Hello and welcome to Brokegonomics.

Now, in this episode, I had promised to do something else and I hadn't forgotten about that

and I will come back to it my sort of, you know, thinking about how to reconstruct the political

and economic landscape purely from first principles and see what that

tells us about the government world. However, I did a live pro-economics a couple of weeks back,

and somebody asked very nicely if I could take a look at silver, and I thought, well, yes, why not?

So let's talk about silver and what's going on with metals at the moment, because it is

getting quite interesting.

And also there are quite a lot of takes on Twitter that I would love to be true, but they're just really not.

So that needs calling out as well.

So, yeah, gold and silver.

So, I mean, they weren't chosen as money in the first place because of any sort of great mysticism and I think.

They emerged organically because what they did is they solved a hard coordination problem in early economies.

If you need to be able to ship value over long distance, and in the early world, I mean, you had supply chains that went from Cornwall to supplying tin down into

bloody Egypt because it was Bronze Age and you needed tin and you couldn't get tin from very many

places. So it's long been an issue that you need to transport value over long distance.

And actually at that time, it was, it was largely copper. And you kind of got into a

phase after that, basically for the rest of history, where, you know, gold was your sort of state

level money. This is your palace money. Silver is your, effectively your middle class money. It's sort of

daily commerce, that kind of thing. And, you know, lesser metals like copper or bronze might be

used as your street level, you know, buying a bloody loaf of bread or something like that.

And none of this was sort of planned or ideological.

...