To add to that: when people buy gold to hold onto it as an investment, it takes gold off the market and puts dollars into the market. Gold is more scarce, and d

To add to that: when people buy gold to hold onto it as an investment, it takes gold off the market and puts dollars into the market. Gold is more scarce, and dollars are less scarce. This has two effects. 1) reduces the price of dollars and increases the price of gold. 2) Incentivizes more gold mining, which means that purchasing power that could fund science or innovation is instead being used to dig metal out of the ground. Maybe gold miners are getting higher wages while some professor has less money to pay grad students. Oil is being directed to power mining machines which makes all other energy use more expensive. And so on.