Why do we use bottlecaps as money in Fallout 4?
If you’re a fan of Fallout--and, to be honest,
I’d be really surprised if you were here and you weren’t, you’ve probably seen
the video where MatPat figures out how much a Bottlecap in the Fallout Universe is worth
in today’s dollars. It’s a pretty fantastic episode, if you haven’t seen it yet, and
you should definitely check it out.
But that’s not what I’m asking about today. It’s cool, sure, but it’s not really relevant
to the world of Fallout. A bottlecap is worth whatever a bottlecap is worth in the Fallout
Universe, regardless of the price of gold in the United States in 2016. But I’m also
not here to present a counter case to MatPat.
Instead, I’m wondering something, almost purely from a lore perspective: does it make
sense at all that Bottlecaps are used in the East Coast settings of Fallout?
To understand why I’m even asking this question, we have to know the lore of bottlecaps. Bottlecaps
were first introduced in Fallout 1 as the game’s main currency. In Fallout 1, it was
the currency of The Hub. Bottlecaps were a form of what’s called Representative money--that
is to say one unit of currency (in this case one bottlecap) represents a claim on a commodity.
An example of this in our real world is the Gold Standard, where paper money represented
a claim on a certain amount of real-life gold. In fact, for a while, until the Gold Standard
was mercifully abandoned for the betterment of everyone, you could take a $1 bill in the
United States and trade it in for an equal amount of gold. Anyway. Bottlecaps didn’t
represent gold--instead, they were actually backed by water. Originally, merchants in
the Hub would trade using water, but started using caps instead because, you know, it’s
easier to hand someone ten bottlecaps that it is to carry jugs of water around with you
everywhere.
And you know, this mirrors a lot of real history currencies pretty well, honestly. In the ancient
Fertile Crescent, the currency was the Shekel, which represented a bushel of barley. Shekels
were rarely used in everyday transactions of course, but they were used as the predominant
measurement of value.
Which brings us to exactly why currency even exists to begin with. Currency is meant to
function as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. So when I want
your Stimpak, and you’re willing to sell it, I give you 48 bottlecaps, and you give
me the stimpak. That’s the exchange. Of course, it’s totally common in the Wasteland
to trade stuff-for-stuff, but the value of what’s being traded is still measured in
caps. Like if I want that Stimpak, but I don’t have caps, but I’m loaded down with garbage,
I still have to give you 48 caps worth of junk. These two ideas, me giving you caps
or giving you a certain number of caps worth of something for another thing, both illustrate
the principles of “medium of exchange” and “unit of account,” because caps are
the thing we actually use to trade, and if that’s not an option, it’s still the method
of accounting for the value of objects.
Now if I hand you those caps, in order for the currency to be good, they have to be mostly
worth the same thing tomorrow as they are today, and next week, and months from now.
They can change a little bit though, but the less stable a currency is, the less reliable
it is as a medium of exchange. This is the Store of Value part. It’s probably something
we think the least about in a day-to-day way, but it’s honestly one of the most important
qualifiers for a currency. Out of control inflation makes money almost more trouble
than it’s worth, and out-of-control deflation can be a thousand times more terrifying.
As being a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value, Bottlecaps honestly work
really, really well. They were chosen from a lore perspective because the technology
for creating bottlecaps was lost when the bombs dropped, meaning the number of bottlecaps
in circulation rarely change. New caps enter the economy only very rarely, when folk find
a stash somewhere, or something opens a bottle of cola to drink its contents.
It’s very, very similar to gold in this way, which was the standard currency for thousands
of years. Inflation basically couldn’t exist, at least not aggressive inflation, because
in order for there to be more money, more gold had to be found. Gold is relatively rare,
like bottlecaps, so it very infrequently entered the economy at a rate that humans couldn’t
handle.
