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“We have gold because we cannot trust governments” (JE Hoover)

The least reactive of metals, gold is untainted, pure and unsullied by its relations with others.  Nazi gold and Freud’s sublimated rituals apart, it is difficult to de-value gold.  Used as money, gold facilitates other relations to occur – anything beyond the most rudimentary forms of exchange is made possible by having a standard measure of value.  Pricing relative to gold allows for a system of fairness, objectivity and commensurability.  It allows commercial relations to be made – it is in that sense a blank object without which market relations might break down.

Gold standard as a term started to be used in the 19th C, as a means of international exchange, tying international currencies to specific amounts of gold as a means to facilitate foreign exchange.  In health and medicine, the term is surprisingly recent in its current use, linked to RCTs, with Jones and Podolsky (2015) dating first use as 1982. The hierarchy of evidence nevertheless predates this, and has arguably become entrenched thereafter. 

It's easy to see the power of the monetary metaphor.  Solid, untarnished by seedy economic relations and the machinations of governments, gold becomes the true arbiter of truth and value.  An outside, a third term that guarantees value.  No wonder then that evidence has its own gold standard – as we move down the hierarchy towards the lesser metals, all that knowledge becomes tainted by its relations with other values, emotions, opinion even.  The masculinity of the solid, timeless body of evidence versus the feminized world of soft opinion, temporariness and fleeting ideas, is of course part of this power game.

The irony is perhaps that gold standards were abandoned by monetary exchanges from the 1930s onwards, and replaced in the 1970s by the US Dollar (with the Bretton Woods agreement).  There is no gold standard as such.  In its place there is a system of fiat money, with value following order by decree, and through a complex system of exchange where gold becomes simply another currency.  The post Bretton Woods world is certainly no more secure than its gold pegged version.  And we could lament the semblance (rather than reality) of monetary order.  But perhaps the lesson is useful in other ways.  First there is no absolute, outside arbiter of value, or, if there is, it is an effect of power relations and imposition (US Dollars as de facto gold).  Second, while outsides are comforting, and there is normative value in objects (which can and do matter), these outsides are not given.  They are made through all manner of social and material relations.  Third, to reverse Hoover’s line, we have governments because we can’t trust gold, or any other timeless outside.  The lesson for evidence watchers is to interrogate the conditions that allow one form of currency to set the standard for others.  And to continually question what kinds of evidence are being mobilised and with what effects.

Steve Hinchliffe