Hard Money for Hard Labor
Assuming a return to a gold/silver standard, what would a day of hard work be worth today?
One way to guess would be to compare wages from the past.
A day of hard labor earned a man 2-3 grams of silver in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire.
During the late Roman Republic (49 BC), Caesar increased a legionary’s wage from 112 to 225 denarii per year[1-3]. Around 33 AD, a day’s labor in a vineyard was 1 denarius (denario), per Matthew 20:2.[4]
A Denarius during the reign of Caesar was 3.9 grams of silver. During the time of Matthew’s writings, the denarius was continuously debased from 3.9 to 3.4 or 3 grams of silver.[5]
For a legionary, that would equate to 2.8g silver per day during the reign of Caesar, 2.45g silver per day during Augustus, or 2.16g silver during the reign of Tiberius.
Xg silver denarius x 225 denarii per year / 312 working days per year = Yg silver wage per day.
312 days assume 6 days of work per week.
So a Roman legionary could earn 1 US silver dollar (31.1g silver) every 11 days (Caesar), every 12.5 days (Augustus), or every 14 days (Tiberius).
A day laborer in Matthew’s parable of the vineyard owner could earn 1 denarius of 3 or 3.4 grams of silver per day, or about 1 silver US dollar every 10 days.
So a hard day’s work could earn a laborer 2 or 3 grams of silver, about a pre-1965 dime of 2.2g silver, were we to return to a gold/silver standard.
Assuming a 20:1 silver to gold ratio (historically as low as 16:1 and currently above 70:1), it would take 10 days of work to earn 1 gram of gold, if paid 2 grams of silver per day.
Disclaimer: This is an imperfect estimate as the variables of human population, productivity, and available (mined) silver and gold have all increased since the year 1800 AD, due to the Industrial Revolution.
[1]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259413853_Roman_Army_Pay_Scales Speidel, Michael. (1992). Roman Army Pay Scales. Journal of Roman Studies. 82. 87-106. 10.2307/301286.
900 sestertii per year is 225 denarii (4 sestertii = 1 denarius) per the 4th footnote in the above source
[2]http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Stipendium.html
[3]http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~lac61/ASSIGNMENTS/SectionOne/RomanMoney.html
[4]https://www.newadvent.org/bible/mat020.htm ”Conventione autem facta cum operariis ex denario diurno, misit eos in vineam suam.”
[5]https://www.numismaticnews.net/article/the-lasting-legacy-of-the-roman-denarius