To those of us who grow up thinking of gold as being innately valuable, it makes the idea
of bottlecaps being the exact same thing as the gold standard utterly ludicrous. But why
is gold valuable? I mean, you can’t eat it. You can’t really make any reliable tools
from it. Unless you’re very, very wealthy, and very, very strong, you can’t build a
house from it. You can make jewelry, of course, but that just means it’s pretty--it doesn’t
have very many utilities, especially in an era without modern electronics manufacturing.
So, practically speaking, there’s nothing that makes gold any more valuable to us than
paper. Or bottle caps.
Well, it’s true that gold doesn’t have a lot of practical utility to an animal when
it comes to directly facilitating survival. But gold is very, very good at being one thing:
money. To understand why, we have to look at what gold is a bit more close--
WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO TALK ABOUT HOW IT MAKES NO SENSE THAT THERE ARE BOTTLECAPS IN THE
EAST COAST GAMES LIKE FALLOUT 3 AND FALLOUT 4 WHEN BOTTLECAPS WERE A CURRENCY ESTABLISHED
IN THE WEST COAST OF FALLOUT 1 AND 2.
Calm down, we’re getting there. Just trust me. Anyway, back to gold. Sanat Kumar is the
Department Chair of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University in New York, and he went
through all the different elements on the periodic table one by one and explained why
they, unlike gold, are really, really bad at being money. Gasses, for instance, are,
um, well, gasses, and are hard to see, weigh, and store. In fact, some, like Helium, eventually
leak out of even the most well-sealed containers. So gasses are no good. Other, heavier elements
like Lithium are incredibly reactive and prone to bursting into flames without warning, and
even if they’re not that reactive, they’re still unstable enough that they’ll eventually
corrode away. Others, like silicon are incredibly common to the point of being essentially worthless.
Some, like these down here, are radioactive, while rare metals like Osmium are so rare
that, you know, you basically can’t find them. Anyway, when you cut through all the
crap, there are two metals on our planet that were the most likely candidates for being
used as money: Gold and Platinum.
Both are rare and therefore inflation-resistant, but not so rare as to be unfindable, and they’re
“shelf stable,” meaning they don’t corrode away like silver and other metals. So why
did gold end up winning out in the test of history? Well, for two other reasons: gold
is very easy to identify over other objects, whereas platinum looks a lot like other metals,
but more importantly: gold has a melting temperature of only 1064 degrees celsius, or 1948 degrees
fahrenheit, which is easily meltable by a regular fire, whereas platinum has to be heated
over 1700 degrees celsius, or over 3000 degrees fahrenheit in order to be turned into distinct
and standardized coins.
So with gold we can add “easy to identify” and “easy to actually TURN INTO money.”
So what does this have to do with bottlecaps? Well, quite a lot, actually. Bottlecaps have
a lot of these same qualities themselves. They’re rare, but not too rare. They seem
to be mostly shelf-stable, since they’ve managed to stick around relatively unaltered
for over 200 years, are inflation-resistant like gold is because the technology to create
them has been lost, they’re easy to identify and really, really hard to forge.
All the qualities that make gold good at being money, bottlecaps have in spades.
This is cool and all, but from a lore perspective, does it make sense that bottlecaps would be
used in the D.C. area like in Fallout 3 and in the Commonwealth of Fallout 4? Bethesda
never really addresses this directly.
So after going through these different qualities that make gold a good ancient currency, Kumar
even posited that if we were to reset the world all over again back to 0 and try it
again, humans would very likely choose gold as a currency no matter what, because of these
qualities that make it so clearly favorable over the other options. So it stands to reason
that in different pockets of the United States wasteland, folk would choose to rely on bottlecaps
because of their unique qualities as a good currency.
But this isn’t good enough for me, and it relies on too much randomness and coincidence.
But it lets me talk about my absolute favorite thing ever: The Jet Road.
You know, it’s funny, when I was in school growing up, my history teachers framed the
world as though countries were just isolated pockets of their own culture for thousands
of years until the age of industry, when suddenly we discovered better boats and airplanes and
could finally, finally conduct trade across the world with people far away from us.
