… the world is very satisfactory. It is merely the fact that it is real that makes it so hard to swallow.
http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=28765
As Pure Story…
07-May-10An Academic Gold Standard.
06-May-10From time to time in literature, direct references are made to money. It might be a sesterce or a half-a-crown, a dinar or a livre. Having a sense of the value of these foreign amounts has always been difficult. For this reason, old Greek and Latin textbooks would translate the amounts into modern dollar equivalents. So we might learn that Cicero bought a house for the sum of three thousand dollars (in 1845 money), which at one point communicated something; but now it simply does not. The note gets outdated just as the original reference it attempts to explain.
There is no perfect answer to this problem, but there is a satisfactory one. All monetary amounts should be expressed, in academic notes, with reference to their value in gold. Of course vast amounts of gold have been discovered since the ancient days, which might indicate a cheapening of gold’s value, but it appears to have been offset by gains in the demand for gold created by a much larger population. The value of gold fluctuates, of course, like all commodities; but its long-term value is more stable than almost any other. The result is that a bag of gold, which was worth a tremendous amount two thousand or a thousand years ago, is still worth a tremendous amount now.
Calculating monetary figures back to a gold standard would provide a relatively stable way of describing and comparing value across time.
Let us take, for example, Mr. Darcy. He has £10,000 per annum. We know that this is fabulous wealth; but just how wealthy is he? In 2010 it is two dollars for every pound, but we know he makes a lot more than $20,000 a year.
I have done rough calculations, not having precise figures before me, but let us test our conclusions just for method: in 1816 the British government standardized the gold value of their coinage. This is a bit late for Mr. Darcy, but the 1816 values must have been close to Mr. Darcy’s, and they are delightfully easy to ascertain. At that time a sovereign, the one-pound coin of England, was pegged at 113 grains of gold, just shy of ¼ ounce (which is 120 grains). In terms of bullion coin, it would be called a quarter-ounce. But let us stick with the numbers we have. The value of gold in 2010 dollars is approximately $1150 to the ounce, or $2.40 per grain. A sovereign’s 113 grains, then, comes out to $271. £10,000 per annum becomes 10,000 x 271 = $2,710,000 per year. This seems about right. Mr. Darcy has somewhere around the yearly income of your average major league baseball player; which is all the more impressive, because he does not have to work for it and is merely drawing the profit off of a much larger capital sum. And $2.7 million per year definitely sounds like enough for Mrs. Bennett to be very impressed, and for Mr. Darcy to be profoundly untroubled by financial concerns. He probably would not be comfortable giving Mr. Wickham and Lydia Bennett a lifetime pension (a lifetime pension! imagine being able to offer that – and to in-laws you don’t even like!) without investment income of this order of magnitude.
The above dollar calculations will be valueless in twenty years, and indeed would have looked very different even in the last presidential administration. What would be desired is scholars’ determination, and insertion into the notes, of the value of a grain of gold in the currency unit in question. Given this information, future teachers and students will be able to discuss, within reasonable limits of precision (no standard of comparison will be completely accurate), the monetary scale operating in a given work.
While economic values will still remain hard to translate across centuries and countries, this simple standard does seem to give a realistic sense of many financial amounts to be encountered in literature. A penny was 1/240th of a pound; hence more than a dollar of today’s money. Hence it was possible to live for a penny a day, or even a half-penny, amounts which seem absolutely ludicrous to us today when we read them. In global terms, a dollar a day is a fair definition of the poverty line, the kind of poverty that the Western nations no longer have, but used to. Similarly an income of £40 per year was definitely modest (not quite $11,000), but enough to manage in the only partially industrialized world of England, just as it would be enough today in most countries of the world.
Notes on Roman Money.
06-May-10The top unit of value in the coinage of the late Republic in Rome was the aureus, which prior to Nero was approximately 1/42 of a pound of gold. In 2010 dollars, where a pound of gold is worth about $14,000, the aureus takes on a value of approximately $330.
