bad money drives out good
- idiom
- Specialized
:
la mala moneda expulsa a la buena
- When a government issues less valuable currency, bad money drives out good as people hoard the higher-quality notes.
- bad money drives out good law
Examples
-
The democracy of cultural exchange often operates on the principles of Gresham's law: bad money drives out good money.
Academic text (1997) -
According to Gresham's Law, bad money drives out good, leading people to spend inferior currency first.
-
"Gresham's Law is that bad money drives out good.
Fiction book (1994) -
The rub here is that academe is also the best place to understand the cunning contained in Gresham's Law about bad money driving out good.
Academic text (1999) -
In economics, the phrase bad money drives out good explains why counterfeit currency often circulates more than genuine coins.
Synonyms
People spend cheap coins and keep valuable ones
Surface Forms
Morphology
bad + money + drive + out + good
The components 'bad', 'money', 'drive', 'out', and 'good' allow a learner to infer a literal meaning — that inferior money forces better money out — because 'drive out' is a transparent phrasal verb meaning 'expel' and 'bad/good money' are understandable. However, the expression is a proverb with an economic/technical implication (circulation and debasement) and omits the repeated noun after 'good', so the precise economic sense may not be fully predictable to a B1 learner without exposure. For these reasons it is only partially transparent.
Etymology
The proverb bad money drives out good comes from times when coins were real silver or gold: people would spend worn or light coins (the bad money) and keep the shiny, heavy ones (the good money) at home. So the 'good' coins quickly 'disappeared from use' while the 'bad' coins stayed in shops, and the saying now means that worse things can push better things out of everyday use.
