"What is a coin compared to the value of the hand that holds it?" to misquote Terry Pratchett in his latest book, Making Money.
Money, and the relative value of money, has always been of critical interest to investors. Most of the time maintaining the value of any investment has left people feeling as if they were running across an icy lake in their bedroom slippers ... during an earthquake.
It is one thing to buy stocks or property in the hopes of making a fortune; but what happens when you want something that will keep its value, no matter what?
For hundreds of years this third-party value was assumed to be gold. So much so that, in 1945 at Bretton Woods, the war-time allies agreed on an international gold standard to stabilise the world's economy.
It was complex. Gold was fixed at $35 / ounce and all other currencies were pegged to that price via the US dollar. The US became the reserve currency of the world.
During the 15th and 16th centuries in England, starvation in the countryside was widespread. Subsistence farmers grazed their sheep and cows on commonly held grazing land. Herds intermingled, livestock diseases travelled easily, and the soils were depleted.
The problem that medieval peasant farmers discovered was this: as long as the common area was massively big then there could be no limitation on grazing; as soon as grazing became in short supply then everyone had an incentive to use up the last of it as quickly as possible before anyone else did.
Modern free markets have a solution to such shortages. The price goes up.
Medieval commons had no such mechanism. Everyone owned the right to graze, and so the grazing had no value. Starvation followed.
The solution was as simple as it was devastating. The commons were enclosed and title was transferred to individuals.
The waves of peasants who flocked to the cities in the 18th and 19th centuries were fleeing villages wiped out by enclosures. They triggered the most dramatic social change in human history: the industrial revolution. With it came the astonishing innovations that led to the motor car, airplanes and cellular phones. The 2,000 years of the middle ages came to a cacophonous end with the coming of the industrial revolution and, a little over 100 years later, to us.
There are plenty of good reasons to buy hand-made or bespoke goods. There is the support of individual craftsmanship, high-quality originality, and ensuring that life doesn't become a mass of hum-drum sameness.
Declaring that "hand-made" is more efficient and better for the environment is not one of them.
Yet this is precisely what the HandMade Project declares: "The accumulating environmental effects of mass production are a major cause of global warming and the poisoning of our air, water and soil." This being the third-tier of their justification for promoting "handmade" over "factory-made".
Purely logically, that doesn't hold. The peak times for electricity consumption happens to be 18h00 to 21h00 ... AFTER people come back from work and start preparing dinner, bathing, and watching television. In small family groups.
