More Precious Than Silver

[mishalak]

It was just a throwaway line at the end of chapter 14 in Circus of the Damned.
     "Please tell me I'm not the only one in this car with silver bullets."
     Zerbrowski grinned. Dolph said, "Silver's more expensive than gold. City doesn't have that kind of money."

It got me to thinking about what it would do to history if silver were much more valuable. It should cause all sorts of changes, but then if vampires, magic, and all the rest were real that should have changed history a lot too. But the world of Laurell K. Hamilton is almost exactly like ours other than the supernatural. I, of course, can't just leave it alone so I spent a bit of time recently trying to come up with rationalizations for the apparent contradictions.

My first rationalization is that though the supernatural boogies are real that doesn't change history much as long as they are for the most part hidden from public view (which they are). Second when something happens in history the reason the other side didn't win was because the winning side usually had more magic as well as more arms. I think I might be able to get the enlightenment to work since magic isn't exactly an everyday thing by saying that most scholars ignore it and the few who don't follow Newton in throwing aside many of the old assumptions and studying rationally. That sort of works. But still I think it would produce a somewhat different world than our own.

But none of that is as bad as silver being more valuable than gold. I mean that would throw all sorts of default assumptions into a cocked hat. What about silver dollars? Were they minted? Did Colorado have a longer silver boom? Was there a silver purchase act? Without the cause of free silver what was the rallying cry of William Jennings Bryan and the populists? How far back was silver more costly? The reason is obvious enough; it has more cachet with actually working against the supernatural. And the majority of Gold and Silver's price is their popular image. There are more than enough of both for jewelry, but having this aura about them makes people hoard them. In our world gold has much more of a reputation so it has the high price and silver is regarded as second best and so has a more natural price. If the hording of gold in bullion form and the purchase of it as an investment stopped the price would likely drop to about $50 an ounce or less based upon the amount out there and the demand for jewelry alone.

So how in the world could silver rise to that price level? Well assume some hording by government and it isn't too hard. Though probably very annoying to would be vampire hunters. Still at the higher price there is a lot more silver available. Unless there was some serious hording and more gold available I don't think it would be possible for it to go down in price. And what in the world would that do to the film industry alone? Would it have even started without cheap silver? And what do Navajos sell beside the road in the southwest if silver is that expensive?

Bad world building is probably the ultimate answer. But still it nags at me.

Comments

[akicif.livejournal.com]

But still I think it would produce a somewhat different world than our own

I think the Enlightenment could have gone either way if magic worked, depending on how early the rules were discovered. One end result is Greg Keyes' Age of Unreason (although hopefully without dropping an asteroid on London) while others get you things like John Ford's The Dragon Waiting or Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

LKH's worldbuilding is just so much handwaving. Although I enjoyed the early novels, I can barely get through the recent ones. I've always tended to skim the sex scenes and skip the gratuitous torture scenes, which doesn't leave a lot to read.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Really after the first three, maybe two, I only really liked Obsidian Butterfly. That one was had the ultral violence, but no sex, and it made more sense why Anita didn't figure things out earlier.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

But none of that is as bad as silver being more voluble than gold.

Money talks. (Sorry, irresistible impulse.)

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

This is why JK Rowling drives me nuts... she does that sort of thing _all the time_. I haven't read enough Hamilton to comment, but Rowling will just toss something in-- like there being wizards present in a Muggle war-- and then go blithely on. Because she used the line as a throwaway joke, but it shows that that's how she sees world-building-- as something that no-one's going to pay more attention to than for that one line or so. And she's managed to make a world that just, in so many ways, doesn't _work_. Feh.

--R

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

For whatever reason I've not noticed it as much in the HP books. Though the ignorance of wizards and witches about muggles does bother me. Sure they're hidden, but one would think that more than enough wizards of muggle parents would enter their world to keep the wizarding community well informed. That has always bothered me a bit. Though it has made for some neat moments.

[scottscidmore.livejournal.com]

Just a side note. While gold's price is in part driven by the investment demand, there is a fairly high demand for in for 'industrial' applications in a technological civilization. Gold plating on electronics, gold for bonding semiconductors to conductors, some tough corrosion problems, gold film for heat refection on eye protection for working around hot stuff. In the art work, besides jewelry there's gold leaf for gilding, and ruby glass.

