Roman Empire the price of a tonne of pure copper was equivalent to roughly 40 years of the average wage. Forty years of work for a tonne of copper. By 1800 this had fallen to 6 years a tonne. In the following 200 years it dropped to just 0.06 years per tonne. For Paul Gait, a polymathic mining investor from London, this measure of the ‘real price’ of copper is the big story here. It is a productivity miracle, just as impressive as Moore’s law for semiconductors
