I have actually done a bit of research on this. Basically, if you take a graph of world population and a graph of world silver production, they both look the same. As population increases, so does silver production. Silver production grows just enough to meet demand. Silver salesmen will tell you that there is more gold than silver so silver price must go up. There is more gold because gold is used as a store of wealth, and silver is mostly just used for industry and jewelry. Silver is a much more common element, something like 50 to 1 in the earth's crust. But the main driver for gold and silver prices is the cost to mine and purify. Gold costs about 500 an ounce, while silver costs 10-15 dollars an ounce.