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| | The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town |
 | | The idea of gold as a platonic currency, universally valuable across time and space, reflects a basic distrust of markets, a fear that in a world of paper money wealth is just an illusion. |
 | | The gold bugs are classic cranks, but their obsession is rooted in experience; we’ve all been conditioned—by history, by myth, by Mr. |
 | | Yet gold is valuable only as long as we collectively agree that it is. It may be soft, shiny, durable, and rare, but it has no more intrinsic value than feldspar or quartz. |
| www.newyorker.com /talk/content?041129ta_talk_surowiecki (988 words) |
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