in the past, how was it decided how much money to produce?

zyxwvu

I was thinking about this the other day. Say for example in the middle of the 19th century or 18th century; how did governments work out how much money they should mint?
I assume that nowadays there are very intricate and detailed ways of working it out but back then it must have been much more difficult to get it right?
Was there just so little money in circulation that the average person more or less lived without it and just lived off the land with basically no possessions?

Delancey

It was pretty simple really in those days - virtually all countries were on the Gold Standard.
What this meant was that a unit of currency had a set value against a quantity of gold , for example a US $20 bill could ( in theory ) be exchanged at a branch of the Federal Reserve bank for the quantity of gold that its value was pegged at , if say the US Federal Reserve valued 1 dollar at 1 gram of gold then the $20 bill could be redeemed for 20 grams of gold.
Using the Gold Standard menat that a country could not increase the money supply unless it first increased the gold supply , it was effective at keeping inflation in check.

There was one massive drawback to the Gold Standard - it was impossible to finance a long drawn out war on the standard , it was for this reason that in WW1 Britan left the Gold Standard.

Post WW2 the US operated a form of Gold Standard ( sometimes called the Bretton Woods Agreement ) but was forced to abandon this in 1971/72 due to the costs of the war in Vietnam.

( As an aside the Treasury Secretary who implemented the Nixon administration's decision in this regard was none other than the former Texas Governor John Connally who was wounded in the JFK assassination ).