Sounds amazing and at first glance seems quite unlikely we’d agree. But what labourers were paid in silver in ancient Greece, and New Zealand house prices when measured in silver, both show how very undervalued silver is currently. We’ll show just how eerily similar the resulting numbers are…

We compared ancient wages in silver and NZ house values in our newsletter this week.  But then realized we should have explained the concept further. So we’ve expanded upon it here.

Silver Very Undervalued From Historical Perspective of Ancient Greece

Perhaps you have seen historical references to what silver bought in the past?

We have too on occasion. In fact we we wrote about this a couple of years ago. There’s some amazing facts about silver in this article:

Anyhow, this week we came across an excellent article by Dominic Frisby. He outlined what the average labourer has been paid in silver over many different periods in history.

Frisby notes:

“To compare modern and ancient prices might seem like a ridiculous and redundant exercise – the two worlds are so different – but there is a point to all this. Measured in silver, salaries actually remained fairly constant until the 20th century.”

Here’s an outline of the full article care of BMG.

“Frisby looks at the wages paid in ancient Athens (450BC), because it tells us a lot about the silver price today.

The Athenian talent, about 26 kg of silver, could purchase nine years of a skilled man’s labour. If we assume 250 working days in a year, that works out to about 11.5 grams of silver per day, or a little under 0.3 of a troy ounce.

A kilo of silver today is about £460, so nine years’ skilled labour would be about £12,000 in today’s money. That makes a year’s skilled labour about £1,333, and a day’s £5.29.

Today, the average wage in the UK construction industry is about £30,000 per annum, or £120 per day. Today’s British labourer is earning considerably more than his ancient Athenian counterpart.

The Babylonian worker might have earned 2 grams of silver (92p). The Roman unskilled worker, like the Greek, might have earned 4.2 grams of silver, at least until Romans started chipping their coins.

The wages of the medieval English worker had fallen back towards Babylonian levels by 1300. He got 2.8 grams, while a skilled city craftsman might have expected 5.6 grams, about half what an Athenian was paid.

By the 19th century, the skilled labourer might be looking at around 24 grams of silver per day. The 19th century labourer was getting about double the pay of his 450 BC Athenian counterpart.

Compare that to today. Frisby used £30,000, the average wage of a construction worker, or £120 per day. That amounts to 260 grams of silver, compared to 11.5 grams for the Athenian worker. Today’s pay dwarfs that of any pre-20th century worker in history.

Wages have risen, but not by this much relative to the cost of living, status and so on within a society. It’s not that wages have soared; it’s that silver, having no monetary role, has become cheap, historically and geologically.

If today’s wages of £120 were to equal the Athenian equivalent of 12 grams, silver should be £10 per gram. That’s over 20 times higher than today’s silver price of $18.50 an ounce—more like $400 per ounce. At $400 per ounce, not only do wages correspond, so does the cost of constructing ships or city buildings.

One day we will see silver reverting to its historical mean, and we should all prepare.”

Here’s the full article which also details Frisby’s allowances made for the likes of modern taxation and cost of living changes. Highly worth a read: What wages in ancient Athens can tell us about the silver price today.

How Does NZ Housing to Silver Ratio Compare to Frisby’s Wages Valuation?

Very interestingly, Frisby’s wage numbers can also be compared to other methods of valuing silver.

You’ll recall he concluded silver should be over 20 times higher than the current price. Based not only upon wages but also upon the cost of constructing buildings and ships too.

So we thought we’d compare this to the NZ housing to Silver ratio.

What’s that?

Simply the price of the median New Zealand house, divided by the price for one ounce of silver. This results in the number of ounces of silver it takes to buy the median house.

So at current prices (using round numbers to keep it simple) this would be:

$500,000 / $25 = 20,000 ounces of silver to buy the median New Zealand house.

That number on its own doesn’t really tell us much. We have to cast our eye back to some historical numbers to glean further insights.

We did this a few years ago in this post:

Note: The chart only goes up until 2011. Yes we have been meaning to dig these numbers out and update them for some time!

Anyway, to explain the chart more fully, the red line is the median house price (right axis). It has extended up to the the $500,000 level over the past number of years.

The black line and left axis is the housing/silver ratio in ounces. It too has pushed higher since 2011 and now sits at the 20,000 level calculated above. Back to where it was in 2007.

The key point to take note of is where the ratio bottomed out at in 1980.

Why 1980?

Because this was the end of the last precious metals bull market of the 1970’s. The ratio in 1980 actually dropped to just slightly under 1000 ounces of silver to buy the median NZ house.

Do you notice anything about that number?

What if you compare 1,000 to 20,000?

The current ratio compared to the end of the last bull market also differs by a factor of 20.

That is, silver needs to go up by a factor of 20 in order to buy the same house as it did in 1980!

Which also equates to the rise Dominic Frisby calculated was required to return wages in silver to their (very) long standing historical average. How’s that for amazing?

Will Silver Return to That Level in the Future? i.e. Go Up By 20 times the Current Price?

Who knows?

But the fact these comparisons match so closely gives them both some weight.

They both certainly show that silver remains very undervalued. Even if it doesn’t go up by 20 times the current price, there certainly seems to be plenty of potential upside ahead.

The long term chart below shows there is plenty of upside just to get back to where silver was in 2011.

Sign up to our daily price alerts to see more charts like these. Especially useful if you are looking at buying and want get in at a decent level:

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