The denarius, a silver coin, had a value of 1/25 an aureus, putting its value around $13.30. Caesar doubled the legionary’s pay to 225 denarii a year (ca. $3,000). Promotion involved a substantial raise: centurions received 3,750 denarii a year (ca. $50,000).
The sestertius was the basic unit of monetary measure. It was ¼ of a denarius, or about $3.30. It was abbreviated IIS = 2.5 (S being Semi), or ¼ of a denarius (X); this is also written HS. Suetonius reports that Caesar purchased for his mistress Servilia, mother of Brutus, a pearl for six million sesterces, nearly $20 million; the ring Kobe Bryant got for his wife (“the Kobe special”) while he was on trial for sexual assault – when adjusted for gold prices – cost about $11 million.
The as, a bronze coin, was ¼ of a sestertius, or about $0.80. Catullus tells his lover (prob. Clodia, vide infra) that the opinions of all those who condemn their affair are worth an as. In the time of the early Republic – before the unmercantile Romans had any gold or silver coinage at all – the as was a pound of bronze and was the standard unit of measure. Hence in the English translation you will find Livy talking about Romans having such and such a number of asses – a term I initially found first confusing (“Did they measure wealth in donkeys?”), then amusing.
A quadrans was ¼ of an as, about $0.20. We deduce from Horace and Cicero that a quadrans was the typical price of going to the baths in the late Republic. It became emblematic of a small sum. Marcus Caelius Rufus called his ex-wife, the infamous Clodia, a quadrantaria, i.e. a twenty-cent whore.
“Sitting opposite the collection box, he saw how the crowd cast their money into the box; and many rich people put in much. And a poor widow came up, and put in two mites [minuta, dimes, essentially], which make one quadrans [Greek kodrantes]. And calling his disciples he said to them, ‘Amen I say to you, This poor widow has given more than any of the people who gave; they gave out of their excess, but she gave out of her poverty, all she had, all her living.’”
HS.
05-May-10Last night I was reading up on the Roman monetary system, and was reminded that a sestertius was 1/4 of a denarius. A denarius was abbreviated with an X; and a sestertius, unaccountably, with an HS. What the hell was that H? And I figured it out: it’s not an H, it’s IIS, i.e. II et semis, two and a half, a quarter of X. I’ve spent my whole life around Classicists and I never could get anyone to tell me what that meant, but I’m sure my guess here is right.
May.
05-May-10Summer weather arrived this weekend – ninety degree days – and with it, an astonishing ascension of complexity in the life around me. In April solitary individuals would break the stillness – “What is that bird? Where is he? Let me figure it out.” – but now the forest is never silent, all kinds of birds and insects (and frogs, very loud) making a constant chatter. Thrushes, chickadees, woodpeckers, and owls are the main components, but I can’t tell anymore. There are many more sounds and silhouettes than I can identify.
The insects have emerged as well. The most obvious are the ants – there is hardly a rock here that does not have its ant-nest beneath – and the flies. The first hatch of blackflies are here, alas. On Sunday evening they were merciless – I don’t remember them being so efficient in attacking – and I have a good dozen welts on my body as a result. “You haven’t really had a bugbite until you see blood trickling” is their motto.
The trilliums are all in bloom, and the deer have not yet migrated to the uplands (I have not seen one yet this spring anywhere but on the valley-floor), so they have not yet been eaten. The yellow adder’s tongues are about done, but the wood anemones are still flowering, and there are a few mayflowers – Maianthemum Canadense – a species I have all over my property but never recognized before. Dog-hobbles and apples also in bloom, and in the valley, the first cherries.
The turkeys have been using my front lawn as a morning point d’assignation, with the males displaying and gobbling while the females ate all the grass seed I had laid out. The females always seemed terribly unimpressed, but there are enough turkeys in the woods, so it does seem to work out in the end.
