It's interesting that the middle class started losing wealth and income stagnated in relation to the larger economy starting in 1971-1972, but most of the event

It's interesting that the middle class started losing wealth and income stagnated in relation to the larger economy starting in 1971-1972, but most of the events from 1971 are lagging indicators. Eg, the CIA was actively keeping China from being able to obtain chips in the mid '70s. China was barely able to export anything until the late '80s - early '90s. The birth of the digital age is another good example, but tech didn't take over many jobs until the late '70s if not the mid '80s. When analyzing wage stagnation in a finer detail: Going off the gold standard caused a rise in the stock market. Also, we have regulated food prices in the US, so the current metric we use to measure inflation isn't strongly correlated to a living wage. Meanwhile, people who are invested in the stock market and rental properties, aka the upper 10%, have seen a large boom in wealth. (Not just the upper 1% have had a rise in wealth.) Unless we have any other ideas that is being overlooked here, it does in fact look like going off the gold standard started this trend, and has only been amplified by trade and tech later on. Could it be possible that unionized workers started shrinking in 1971? They're commonly cited by historians as a key element in the rise of working class wages, so it would be a good place to check to see if there is a correlation there.