Volume 8, No. 3 (Fall 2005)
Throughout much of modern history, gold served as the commodity that most widely facilitated free exchange. While its virtues as a medium-of-exchange were clear to people of previous eras, gold has fallen out of favor, both in its use as money and in the esteem in which it was once held among academics. It used to be the case that gold, the gold standard, and the various other iterations it took over its many years of employment saturated the study of money and economics, but now it is often difficult even to find substantive references to it in modern textbooks. Just what is the prevailing understanding today on the subject of the gold standard? The world is now a generation removed from any semblance of a gold standard and well over a century from its heyday. With little or no practical experience with it, almost all dialogue about it exists now in the fringes of the academic community. The minimal emphasis that mainstream economists place on a gold standard is reflected in the scant attention placed on it in modern principles of economics and monetary textbooks.
