shortwavesurfer ,

Nixon depagged the dollar from gold and ruined the United States for ever more.

Blue_Morpho ,

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?

shortwavesurfer ,

The US doesn't need to be supporting Taiwan, Ukraine. The US needs to be supporting the US. Let Taiwan and Ukraine support themselves.

orrk ,

ok there, Mr. Chamberlain, you know what happened to every isolationist nation throughout history... right?

Krono ,

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!"

3volver ,

Porque no los dos?

jkrtn ,

Libertarians cannot handle the cognitive load of multiple contributing factors, otherwise they wouldn't be libertarians.

orrk ,

I had a libertarian try to explain how a corporation couldn't be evil because fire exists, needless to say, he never got the whole part about an idea not being the same as a rock

jkrtn ,

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!

grue ,

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.

amio ,

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.

leadore ,
@leadore@kbin.social avatar

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.

jkrtn ,

I wouldn't mind seeing a Reagan arrow on these graphs.

protist ,

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

Prunebutt ,

Bullshit libertarian take. And in the wrong community.

reddig33 ,

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.

Blue_Morpho ,

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%.

protist ,

A base 2013 Dart was $16K MSRP. At that rate it doubled once every 13 years or so from 1970...certainly not every year like dudebro said

RestrictedAccount ,

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.

Prunebutt ,

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.

oo1 ,

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.

Prunebutt ,

The take that the homepage is trying to sell you, hinted at by the Hayek quote.

This homepage is usually posted by right wing libertarians.

tburkhol ,

The US Libertarian Party was founded in 1971. Not saying there's a causative link...

Blue_Morpho ,

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.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

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