Why are bottlecaps REALLY used as money? - Rethinking Fallout 4

Why do we use bottle caps as

money

in Fallout 4? If you're a Fallout fan (and to be honest, I'd be very surprised if you were here and weren't), you've probably seen the video where MatPat finds out how much a bottle cap costs in Fallout. The universe is worth in today's dollars. It's a pretty fantastic episode, if you haven't seen it yet, and you should definitely watch it. But that's not what I'm asking today. It's cool, sure, but it's not

really

relevant to the world of Fallout. A bottle cap is worth what a bottle cap is worth in the Fallout Universe, regardless of the price of gold in the United States in 2016.

But I'm not here to make an argument against MatPat either. Instead, I'm wondering something, almost purely from a historical perspective: does it make any sense for bottle caps to be

used

in Fallout's East Coast settings? To understand why I ask this question, we have to know the history of bottle caps. Bottle caps were first introduced in Fallout 1 as the main in-game currency. In Fallout 1, it was The Hub's currency. Bottle caps were a form of what is called representative

money

, that is, a monetary unit (in this case, a bottle cap) represents a claim on a commodity. An example of this in our real world is the gold standard, where paper money represented a claim on a certain amount of real-life gold.

In fact, for a time, until the gold standard was thankfully abandoned for the good of all, you could take a $1 bill in the United States and exchange it for an equal amount of gold. Anyway. Bottle caps did not represent gold; instead, they were actually backed by water. Originally, merchants in the Hub traded using water, but they started using caps because, you know, it's easier to hand someone ten bottle caps than it is to carry jugs of water everywhere. And honestly, this reflects a lot of coins from real history pretty well. In the ancient Fertile Crescent, the currency was the shekel, which represented one bushel of barley.

Of course, shekels were rarely

used

in everyday transactions, but they were used as the predominant measure of value. Which brings us to exactly why the currency exists to begin with. Currency is intended to function as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. So when I want your stimulant and you're willing to sell it, I give you 48 bottle caps and you give me the stimulant. That's the exchange. Of course, it's entirely common in the Wasteland to trade things for things, but the value of what's traded is still measured in limits. Like I want that Stimpak, but I don't have any capsules, but I'm loaded with crap, I still have to give you 48 crap capsules.

These two ideas, me giving you limits or giving you a certain number of limits on something for something else, illustrate the principles of “medium of exchange” and “unit of account,” because limits are what we actually use to trade. , and if that is not an option, it is still the method of accounting for the value of objects. Now, if I give them those limits, for the currency to be good, they have to be worth the same tomorrow as today, and next week, and months from now. However, they may change a little, but the less stable a currency is, the less reliable it will be as a medium of exchange.

This is the Reserve of Value part. It's probably something we think about the least on a day-to-day basis, but it's honestly one of the most important qualifiers for a currency. Runaway inflation makes money almost more trouble than it's worth, and runaway deflation can be a thousand times scarier. As a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value, Bottlecaps honestly work very, very well. They were chosen from a traditional perspective because the technology to create bottle caps was lost when the bombs fell, meaning that the number of bottle caps in circulation rarely changes. New caps enter the economy very rarely, when people find a hiding place somewhere, or someone opens a cola bottle to drink its contents.

In this sense it is very, very similar to gold, which was the standard currency for thousands of years. Basically, inflation could not exist, at least not aggressive inflation, because in order for there to be more money, more gold had to be found. Gold is relatively rare, like bottle caps, so it very rarely entered the economy at a rate that humans couldn't handle. For those of us who grew up thinking that gold has innate value, the idea that bottle caps are exactly the same as the gold standard is completely ridiculous. But why is gold valuable? I mean, you can't eat it.

You can't

really

build reliable tools with it. Unless you are very, very rich and very, very strong, you can't build a house with that. You can make jewelry, of course, but that just means it's pretty: it doesn't have much use, especially in an era without modern electronic manufacturing. So in practice, there is nothing that makes gold more valuable to us than paper. Or bottle caps. Well, it's true that gold doesn't have much practical use for an animal when it comes to directly facilitating survival. But gold is very, very good at being one thing: money. To understand why, we have to look at what gold is a little closer.

WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO TALK ABOUT HOW IT MAKES NO SENSE THAT THERE ARE BOTTLE CAPS IN EAST COAST GAMES LIKE FALLOUT 3 AND FALLOUT 4 WHEN BOTTLE CAPS WERE CURRENCY? SET ON THE WEST COAST OF FALLOUT 1 AND 2. Calm down, we're coming. Just trust me. Anyway, back to gold. Sanat Kumar is the professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University in New York, and he went through all the different elements of the periodic table one by one and explained why, unlike gold, they are really bad at being money. Gases, for example, are, well, gases and are difficult to see, weigh, and store.

In fact, some, like helium, eventually leak from even the best-sealed containers. So the gases are not good. Other heavier elements, such as lithium, are incredibly reactive and prone to bursting into flames without warning, and even if they are not as reactive, they are still unstable enough to eventually corrode. Others, like silicon, are incredibly common to the point of being worthless. Some, like these below, are radioactive, while rare metals like osmium are so rare that they basically can't be found. Anyway, if we put all that crap aside, there are two metals on our planet that were the most likely candidates to be used as money: gold and platinum.

