Dear Jim Blaut,(posted 8751 days ago)The intriguing extracts from your book don't quite respond to the point I was making about precious metals.
It's an economist's point. If my august Authority doesn't strike you dumb, ask any economist whose judgment you trust if she doesn't agree with the following:
Gold and silver are good things, yes, as are wheat and iron and wool and haircuts. But non-economists are inclined to assign them greater importance than they deserve. We economists think the other people are merely confused, and we have been stepping forward smartly since 1776 to set them straight. (For this they have not shown proper gratitude.)
Our point is that money is just one useful thing among others, and like eyeglasses and clocks is not to be elevated beyond its reasomable impact. Its reasonable impact is its contribution to efficiency (I set aside your much more persuasive point of political economy: that WHO got the money shook up the political balance: tho not I should think in a desirable way for growth--it gave Catholic Iberia the coin to push ignorance and intolerance, as David Landes would say) The part of national income attributable to an elastic money supply is small, some few percent, and the magnitude could be nothing like what's necessary to explain European dominance. (European dominance probably had more to do with other metallic matters---cannon boring and nail-making, for example--than with Spanish treasure.)
My opinion here is not "monetarist" (although I and Dennis Flynn are for this period world monetarists--see his recent book, and an old review of mine on the anti-monetarism of an earlier generation, in the Journal of Political Economy, Nov/Dec 1972)). It's the common coin since Smith among economists.
Please don't badmouth Earl Hamilton in my hearing! I loved the man: what a prince.
Believe me. Or. . . believe me?
Sincerely,