“Don’t Worry… He’s More Afraid of You…”
29-Apr-10A few days of emotional chaos, perfectly reflected by the weather: cold, rain, sleet, snow – yesterday I woke up to find half-an-inch on the ground. The wind has been astonishing, shaking the house, raising great swells of sound up from the mountain. Clarity emerged, and I wrote a letter, which I resolved to carry down to the mailbox at the bottom of the road, about a mile away. I emerged around six p.m., walking down my path to the road, absorbed in my thoughts. As I crossed the field I watched my feet, as the way was damp from runoff and there were puddles and muddy patches and so forth.
Little did I know that watching me, from the end of the stone wall, was the bear. I walked right at him, utterly unaware of his presence, until I heard large motion right in front of me. I looked up and saw him about fifteen feet away, leaning back onto his back legs and then bolting down the path. I watched him run away, around the curve of the mountain into the woods: he was beautiful, galloping as wonderfully (and as quickly!) as a horse. He looked larger than ever, probably close to four hundred pounds, more corpulent and stocky, though his movement was still spry and youthful. His fur was black like a black hole, reflecting no light.
He must have been watching me the whole time – he was right in my path – until he was unnerved by my fearless approach (timere nequit quod adesse nescit), and when it came time for fight or flight, he presumed that I was some powerful beast who could dispense with caution around bears, and he chose flight. Had he chosen otherwise, of course, my story could have come to a swift but dramatic finish. I was utterly unarmed and hundreds of feet from either my cabin or my car.
He ran away this time, but if he lives many more years, he will be bigger, and less inclined to run away, no matter who comes down the path, or how cocky his approach.
The experience of passing through situations where you might well have died is unusual – though much can be ascribed to chance, you feel saved, preserved – the question being, “for what?”
For the Regians…
27-Apr-10A piece in the Wall Street Journal about debaters, featuring Eric Dimichele.
Talk about Brains!
27-Apr-10If you’ve never read a piece by Glenn Greenwald, treat yourself. This guy sounds like a terrible person to have a dinner conversation with – time to cut down on those unsubstantiated assertions! – but invaluable as a journalist and blogger. Terribly smart and frighteningly informed. And he exudes the integrity of crisp thinking. In the above post he makes mincemeat of poor Douthat.
Simone de Beauvoir.
27-Apr-10Apparently a new edition of her book The Second Sex is out (rather substance-free review from Salon here). I found the book in a friend’s house a few weeks ago, and devoured a few hundred pages of it before my visit ended. It’s dazzlingly intelligent and endlessly fascinating; I read it as perhaps it is best read, i.e. not straight through but picking the chapters that most interested me. I hear that one of the main arguments (which I did not really pick up on) is that “man inclineth to transcendence, woman to immanence;” and perhaps “woman has been condemned to immanence,” i.e. not allowed to engage with “childhood” so much as focused on raising a specific child, not philosophizing about Love so much as in a specific relationship. This struck me as intriguing; and perhaps can be used to explain one thing I never understood, which is that the most broadly (read: transcendently) feminine women I have known have not had children; not having actual children (and probably the full experience of womanhood) they keep something abstract about them.
As usual with these things, taking them as overly prescriptive, as people are always inclined (“So she’s saying I can’t care about Truth because I’m a woman?”) is not helpful, but thinking of how immanence and transcendence work in your own life is. What I desire more than anything now is to move from transcendence to immanence, from potential to actual. And how hard it has been – I have been balking at the threshold for ages now.
Unlimit their liability, and they won’t do this.
04-May-10The BP spill is remarkable because the initial reportage seems to indicate that this was preventable, and can be laid at the feet of a specific Bush administration policy change in 2003. And now there is talk of fixing the oil-spill problem simply by making oil companies fiscally liable for the damage caused. That seems like an obvious and desirable legal change. Currently their liabilities are limited to $70 million, while their profits are of course not limited.