The Spanish had grown up knowing that gold could be swapped into land and wine and women. Get a lot of it, go home, live the good life. I doubt it was more sophisticated than that. The evidence suggests that the Spanish didn't have an academic understanding of currency, because the influex of silver caused huge inflation in Spain and damaged their economy.
> it's univerally a good currency
It's not. Metals don't function as currency even in the world we live in. You can't go into a shop and buy a computer with a piece of gold - nobody is set up for it. It functions less as a currency even than something like bitcoin, which you can occasionally find something quoted in. With gold - you won't find someone quoting food, land, or shares with it, or set up to accept it as payment.
There's a concept called 'store of value'. Gold is regarded by many to function as a strong store of value. In fact, recently it hasn't - it's gone up significantly for several years and then down this year.
But that's a different thing to currency. And it's not unique to metals - land and cocaine tend to have those properties also.
> It may be that the Inca never used gold as
> currency, but it would be hard to substantiate
> that claim, I would think
You've set down a default assumption that is incorrect - that gold is a universal currency. Then you've followed on to say that - therefore - it should be assumed that the Incas used gold as a currency. This is invalid.
The article says there's an absence of evidence of markets from the Incas, and painted a picture of how life worked. If you think that gold was valued as a currency, show some evidence.
The Spanish had grown up knowing that gold could be swapped into land and wine and women. Get a lot of it, go home, live the good life. I doubt it was more sophisticated than that.
Actually it really was. Spanish, Europeans, Asians, and perhaps other nations elsewhere, tried different methods of exchanging goods. In the beginning they would have exchanged good directly (salt for sheep), but they found this would be very hard because you could not readily divide certain goods and you had to buy significantly more or less of what you needed. Other forms of payments were introduced in different parts of the continents including salt, silk, and even nails in some regision, etc... Then came metal. It wasn't easy to divide, but soon enough they introduced small equally sized weighted metal. But as you can imagine the crooks would mixed different metals, which in the long run lead to coined money to certify authenticity. However Kings started to reduce the quantity of gold to repay debts they owed because it was not so much based on weight, but more so on "coin." There is more, but you would want to read the Origins of Wealth of Nations by A. Smith for more on the subject.
Gold seem to have been a good "currency," (but then again what do you mean by currency) and could have remain such, but the problem has always been the value it was based on and what you could have afforded with it. There layed the problem.
The above is what I understood from Adam's Smith Wealth of Nations, Book I, but I must admit I am still at my first read and perhaps by read 3 I will have a better understanding.
To be clear, I think gold is inferior as a currency compared to modern (fiat) money. I was comparing it to other goods-of-value (livestock, clothes, food, etc.)
I know very little about the Inca, and make no claim about them. I'm merely skeptical of the article's claims (which may very well be right).
There's a concept called 'store of value'. Gold is regarded by many to function as a strong store of value. In fact, recently it hasn't - it's gone up significantly for several years and then down this year.
But that's a different thing to currency. And it's not unique to metals - land and cocaine tend to have those properties also.
You've set down a default assumption that is incorrect - that gold is a universal currency. Then you've followed on to say that - therefore - it should be assumed that the Incas used gold as a currency. This is invalid.The article says there's an absence of evidence of markets from the Incas, and painted a picture of how life worked. If you think that gold was valued as a currency, show some evidence.