But the most surprising realization? All but one of the documented episodes of hyperinflation occurred in the last 100 years.
Not to mention, how do you have hyperinflation with gold bars and barter?
Not “Pretty good” enough to detect hyperinflation by the definition at issue (50%+ monthly inflation.) Before regular, systematic, and frequent collection of data for price indexes, we have good enough data to make wide-range estimates of inflation over intervals of years to decades, in the best cases, but hyperinflation (whether or not it produces collapse of currency) doesn't continue long enough to show up in that, and also hyperinflation tends to correlate with conditions which reduce the availability and survivability of data. (The author of the article here notes a data problem with Yugoslavia in the late 20th century, for instance.)
From the OP:
"[In 2012,] the researchers unearthed a total of 56 episodes of hyperinflation, many of them previously unreported in English-language works."
If we don't even report on the ones in recent high-literacy times, I can't imagine what the odds of this going untranslated/unnoticed are more than two hundred years ago.
There is at least a bit of spin in those words that aren't quantified by your impression of them. What is meant by 'many' in this regard? 12 of them (out of 56) were unreported?
Unreported in English-language works, really? Qualify that statement, show me where you or the authors actually combed through all the works of the English language to arrive at such a statement. Show me one example among the 56 for which I cannot find a prior report on in English language works.
Some things are written in such a way as to provide editorial impact. But they're not an accurate representation of the historical record by any means.
Not really. Hyperinflation is a failure mode expected to be almost unique to fiat currency, which is relevantly recent as a norm. Other types of currencies have different problems. Plus, having data that would even detect hyperinflation is a recent thing in most of the world.
Actually, what jumps out from thaf data (especially when you look into when the inflationary spiral that spiked into hyperinflation happened in individual cases) is that hyperinflation seems overwhelmingly to have one specific cause: major, especially global, conflict, and especially losing such a conflict; the main clusters are associated with (and shortly follow) the end of WWI, the end of WWII, and the end of the Cold War (the collapse of the Russian Ruble around 1992 is by itself about 1/5 of the list, becauae each country that was using it is listed as a separate incident.)
If you're on a gold standard and your war chest starts to run out, you must either find a wealthy lender (hard), press the plunder of your citizenry (limited & bad for morale) or start thinking about a peace deal.
With fiat you can just fire up the printing presses, the later consequences be damned (should you even be aware of them). The first one to have their economy collapse loses, but in the meantime the slaughter can go on.
Yes, one of the failure modes of commodity/representational currencies is that in emergencies—natural.or artificial, war or peace—your state and economy collapse before they would run the risk of hyperinflation with fiat money.
That's one of the reasons those systems have been abandoned generally. (Oddly, goldbugs see this as a selling point of commodity currency.)
There is definitely some bias in the availability of data, but it was comparatively harder to end up in a hyperinflationary spiral in the era of commodity or representative currencies, and these were commonplace until the twentieth century.
There were instances of money suddenly losing all value due to the failure of the issuing state (e.g., confederate dollar banknotes), but that's probably a different story.
Also, I think more key factor is the ease of printing/minting new bigger values and the amount of economic trade that happened. If you didn't buy or trade too much back in time stepping back to barter temporarily was rather easy. Mass manufacturing is rather late thing. And during industrial revolution hyperinflation is unlikely to happen.