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What is worth its weight in gold?
Here is a list of stuff worth more than its weight in gold, expressed in terms of price per pound:
| Platinum | $20,679 |
| Fifty Dollar Bills | $22,680 |
| Cocaine | $22,680 |
| Hundred Dollar Bills | $45,359 |
| Rhodium | $77,292 |
| Good-quality, one-carat diamonds | $11.4 M |
| LSD | $55 M |
| Antimatter | $26 Quadrillion |
Here is the link, with much more information. Here is a short article on the market for rhodium. Here is an earlier post on the economics of antimatter. Thanks to Jen Smith for the pointer
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 28, 2008 at 01:13 PM in Data Source | Permalink
Comments
How about high quality original software, music, video, books, or inventions, as codified in bits?
$/lb --> infinity
Posted by: a student of economics at Aug 28, 2008 1:43:09 PM
I think this means humanity has produced less than a pound of antimatter so far...
Posted by: stefan at Aug 28, 2008 1:44:28 PM
Student, the examples do seem to be 'commodities' in some sense.
Posted by: Zamfir at Aug 28, 2008 2:02:10 PM
So far, all the attempts to put antimatter coins into circulation have ended badly. Good money merely drives out bad, but really good money annihilates bad.
Posted by: albatross at Aug 28, 2008 2:09:42 PM
Arghh! I swapped "bad" and "good." Man, this antimatter stuff is tricky.
Posted by: albatross at Aug 28, 2008 2:10:42 PM
I don't think you could find a buyer for the last item at that price, unlike the other items in the list.
Posted by: Dan Green at Aug 28, 2008 2:18:58 PM
What about printer ink? I thought that stuff is worth more than its weight in gold.
Posted by: paul at Aug 28, 2008 2:29:16 PM
Dan, I seem to recall that Scrooge McDuck had $76 quadrillion in his money-bin. So he *could* buy just under 3 lbs., but that money would probably be better spent on some pants for his nephew, Donald.
Posted by: Michael B. at Aug 28, 2008 2:39:10 PM
Hospitals purchase anti-matter emitters (positron emitters) at a price of $1000 a dose. As my old professor used to say, it is left as an exercise for the students to determine the price per lb.
You could also calculate the price or tritium per pound. It probably exceeds rhodium.
Posted by: superdestroyer at Aug 28, 2008 2:39:22 PM
Let us not confuse ourselves by extrapolating from point estimates. A pound of dollars makes sense (by definition), a pound of gold, is still small relative to the market. But a pound of LSD surely is relatively large with respect to the market and cannot be estimated based on a simple point estimate (unless we have a historical transaction of such quantity at that price).
Posted by: mt at Aug 28, 2008 3:26:00 PM
LSD is much cheaper than cocaine if you look at each in terms of individual doses.
Posted by: Peter at Aug 28, 2008 3:51:06 PM
You forgot Kate Moss:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/eonline/20080828/en_celeb_eo/26366
Posted by: Dave at Aug 28, 2008 4:42:00 PM
Aerogels, surely.
Posted by: at Aug 28, 2008 5:34:20 PM
I'll bet the meanest Picasso is worth more than its weight in gold by a lot.
Posted by: Bill Stepp at Aug 28, 2008 6:46:13 PM
What is the price of gold?
Posted by: Dumb at Aug 28, 2008 7:55:43 PM
I know a number of people who love the idea of investing in gold, because they have bought into the idea that U.S. fiat money has been debased by monetary supply growth. When I point out to them that no (sane) person actually holds more than a month or two worth of cash, they move into some weird Ron Paul speak.
Posted by: liberalarts at Aug 28, 2008 8:23:28 PM
Doesn't antimatter emit anti-gravitrons? If so, then weighing it is going to be difficult.
Posted by: Chris at Aug 28, 2008 8:55:22 PM
Let's not forget each and every B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber!
Posted by: Paul N at Aug 28, 2008 9:12:43 PM
I wonder how much a pound of the International Prototype of the Kilogram, stored at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures is worth.
Posted by: Walt at Aug 28, 2008 9:25:38 PM
We obviously desperately need a government funded research program to bring down the cost of anti-matter.
Posted by: Frank at Aug 28, 2008 9:51:57 PM
paul: printer ink costs something like 1.50/oz when bought in quantity; expensive ink is to help amortize (for lack of a better word) over the printer's use. more expensive ($800-$1000+) printers can use the cheap ink.
if we're including consumer goods, many biochemical reagents cost $100-200+ per mg, or about 100,000,000 per pound. but nobody ever buys in those kinds of quantities, so it's a moot point.
Posted by: Joe Li at Aug 28, 2008 10:04:04 PM
Chris: no, antimatter has positive mass.
Posted by: greenish at Aug 28, 2008 11:41:21 PM
I wonder, what is the price of the average mature human brain per pound?
Posted by: a person at Aug 29, 2008 2:34:42 AM
Greenish and Chris: Actually, from an experimental perspective, I don't believe that question is entirely settled.
Certainly antimatter has positive inertial mass -- we know that both observations in accelerators and from the field theory that describes it. But I don't believe antimatter has ever been cooled sufficiently to watch it interact gravitationally, and since we don't have a quantum theory of gravitation there isn't, strictly speaking, a field-theoretic prediction. General relativity does predict that gravitational mass always equals inertial mass.
Posted by: David Wright at Aug 29, 2008 3:16:57 AM
David Wright, that brings up an interesting question: Does the price per pound of antimatter go up or down if you bring it to relativistic speeds? On the one hand, there will be less of it in a pound. On the other hand, highly energetic antimatter is presumably worth more than slower antimatter
Posted by: Zamfir at Aug 29, 2008 4:06:28 AM