Silver may have received it's reputation for effectiveness against the supernatural in part from a real world fact, silver is toxic and inhibits the growth of microorganisms in liquids kept in silver containers, and in part to the connection between silver and the Moon.

What if the silver jewelry being sold was a silver-nickel-platinum-(other metals) alloy? Sold with the reputation of silver in mind, adulterated to lower the cost and increase the profit margin.

And you could tweak nature so that silver was less common than for us, so that it was more like gold.

Or what if silver wasn't truly effective against the supernatural? If that reputation was spread by the very beings it was supposed to harm, against whom it was no more effective than lead. Doing so would serve to drain the resources of those fighting the supernatural, reducing their effectiveness. When they were killed by something, the silver story would serve to help hide the existence of a real way to harm them, muddling the facts. Those humans who know the truth about silver, perhaps often on the fringes of mainstream society - such as the Navajos selling by the roadside, would not value silver than much.

If raising the cost of silver messes with history that much, just imaging how the traditional effectiveness of iron would change things.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

As near as I can tell at least 30% of all the gold that has ever been produced (3.4 billion troy ounces) is held by governments. The US alone holds 7% of all the gold ever refined. Industrial consumption also seems to be relatively low, compared to silver. 8% is in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York belonging to various national governments.

Yearly production in the US totals some 9 million ounces. I've been unable to locate exact figures on the consumption of gold by industry, but I would be enormously surprised if it totaled more that 5% of that figure as aside from dental work it is not extensively used in anything other than coins, ingots, and jewelry.

The use of gold as a conductor is overrated; silver is better and is more often used in applications needing low resistance. Gold is only used when its ductile quality and resistance to corrosion trump silver's otherwise superior qualities. Honestly gold's price isn't at all due to its usefulness because it isn't.

[scottscidmore.livejournal.com]

I'm not arguing that it's price is mostly due to industrial applications, just that there's enough there to have some influence. And trying to think of how the price of Au & Ag might come near each other.

Stuff below implies 23% went to industrial, after saying that 80% didn't. This was in 2001, I believe but don't have the industrial consumptions was a few percent higher in the `90s boom. So say 1/5 to 1/4 goes to industrial.

Gold's use as a conductor is mainly as a corrosion resistant conducting layer, or where it's softness is useful as in semiconductor packaging.

One potential use that is ruled out by the prices is as a high density material. Part of the consumption of tungsten and tantalum are for applications where a high density material is needed, and gold has about the same density. (A modern counterfeiting trick is a tungsten bar covered with a layer of gold, the densities are a close enough match that normal specific gravity measurements are fooled)

In 2001, it was estimated that 2870 tons of gold were produced worldwide. About 80 percent of that gold production was used to make jewelry,
...
Each year approximately 660 tons of gold are used in telecommunications, information technology, medical treatments, and various industrial applications.

(about 23%)

http://www.newmont.com/en/gold/goldfacts/usesof/index.asp

The prime use is in electronics...The production of plating salts accounts for 70% of the more than 150 tonnes of gold used annually in electronics...Japan is the major fabricator of electronics products in the western world, accounting for over 45% of gold consumption, followed by the United States with nearly 30%. The United Kingdom and Germany are the only other significant contributors at about 6 and 7% respectively although South Korea is growing.
...Dental gold is the second important sector...

http://www.gold.org/discover/knowledge/aboutgold/industrial_uses/index.html
http://www.gold.org/discover/sci_indu/indust_app/

How much of a boost this makes in the price of gold isn't easy to say, as the pricing is on a fairly rapidly changing part of the price/demand curve.

Silver consumption is coming down as digital cameras replace film-based ones.

One could perhaps tweak the fictional world enough to bring the prices closer. Governments sticking to the gold standard, which fixes the price, governments not fixing the price of silver, perhaps some major states using copper-nickel coinage in place of silver. The extension of the large scale burning of coal, or people eatings a lot of eggs 8-), with the sulfur compounds tarnishing silver and lowering it's demand in ornamental uses, being replaced by gold and the platinum metals.