Why do humans love and value Gold so much?
Colombian Jet Gold Artifact |
Why do we love GOLD? I was originally drawn to write
this post after thinking about the gold prices and wondering if they
will continue to stay high. Or if eventually people will come to the
realization that they're paying thousands of dollars for tiny rocks and
move on to a more interesting investment, which would subsequently crash
the market like has happened in the past with other assets. And while
there's ton's of research on the topic from a technical perspective, I
wanted to investigate it from a more personal angle.
From as far back in history as we can trace, gold has been considered a
precious asset. And this lust for gold has not been unique to one
culture or another, but it has occurred across cultures separated by
vast distances, which indicates that the high value of gold was
established even before we have historical recordings confirming it.
Significant gold artifacts include the intricate "Colombian Jet" (above)
from ~800 BCE and the Bulgarian Varna Burial Tomb artifacts (below)
estimated to have been buried ~5000 BCE.... Given that gold phenomena, I
wanted to take a moment and reflect on the question of why do we humans love gold so much?
And how long that's likely to continue? As well as whether a lust for
Gold is simply baked into our human DNA after all this time...
Gold's international cash value remains such an interesting phenomenon since gold in itself has little functional value (like other rare earth elements required for technological and industrial manufacturing for instance). And unlike diamonds which have high stated value but little cash value, gold can be utilized quickly and easily for the value of its published market price. We know that the world's monetary systems value gold prices as one of its primary standards, but if an inexpensive method for producing gold ever came about would it make waves in the international monetary community and crash the price of gold? Or maybe that development in itself would cause it to be hushly purchased by a gold mogul so it could never make gold commercially and publicly have that market effect. And if gold ever did become devalued, would we humans still see it in jewelery form and "have to have it"?
Unlike 5000 years ago, we now have deeply rooted monetary systems (and yes they're corrupt and fragile) but gold's value is mainly based on fear of those systems crashing (and a whole lot of speculation in the meantime). If monetary systems did crash, should we rather own real assets (water, canned goods, survival items) or a gold metal that supposedly has value in an artificial system? There's no doubt that today gold is a strong investment and hedge, but my guess is that if a worldwide monetary crash occurred, people would be looking for other commodities (which would increase their value) over gold...
So maybe it's just me, but the fact that humanity still values gold so highly does seem a bit unevolved given our established systems of currency. And I don't mean to make offence at the many gold collectors around the world, including most of my friends from India :-) but it's just like the idea of spending $5000 on an engagement diamond sounds a bit crazy (essentially just pressurized carbon) when we can just as easily buy a nicer lab created Cubic Zirconia for $200 and give the remaining $4800 to the needy (or invest it in a commodity that the world really needs)... Ultimately no one could argue that gold isn't typically a great investment, but instead my argument is whether it should be. Maybe one day we will get to that, but for the foreseeable future humanity will probably remain more closely related to the man below. What do you think?
Varna Burial Tomb Gold | Photo Source Unknown |
You may also want to check out:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered