WTF Happened In 1971?
WTF Happened In 1971?
"I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop." - F.A. Hayek 1984
(kinda) A great website to share if you have no idea how to explain the downfall of the US economy.
Edit: Thanks to everyone who provided insight on this website. I've had this in my bookmarks for a very long time and was curious how it held up.
While there is no doubt that the Nixon shock and gold standard had huge effects in 1971, that website pushes a goldbug agenda that isn't supported by other sources.
For example the labor productivity gap didn't start until after 1979. Which is no surprise given that 1980 was the start of Reagan pushing his trickle down economics.
yeah, Bretton-Woods - was so much more about a broader scope of bank regulation - to try control and stabilise investment and capital creation for the good of domestic businesses (ideally small businesses) across all international members of B-W.
Throwing all that regulation away - essentially led to over-concentration of unregulated financial power with little to no incentive (or requirement) for them to work in the domestic interests - all the great stuff that comes from that (and it really is great - for some people).
Couple that with the small govt-ism that came in in the late 70s and there's not even a state investment sector to prop up growth during recessions.Its one of those things where they experiment with something really important and before it's even been tested for long enough, they whip out the safety net.
"We won't need that anyway once the banks are deregulated - they'll fly in and catch us when we fall - they're very fine people ." At least they'll catch us for long enough to sort out foreclosure/eviction and make sure borrowers take all the risk of asset price movement.Pretty much jack-all to do with gold - that was done with in the 20s pretty much in all but name.
Propaganda site. You are supposed to superficially read the graphs' titles and notice the big arrow, then uncritically accept the narrative that something happened around 1971.
When you see a personal blog site or social media post with a graph or graphs on it, stop and think.
First, are these real and accurate graphs? What is their source? Look up the same info on reputable sites that track these numbers to verify.
Second, notice attempts to manipulate. All those big arrows pointing to 1971 as if they mean something. In most cases there isn't even an inflection point or other notable feature of the data at 1971, but the arrow makes you think there is if you don't look closely.edit to add: if you start looking up graphs of things like wages vs productivity and wages compared between income groups, you'll find that things started going to hell during the Reagan era, when Reagan and Thatcher devastated the economy by slashing income taxes on the wealthy and corporations, deregulated industry, and busted the unions, and more.
I wouldn't mind seeing a Reagan arrow on these graphs.
Leftists: its deregulation and reagan and the destruction of labor unions and forever wars and wall street and the death of manufacturing and and and
Libertarians: "GOLD!"
I'm kinda tired of seeing this fucking website being passed around. Several of those rocketing charts begin their launch sequence in the 80s. Must be the gold! Regulations are bad!
Did you get a load of those interest rates …. In 3000BC?
No it's gold. Money printer goes brr is the root cause of almost all deregulation problems.
This site explains absolutely nothing, it just shows a bunch of graphs with limited to no correlation and no reason at all to think they have any common causality
Bullshit libertarian take. And in the wrong community.
I dunno i read all those graphs and think.
Well there was a lot of banking deregulation from 1971 onwards?
Let's give that bank regulation idea another shot maybe - it can't do worse.. . .but then i also think - good on china for that one child policy.
I'm just not getting anywhere near the Hayeck conclusion from the same data.
What take? It is just a bunch of graphs.
This may be the first time I’ve seen anybody say that facts have a libertarian bias.
That is not the way I read the data.
I see the boomers hitting the labor market and people with capital getting rich off the depressed price of labor.
It's a common homepage linked by libertarians in an argument.
Also: read the Hayek quote at the end. This homepage tries to sell youesomething and it an't graphs.
ah ya, "facts", sure many of these graphs can be based on real data, hell maybe even all of them, but then you take a step back and look at these graphes, are the fun arrows and lines at 1971 actually meaningful? or are they there to try and use the data to shape an opinion? taking advantage of the average person's statistic illiteracy, to push some form of partisan agenda?
such as the first graph, we have a nice little arrow and a dot with the number 90.84% but the actual diverging of the variables doesn't start until later, when exactly? you can't tell because the graph only labels three data points on the X axis!, and this isn't the only deliberately misleading graph here, that the authors are using to openly lie about the data to those who aren't well versed in this stuff.
facts don't have a Libertarian Bias, but Libertarians sure are prone to spreading lies.
I’m not a libertarian, but something did go awry around that time. You can see it when you watch reruns of game shows like the price is right. Automobile prices double after a year, and then keep doubling.
Automobile prices double after a year, and then keep doubling.
??? I'm going to use a Dodge Dart as my basis because a 70 Dart was my family car.
1970 Original MSRP $2,261
1972 Original MSRP $2,528
https://www.jdpower.com/cars/1970/dodge/dart-swinger/2-door-hardtop
That's 7% annual inflation, not 100%.
Something indeed happened to cause the decoupling of wages and productivity, but dropping the gold standard (like that site would have you believe) ain't it.
This doesn't explain shit. It tosses a bunch of graphs at you with the feeling of someone suggestively waggling their eyebrows. Some of the graphs have completely valid points. Some are of unclear relevance. Most of all, the page busily works to correlate all these in your mind while carefully not actually arguing anything. That should basically always make you thoroughly fucking suspicious - no matter what the message is.
Maybe the site is completely right about whatever its carefully-only-implied point is: that's the beauty of not really taking a clear stance at all, but just throwing information at people that is likely to allow them to extrapolate whatever you want them to. You also don't have to do pesky things like providing citations, justifying your reasoning, or even explaining what that reasoning is.
I would absolutely recommend against using this as a teaching tool. It could (generously...) be used as a reference for yourself, sure, if you can otherwise back up the implied connections in a way this site did not even try. The fact that its implied point, "wealth hoarding bad" (I assume) is a fairly good one, does not mean this is a good way of communicating it.
The divergence of productivity and wages coincides with a lot of things, like the rise of the service industry, and tons of deregulation and lower taxes over those decades.
This site reads like a creepy Ayn Rand fesish tribute page:
As mentioned previously, railroads were the first large scale industry. The railroad revolution brought with it tremendous improvements in standard of living and a fall in the cost of transportation of goods and people. However, as is the case with most revolutions of industry, the government intervened heavily with subsidy and regulation.
Some railroads (for example The Great Northern) were indeed built in this Libertarian fashion, as purely free market enterprises which competed on the marketplace of transportation (coincidentally these were usually the few that did not go bankrupt) and productive land ownership.
It's weirder than that. The website owner is sharing his paraphrasing of a book by Murray Rothbard. He is the man who coined anarcho-capitalism, protege of von Mises, a Jewish immigrant who organized a group st Columbia to show support for Strom Thurman, mocked by The National Review for his old world isolationist beliefs, called Hayek a liberal, and inspiration to Pat Buchannon, David Duke, and Ron Paul. This Baffler article from Jon Ganz does a great job of breaking down who he was and his relevance to the current Trump moment. He was a self-declared paleo-libertarian.
At the end it's the big rise in seed oil consumption... Interesting, also WTF the insane rise in health admin staff
HMOs
The bane of actual healthcare brought to you by Nixon and his buddy Kaiser
year of my birth. still I was born such that I got a glimpse of decent days even if I did not exactly experience them myselves. still initially the fall was slow enough that I got to sorta experience close. My big mistake was to much school when I should have been working asap since it keeps getting worse.
Nixon depagged the dollar from gold and ruined the United States for ever more.
China is #1 and Russia is #3 in global gold production.
Could you imagine the US being able to support Taiwan and Ukraine if China and Russia had complete control of the US monetary supply?