Disagreement over different skills worth relative to one another, disagreement over what plans to execute as a team etc. dissembles the individual skills' value compared with gold.
People who can't agree where to put a bridge, what crops to plant, or whether or not to go to war will all want gold. The consensus about gold's value is a stronger component of gold's worth than its actual intrinsic value is.
Imagine there's a person with a drill for wells and a person with a material amount of gold. If each walks into a town where people are dehydrated, the people of the town will hopefully be more excited to see the drill person than the gold person.
If they each walk into 5 random towns, however, one would imagine the gold guy would have a more positive reception on average, because gold's beauty is independent of people's circumstances or culture, whereas the value of a well is very contingent on whether or not people want a new source of water. Historical royalty who did not want for anything were always happy to see more gold. Precious metals are one solution of the age old conundrum: "What gift do you get for the man who has everything?"
This relatively inelastic desirability makes gold valuable for trade. As a proxy for human energy and people's resources, gold can solve many different problems that a drill cannot.
Stephen Colbert made segment about gold, along with a mocking commercial asking folks to diversify their portfolio (with Women and Sheep...) but the idea that shiny metal holds value better than a magazine full of 5.56 and a rifle seems a little off. One can hunt or defend oneself with a rifle and ammunition, trade the ammunition to others, and even become a bandit. All gold does is allow one to trade. Hell, in the Metro book/video game series which takes place in a post-apocalyptic Moscow, the units of currency are military grade, pre apocalypse, ammo and, at a lesser value, post-apocalyptic ammo.
Is there more to the notion that gold is valuable than "history" and "shiny"?
[0] - http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/ufq6qh/prescott-financ...
In tbe event of a massive catastrophe, gold is worth MORE than money. Think of it this way, name a civlization in history. Would you rather have $100 of their currency now, or $100 worth of gold from that era now?
$100 worth of gold bought at $850/ounce buys 0.117 ounces of gold. Today that gold (at $1181/ounce) is worth $138.90.
Your cash is worth $100.
The gold bull run of the 70s peaked at $850. So, even if you bought an ounce of gold at its peak, you'd be getting about $1300 for it today.
Cash, on the other hand, would have inflated away quite a lot, so your 100 bucks would buy you about 40 1980-dollars' worth of goods and services today.
But this still highlights the problem with this scenario: currencies lose value over time. They do this by design to encourage people not to hoard currency, but instead to exchange it for goods and services, which encourages people to produce goods and services. Because of this, any non-perishable commodity is going to gain value over time relative to a fiat currency. There is nothing special about gold in this regard.
Gold is still important and will remain important as long as people consider it to be value of last resort for bartering or exchanging product and services. What good is the skill if you can't exchange it for more important things you need for survival? Generally in economics, capital (gold) is always considered more valuable than labor (skill).
IOW "The wealthy were able to migrate to safer places and restart their lives more easily."
No surprise there. So it was their wealth, not gold per se, that made their move safer and restarting easier.
Gold is the most useless element in the world. But greed has no bounds and the love of men for gold seems endless.
If you're wealthy but cannot easily carry said wealth with you across borders or conflict lines or hide it from a kleptocratic Government then there's not that much that you can do.
Case in point, the high middle classes from my Eastern-European country, who after WW2 were wiped clean by the Government in just a couple of years, the result of industry and real estate nationalizations, combined with a forced revaluation of paper money. Holding gold could have protected one against all this, at least partially.
Out of all the naturally occurring elements, proactinium probably takes the "most useless" prize - it's used by scientists doing radiometric dating. And it's both toxic and radioactive.
Texas just wants to make sure what they have claims to is actually in their possession. What is wrong with that?
It's pretty normal for any large investment fund like that to own some gold. What is weird is that Texas as a state is getting into the precious metals storage business which would normally be the domain of private business.
Some economists such as Willem Buiter like to claim gold is in a "6000-year bubble", but others figures like Kyle Bass counter:
"Buying gold is just buying a put against the idiocy of the political cycle. It's that simple"
It's worth noting that lately there has been talk[0] of using the cashless society in order to implement negative real rates. Negative real rates are a way to fight inflation (by removing money directly from bank accounts), but typically such rates are not possible because people will just hold gold and physical cash against negative rates. In the past such behaviour is what prevents rates from going negative.
[0]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-10/citi-econo...
As described, there can't be a good article on "why every civilization picks gold as its currency" because the premise is false.
The article acknowledges this as to silver, though not as to iron. On the other hand, the somewhat bizarre premise that currency has to be one or another chemical element goes unquestioned. Historically it was common to use grain as a currency. Even among metals, we know electrum coins have been used to great success.
“Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency. No fiat currency, including the dollar, can match it.”
http://www.cfr.org/financial-crises/alan-greenspan-central-b...
I don't know anyone willing to work for a worthless piece of paper.