How do you compare the value of things across time?

Up until very recently, food was scarce. Paper was scarce. Doctors were scarce. The price of anything reflects, in part, how hard it was to come by. That much is straightforward.

But what about creative output? Were humans less creative in the past? Creativity doesn't seem to be a scarce resource. If anything it might be the most consistently human thing there is — the Lascaux cave paintings, the Lion Man of Hohlenstein, bone flutes dating back 40,000 years. We draw the line between hominid and human somewhere around the moment things started getting made for reasons beyond survival. For their own worth.

So if creativity has always been abundant, and always valued, what has it actually cost?

That question is harder than it sounds. Currencies inflate, collapse, and serve the needs of whoever prints them. Comparing what Shakespeare earned to what a Hollywood screenwriter earns today requires stripping out four centuries of monetary noise first.

Standardized weights and measures appear almost simultaneously with writing in the archaeological record. Humans have always known that the act of exchange requires a common measuring stick. What we never settled on was a suitable measuring stick for value.

Or maybe we did. And we just forgot.

Gold has been a unit of measure as far back as we have records. Not because of tradition or ideology — because of chemistry. It doesn't expand. It doesn't decay. But it does get reused. A lot. A gram of gold in 1599 is the same gram of gold today in every way that matters for measurement. There's a physical, elemental reason for this that isn't arbitrary — it's cosmic.

And that universality is why we're now collecting the measurements nobody thought to put in one place.