Both are rare and therefore resistant to inflation, but not so rare as to be impossible to find, and they are "stable", meaning they do not corrode like silver and other metals. So why did gold end up winning in the test of history? Well, for two other reasons: gold is very easy to identify on other objects, while platinum looks very similar to other metals, but most importantly: gold has a melting temperature of only 1064 degrees Celsius, or 1948 degrees fahrenheit, which is easily meltable. by normal fire, while platinum must be heated to over 1,700 degrees Celsius or over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to be converted into distinct, standardized coins.

So with gold we can add “easy to identify” and “easy to CONVERT INTO money.” So what does this have to do with bottle caps? Well, actually a lot. Bottle caps have many of these same qualities. They are rare, but not too rare. They appear to be mostly stable as they have managed to remain relatively unchanged for over 200 years, they are resistant to inflation like gold is because the technology to create them has been lost, they are easy to identify and really, really hard to counterfeit. . All the qualities that make gold good money, bottle caps have in abundance.

This is cool and all, but from a historical perspective, does it make sense for bottle caps to be used in the D.C. area? like in Fallout 3 and in the Commonwealth of Fallout 4? Bethesda never addresses this directly. So after analyzing these different qualities that make gold a good old currency, Kumar even postulated that if we reset the world back to 0 and tried it again, humans would most likely choose gold as a currency no matter what. for these qualities that make it so clearly favorable compared to the rest of the options. Therefore, it stands to reason that in different areas of the American wasteland people choose to rely on bottle caps due to their unique qualities as good currency.

But this is not enough for me and it depends too much on chance and coincidences. But let me talk about my favorite activity: The Jet Road. You know, it's funny, when I was in school growing up, my history teachers framed the world as if countries were just isolated pockets of their own culture for thousands of years until the age of industry, when we suddenly discovered better ships. and airplanes and we could finally trade all over the world with people who are far from us. But no, this is not the case at all. The Silk Road, for example, existed for thousands of years.

It was an interconnected trade network that stretched from China to Europe. Everything was traded, from food to spices, but the biggest export was its namesake: silk. The Silk Road was also responsible for bringing the first shipment of opium to China. Opium was one of the only things Western powers could leverage over China to maintain anything resembling an economic advantage for hundreds of years, and it was even the catalyst for a couple of wars. Drugs are always, always, always popular in the trade. Which brings us back to The Jet Road. You see, bottle caps aren't the only thing we see on the West Coast in the East.

Jet, for example, was invented by Myron in Fallout 2 and was immensely popular. So seeing it in Fallout 3 and 4, even though they take place just 40 years after the events of Fallout 2, on the opposite end of the country? That seems a little strange, doesn't it? Well, no, not really. The Silk Road, for example, existed in a time before automobiles, antibiotics and airplanes, and stretched for thousands of miles in all directions. Walking from San Francisco to Washington D.C. It takes only 38 days of travel. Obviously it is necessary to stop and rest, but it is feasible that it will take less than a year for goods to be traded one way and then back again.

And there is a lot of evidence that people travel from East to West all the time. There are the deep-pocketed paramilitary organizations, of course, like The Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel. But Harold, a character from Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, appears in Fallout 3, and in a flashback sequence you learn that Kellogg, Fallout 4's first antagonist, originally grew up in the NCR and made his way east to find his fortune. . So it stands to reason that the East Coast, the West Coast, and everything in between have a thriving trading relationship with each other, with goods traveling up and down this Jet Road, even if they are in their own somewhat isolated communities.

And if they trade with each other, it makes sense for them to use an agreed-upon currency, even if it's something as silly as bottle caps. So do bottle caps make sense as currency? They are rare, but not too rare, difficult to counterfeit, easy to transport, and resistant to inflation. Why are they in the east? Because of the sweet, sweet lure of drugs that humans can never, ever escape because drugs... drugs never change. Change. Thanks for watching. So in case you haven't realized yet, I'm a bit of an economics nerd. In fact, a huge economics nerd. In fact, I have a collection of essays by John Maynard Keynes here on my desk.

I'm also a big regular listener to Planet Money and Freakonomics, both podcasts that talk about real economics in an everyday way that makes it easy for you and me to understand. I am a great audio expert. I get very bored reading. It's actually a little strange, because I love things that are IN books, but I hate just sitting down and reading. I'm the kind of person who likes to move and accomplish things, and reading so often seems like a waste of time. That's why I love podcasts so much and it's also why I love Audible audiobooks.

Yes, yes, I know. Sponsorships, bleeeeeeh, but I actually really like Audible and use it all the time because it allows me to vacuum my apartment while learning something new. In fact, some of the books I read specifically to do Rethinking episodes I listened to on audio. Like Ray Kurzweil's book How to Create a Mind for the episode on synthesizers. Right now I'm listening to Misbehaving by economist Richard Thaler. Thaler is a pioneer in a branch of economics called behavioral economics, which is a reaction to traditional economics that tends to assume that people within an economic system, like you and me, are supernaturally logical and rational people, like a Spocksk group. , while behavioral economics is an attempt to incorporate things likepredictive psychology and sociology to solve major economic problems such as poverty.

And if you use the link in our description, you'll get a 30-day free trial and get to choose a free audiobook from the over 150,000 books they have on their site. You can listen to a book I've heard, like How to Create a Mind or Bad Behavior, or choose something else. It doesn't matter. You can click the link in the description or head over to audible.com/shoddy and, you know, get smarter while doing the dishes or something.