5 ms·

Essentially, this website wants to make you believe that going off the gold standard (which only existed on paper at the time) is the root cause of all the bad

• ehmish 6y ago
  Ignoring their conclusion aboutwhat they think it was, it's interesting that _something_ happened in 1971, personally I think it's more likely the opening of trade with china than going off the gold standard. It does a good job of showing the sheer broadness of the effect on American society.
  • taffer 6y ago
    > it's interesting that _something_ happened in 1971 Why do you believe that this is true at all? Someone on the Internet just cherry picked some numbers and shoehorned some graphs to make a point. You could pick any year, and with enough data butchery, you could find all sorts of spurious correlations to all sorts of things. By the way, until the 1980s, China was a dirt poor Third World country that was more or less irrelevant in international trade. In the 1970s China exported fewer things than, for example, Nigeria, Venezuela or Poland. The rise of China took place in the 1990s and 2000s. It is completely impossible that trade with China in the 1970s caused any noticeable change.