But no, this isn’t the case at all. The Silk Road, for instance, existed for thousands
of years. It was an interconnected trade network that stretched from China all the way into
Europe. Everything from food to spices were traded, but the biggest export was its namesake:
silk. The Silk Road was also responsible for bringing the very first shipment of Opium
to China. Opium was one of the only things Western powers could leverage over China to
to maintain anything resembling an economic edge for hundreds of years, and was even the catalyst
of a couple of wars. Drugs are always, always, always popular in trade.
Which brings us back to The Jet Road. You see, bottlecaps aren’t the only things from
the West Coast we see in the East. Jet, for instance, was invented by Myron in Fallout
2, and was immensely popular. So seeing it in Fallout 3 and 4, even though they take
place a mere 40 years after the events of Fallout 2, on the opposite end of the country?
That seems kinda weird, doesn’t it?
Well, no, not really. The Silk Road, for instance, existed in an age before cars, antibiotics,
and airplanes, and spanned thousands of miles in all directions. Walking from San Francisco
to Washington D.C. takes only 38 days of travel. Obviously you need to stop and rest, but it’s
feasible that it would take less than a year for goods to be traded one way and then back
again.
And there’s plenty of evidence that people travel from East to West all the time. There
are the paramilitary organizations with lots of resources, of course, like The Enclave
and the Brotherhood of Steel. But Harold, a character from Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 makes
an appearance in Fallout 3, and in a memory sequence you learn that Kellogg, the first
antagonist of Fallout 4, originally grew up in the NCR and worked his way east to find
his fortune.
So it stands to reason that the East Coast, West Coast, and everything in between have
a thriving trade relationship with one another, with goods travelling up and down this Jet
Road, even if they’re in their own somewhat-isolated communities. And if they’re trading with
one another, it makes sense that they’d use an agreed-upon currency, even if it’s
something as silly as bottlecaps.
So do bottlecaps make sense as a currency? They’re rare, but not too rare, hard to
fake, easy to carry, and are inflation resistant. Why are they out east? Because of the sweet,
sweet allure of drugs that humans will never, ever be able to escape because drugs--drugs
never changes. Change. Thanks for watching.
So in case you haven’t realized it yet, I’m a little bit of an economics nerd. A
huge economics nerd, in fact. I actually have a collection of essays by John Maynard Keynes
on my desk here. I’m also a huge, huge regular listener of the Planet Money and Freakonomics,
both podcasts that talk about real economics in an every day way that make it easy for,
you know, you and I to understand. I’m a huge audio-guy. I get really, really bored
by reading. It’s kinda weird, actually, because I love the stuff that’s IN books,
but I hate just sitting and reading. I’m the kind of person who likes to move and accomplish
things, and reading so often just feels like a waste of time. It’s why I love podcasts
so much, and it’s also why I freaking love audio books from Audible. Yeah, yeah, I know.
Sponsorships, bleeeeeeh, but I actually really like Audible and I use it all the time because
it lets me, like, vacuum my apartment while learning something new. In fact, some of the
books I read specifically to make Rethinking episodes I actually listened to on audible.
Like Ray Kurzweil’s book How To Create a Mind for the episode on synths. Right now
I’m listening to Misbehaving by economist Richard Thaler. Thaler’s a pioneer in a
branch of economics called behavioral economics, which is a reaction to traditional economics
that tends to presume that people within an economic system, like you and me, are these
preternaturally logical and rational people, like a bunch of Mr. Spocksk, whereas behavioral
economics is an attempt to incorporate things like predictive psychology and sociology to
solve big economic problems like poverty. And if you use the link in our description
you get a 30 day free trial and get to pick one free audiobook with it out of the over
150,000 books they have on their site. You can listen to a book I’ve listened to like
How to Create a Mind or Misbehaving, or choose something else. It doesn’t matter. you can Either
click the link in the description, or head over to audible.com/shoddy and, you know,
get smarter while you do the dishes or something.