economies.
Another way to think of it over those timespans, is gold is simply a terrible thing to hold also. If you're claiming holding gold for 10,000 years breaks even, it's a terrible thing to hold. You might as well hold water or dirt. If gold is worth the same now as 100 years ago, you should have sold it immediately and invested into productive assets, such as Dow Jones index (which over the past 100 years returned 132 times the initial investment).
Since no one holds currency for long term investments, and for likely centuries decent investments have returned vastly more than gold, there is nearly zero use for gold. The love of gold is simply voodoo.
Currency is more stable for buying and selling and pricing over any range people hold currency. If you want an investment that has return, pick nearly anything except gold.
In 500 B.C. in Babylonia apparently an ounce of gold would buy you 350 loaves of bread. It’s roughly the same today.
Augustus paid his centurions about 40 ounces of gold a year in 0 B.C. Today the median wage is about the same.
I don’t disagree about the booms and busts, I’m not saying that a gold standard is a solution.
The fact that pricing in gold is stable over millennia even within an order of magnitude is pretty cool. Certainly no fiat currency could say the same even on a 100 year scale.