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Comment by deevolution | Hacker News Reader

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

I’ll bite. The data/graphs look suspicious and convincing enough, so WTF did happen?

I was hoping for an answer but alas there was none. Anyone have plausible theories? Is this an unexplained mystery or just an artifact of S curve growth?

I always thought the site might imply getting off the gold standard.

Of course it implies it, but that's been debunked

I think the gold standard ended because of globalization. After all gold wasn't widely distributed enough to allow a global economy to develop so the USD had to decouple from gold.

Nixon shock/move to fiat standard instead of gold convertibility.

A lot happened around that time: Technology and automation really started taking off, sending productivity way up. Global shipping costs plummeted, giving way to a new era of international trade. The first personal computers started entering the market. Trade relations with China opened up around that time. Households started moving from single-earner to dual-income.

It was a time of rapid change. That particular website is usually used to suggest that the only thing that changed was the gold standard, but it's been debunked and refuted all across the internet.

Stills begs the question... why would we see inflation when all of those trends are deflationary? Can't possibly be because the fed is printing money out of thin air..

> ... top marginal rates in the 1950s and 1960s were extraordinarily high by present-day standards

> ... observers from the 1950s to today repeatedly noted that, at one time, social rules curbed CEO greed.

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2016/08/18/executive-compens...

Other sources -- sorry no links -- ascribe the genesis of such "social rules" to a US WW II norm of austerity among elites, who might otherwise have found ways to seize a greater share of the economy's wealth for their own dissipative pleasures.

Or the threat of Communism, which was still at least officially trying to inspire revolution around the world. If you have someone trying to inspire your workers to revolt, you'd better be giving them a better deal than the other guy is offering.

The website is a crypto ad making a big deal about the gold standard

> I’ll bite. The data/graphs look suspicious and convincing enough, so WTF did happen?

Energy volatility and energy austerity https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FPjE8zVX0AQCFuD?format=jpg&name=...

I think its more what happened in 1980 with Reagonomics and the Volker Fed followed by Clintonomics and the shift towards "third way" neoliberalism. We've actually had 40 years of what I'd call Republican free-market economic policies and decimation of unions and the power of the average worker to get a higher nominal wage. Most of the trends start closer to 1980.

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