20 Grams

No-one knows exactly how much above ground gold there is in the world. However, a common estimate is that it must be about 160,000 metric tonnes. That's 160,000,000 kilograms or 160,000,000,000 grams.

This may sound like a lot, but when we consider that there is about 8,000,000,000 people in the world, we see that there is only 20 grams of gold per person.

This explains why gold is used as little as it is. There simply isn't enough of it to use for all the things it could be used for. The wiring of a typical house requires a few kilogram of copper. A single copper bottomed pan has at about 100 grams of copper in it, so it does not matter that gold is a superior conductor, if we replaced all this copper with gold, we would quickly run out of it.

It is not for lack of useful qualities that we refrain from using gold in bulk. It is entirely due to its scarcity.

On the other hand, just about every person on the planet owns at least some gold. Computers and cell phones contain gold. Most people own a gold ring or some other gold jewelry. A typical person owns a few grams all together.

This means that gold possession is remarkably uniform and spread out. The distance between the typical 3 to 5 grams and the average of about 20 grams is narrow, certainly when considering how unevenly other assets are distributed.

Of the 160,000 metric tonnes in total, much less than half is hoarded by central banks and wealthy individuals. Almost all of it is spread out among regular people, with poor people sometimes owning just as much as rich people.

Gold is for this reason a social equalizer. The more gold is valued as a financial asset, the smaller becomes the inequality between rich and poor. On the other hand, when gold is marginalized and demonized, inequality becomes rampant.

By PHGCOM - self-made, photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link