How does gold perform as bullets? But even then, how many people right now know how to make useful gunpowder anyway, and how many will be left after, say, 90% of the world has starved to death/died in famine-driven wars? When all that’s left are a few pockets of naked apes, will there be any who remember the magical alchemy of the boom stick?
Which begs the question for the OP: just how far are we meant to be falling? Are we talking USA drops into Somalia territory, or are we talking about the fundamental world wide collapse of everything that makes modern civilization possible? If it’s just the USA then yeah, gold will be pretty nifty for buying passage to a less messed up place to live. But if the whole planet is depopulated gold might be a useful material for slingshot bullets.
Gold will remain valuable for ornamentation. It’s soft enough to work with fairly basic tools, and it’s shiny and doesn’t tarnish. Of course, ornamentation is a luxury item, so it gets more valuable as civilization regrows.
I strongly suspect this guy’s claim was bullshit. A hundred pounds of gold is a huge amount; over two million dollars worth in current prices. And just a few years back it would have been worth over five million.
And this guy was telling enough people about his gold stash that you heard about it? If it had existed, somebody would have robbed him by now.
Exactly. Until survival isn’t the primary motivator any longer, gold won’t have any real value. But once settlements have been organized, and things are relatively peaceful, then I could possibly see gold/silver coming back as currency.
What do you base this on? The United States has been issuing paper currency since 1863. We’ve been off the gold standard since 1933. If our currency was certain to collapse, wouldn’t it have done so by now? And even if it will inevitably collapse, when is it going to happen? The collapse can apparently be delayed for a long time. I wouldn’t be buying up gold in anticipation of an event that might happen a hundred years from now.
That’s a difficult question to answer, in part because I am not, myself, a prepper or a speculator in gold as currency. Part of the reason why I’m not (one of those things) is because I have a hard time conceiving of a world in which such extensive preparation at an individual level or a quantity of gold would be especially useful.
For the titular question, I suppose the minimum threshold for collapse (the one involving the least breakdown in social order) would be something that results in a collapse of the US dollar. But the follow-on question is, how exactly do we get to that point, and what impact would that chain of events have on the world economy? I do agree that if IF there are stable economies elsewhere that value gold, then gold could be of use, but I wouldn’t take for granted that such economies exist in the event of an economic collapse in the US.
Beyond that… I think prepper culture necessarily assumes something like Somalia levels of governance and disorder, and possibly worse. Again, I consider prepper culture to go beyond mere disaster preparedness and having enough on hand to sustain one through a days-long interruption in services (which is fine, and makes total sense to me).
I’m sure we’ll be hearing about Zimbabwe and Venezuela before long, without acknowledgement that countries like that had deep systemic problems which led to the collapse of their currencies. Like I said elsewhere, if things in the US get that bad and the dollar tanks, it’ll be chaos and gold and silver will do you no good.
I just want to say that isosleepy made an excellent post that hits the highlights of the lunacy that is goldbugs and that arguing with such is futile - you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
That’s quite a brag. At today’s market values, that’s over $2 million. That’s enough for bad people to torture him to find out where it is (if they were dumb enough to think he really had it).
If people have something to trade they will trade it for gold. If there’s not much to trade gold for it won’t be that valuable but it’s still gold, everyone knows what it is, and knows that someone else values it even if they don’t.
But how much do they value it? Getting back to my original example as a for instance, is an offer of an ounce of gold for your hunting rifle a good trade or a bad one for you with the rifle?
And, again, you can’t look it up because the internet collapsed with society.
ETA: The point is, if you can’t answer the question—if you don’t know what value gold has relative to goods—then do you really value it? Would you take it in trade, effectively blind to its worth?
I think in the post-acpocalypse, the notion of “currency” will be the last thing on anyone’s mind for years and years. Economic markets as we know it will disappear, nobody will have enough surplus for a store of value to make sense. Eventually new ones will emerge, but it will take time.
Gold as a manufacturing material will be utterly useless in the post-apocalypse, and I don’t imagine there will be much demand for ornamentation either. But gold does have the property that it’s scarce and hard to fake, so when the need for currency eventually arises, I expect gold and other precious metals will make a comeback.
You’ll know as well as people did when they used gold for money. You ask around, you see what else people traded for gold, you find out what you can trade the gold for. People engaged in such trade for far longer than they’ve had modern money.
They engaged in such trade within a tradition of engaging in such trade, a tradition we have been divorced from for almost a hundred years. At the very least, I see the value of gold plummeting as people unfamiliar with its supposed value responding with grunts as they are offered some paltry amount for their big (and useful) hunting rifle.
This is a good point. As I said above, gold as a material commodity won’t have much intrinsic use. But as you implied above, having information about prices and scarcity is also extremely valuable as well, and precious metals have been filling that need for much of history.
Well, it’s certainly possible that the US economy will crash, but there will be other countries that still have somewhat healthy economies. That’s the situation where owning gold is valuable.
That’s not the situation where you need to stockpile a year’s worth of food and ammunition, though.
I once read an article where somebody was pointing out that apocalypse stories always seem to assume that people will revert back to old ways. But he said that this was unlikely because their knowledge would still exist.
The example he gave was people riding around on horses. Most stories depict people riding horses when the technology to produce fuel disappears. That if we lose the technology of the 20th and 21st centuries, we’ll automatically go back to living the way people did in the 18th and 19th century.
But he pointed out that bicycles are better than horses in many ways. They don’t require food or much shelter and they don’t get sick or die. More people know how to ride a bike than know how to ride a horse (much less know how to take care of a horse). And there are a lot more bicycles lying around for the taking than there are horses. So ten years after the apocalypse strikes, we’ll see everyone riding bikes around not horses. And as society recovers and rebuilds, we’ll direct our rebuilding to manufacturing bicycles not breeding horses.
His point was that people won’t automatically adopt horses just because we rode horses for thousands of years. Because a collapse that destroys modern society won’t uninvent bicycles. So when people start rebuilding society they’ll skip over the horses and go to the bicycles.
The same is true for other modern technologies. The apocalypse survivors will know they existed so they will aim for them. People won’t go back to copying scrolls by hand; they build printing presses and make books. They’ll build steam engines and windmills. They’ll make anesthesia and antiseptics. They will seek to recover as much of modern technology as possible rather than trying to copy all the stumbling we did along the way.
The same is true about finance. Sure, people used gold and silver as currency for a long time. But they learned that fiat currency works better. Societies have more economic growth when they’re not tied down by a finite money supply; you want a money supply that can grow along with your economy. And fifty years after an apocalypse, the new countries that are arising will remember that. The smart new countries will get back on a fiat currency standard as soon as possible and the countries that insist on sticking to a gold standard will fall behind.
If it’s a nuclear apocalypse,most cars and trucks will indeed stop working. As will most electronics. The electronics that aren’t outright fried will be unserviceable and unreplaceable because they depend on widely distributed logistical/support infrastructure which also depends on fried electronics.
Every damn thing has a microchip in it nowadays, and most of that stuff will immediately become junk in the nuclear apocalypse.
Everybody who knows how to work on it or restore it will either be dead, or too preoccupied searching for food to work on electronics, and that knowledge will be gone in a half generation.
Stuff like bicycles will of course still be good. Somewhere someone will know that iPhones existed, but the knowledge and ability to recreate it will be gone for a century or more. Much depends on the timeframe when we’re talking about “recovery”.