Toga & Suit

[Serendipity]

I’ve always liked the gold toga-to-suit ratio comparison which suited investment advisors love to tell their clients. Here’s a graphical representation that I created for anyone unfamiliar with the ratio comparison.

[Michal]

If you would like to compare now ant then you should go for legit space suit  about 2kk dollars. That would be adequate comparison, 

[sixgun]

i wonder where the Roman toga account comes from - i see it said an ounce of gold bought a toga and sandals but never the source. 

The technology behind clothes manufacture is very different between Roman and modern times even though both garments would be primarily handmade - so the comparison is probably not that valid.

However if we accept the comparison is sound it would suggest gold is fairly valued and not undervalued as is often stated.

[MancunianStacker]

2 minutes ago, sixgun said:

i wonder where the Roman toga account comes from - i see it said an ounce of gold bought a toga and sandals but never the source. 

The technology behind clothes manufacture is very different between Roman and modern times even though both garments would be primarily handmade - so the comparison is probably not that valid.

However if we accept the comparison is sound it would suggest gold is fairly valued and not undervalued as is often stated.

Might be hard to find the receipt 😉 

[KDave]

I remember this meme when I started with gold, it's thought provoking. 

I think we must consider energy expended by the many people back in the day to grow/collect/transport the constituent parts before electricity and oil (leverage on human labour) with today's mostly mechanised production chains to produce something of far higher quality; the example here demonstrates the value of gold/stored labour is linked to the cost of energy as well as economic productive work, perhaps call it the value of labour. The value of labour has fallen, said another way, production is cheaper today than it was back then. 

I think over long time frames like this, the value of gold reflects the relative difficulty or ease of access to leverage (oil/electricity, ect) in production, plus some lesser secondary effects. Gold is a unit of account, acting as a store of changing labour value reflected in its price, which is linked to the cost of production, which is linked to the cost of energy/leverage on labour. 

Gold is a store of units of production. It's the cost of production that changes and golds price reflects it?

[sovereignsteve]

3 minutes ago, KDave said:

The value of labour has fallen, said another way, production is cheaper today than it was back then. 

Didn't they have slaves in Roman times😉

[Paul]

Looking at the punters in my local Sports Direct, they aint flush with gold  

[Coolsmp]

Who needs to spend and an oz of gold when youve got ASDA

https://direct.asda.com/george/men/suits-tailoring/D2M1G10C14,default,sc.html

[silenceissilver]

31 minutes ago, Coolsmp said:

Who needs to spend and an oz of gold when youve got ASDA

https://direct.asda.com/george/men/suits-tailoring/D2M1G10C14,default,sc.html

They should consider a new marketing slogan:

ASDA - where you can get a suit for an ounce of silver

[KDave]

1 hour ago, sovereignsteve said:

Didn't they have slaves in Roman times😉

One guy in a jcb is equivalent to many slaves. Oil/electricity is the leverage on human labour. 

[sixgun]

1 hour ago, sovereignsteve said:

Didn't they have slaves in Roman times😉

We are still slaves today - the only difference today is they have tricked us into thinking we are free.

[KDave]

Yes workers are a form of economic slave but cheaper than forced labour for the employer and more productive for society as a whole, because they feed and house themselves, often work harder and are compliant with no need for wasted productivity on guards. True slavery is a very low productivity wasteful form of labour on the whole, but without leverage on labour, more labour is the only way to increase productivity, hence the popularity of the system in the times of our ancestors. I am not talking about the identity politics version of slavery but the historic version, ancient Rome, Greece, China, Muslim Bulgar's, Africans, Egyptians, ect. 

Someone must work to produce, its just the way it is. 

[Paul]

3 hours ago, silenceissilver said:

They should consider a new marketing slogan:

ASDA - where you can get a suit for an ounce of silver

Dont get me started on Asda again 😖😓😓😓 They still haven't paid me for my unpaid work I had to do last year ! Still not been back to the store either

 

[silenceissilver]

5 minutes ago, Paul said:

Dont get me started on Asda again 😖😓😓😓 They still haven't paid me for my unpaid work I had to do last year ! Still not been back to the store either

 

This might explain why they can afford to sell suits at such prices.

[sovereignsteve]

4 hours ago, KDave said:

One guy in a jcb is equivalent to many slaves.

just to make a toga?😁

[KDave]

1 hour ago, sovereignsteve said:

just to make a toga?😁

Perhaps a more contextual example is the electric sewing machine 

[silenceissilver]

I think a loaf of bred might be the single best item to compare prices over centuries and even millenias. It would be quite nice to see a table with the value of a few items over the centuries, epxressed in silver and with the gold silver ratio of the time - shouldn't that tell us if gold and silver are indeed undervalued or not? There must be records of such things, I'm sure.

[Au79]

If 1oz of gold = gentlemen’s suit truely holds. If the possibility of gold price reaches $10,000 an ounce, we will be seeing lots of half naked men 😬

[KDave]

14 hours ago, silenceissilver said:

I think a loaf of bred might be the single best item to compare prices over centuries and even millenias. It would be quite nice to see a table with the value of a few items over the centuries, epxressed in silver and with the gold silver ratio of the time - shouldn't that tell us if gold and silver are indeed undervalued or not? There must be records of such things, I'm sure.

It's interesting the problem I think is the multiple factors in production of suits and bread, even with a simple product, for example the grain. Bread being the end product of many processes which have each developed in efficiency over the ages, all requiring far fewer people now due to the leverage machines provide to human labour. 

I think look to the cost of leverage as that has the greatest impact on production. How much does oil cost compared to gold. How cheap is electricity compared to gold. Is it going to be harder to extract oil and more expensive to produce electricity or not? If yes, then gold (everything) is cheaper today than it will be tomorrow?