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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

So the rebuttal is basically agreeing to everything except from exact timing.

Cool.

The timing is the whole point - original website is trying to blame everything bad on dropping the gold standard, which happened in 1971.

Are they really blaming it on that or is that what the typical (inferred) explanation is? Clearly things started going wrong economically around that timeframe.

Yes, they are really blaming that. If they wanted to blame energy prices, they would have said "WTF happened in 1973?"

There are a bunch of potential explanations for "WTF happened in the early 70s", but only one for "WTF happened in 1971".

Something forced the US off the gold standard. We can all have a sensible discussion about that without getting hung up on the wisdom of collecting pretty rocks.

I think you're talking past each other. Yes, something happened. The website has a particular vision about what the root cause was (moving off the gold standard), and some people here disagree with it. That website is often quoted by gold and (even more often) bitcoin enthusiasts. In this context the exact year is important because it's fundamental to the thesis the website is trying to make.

Btw. if you don't believe this is what the site is about, check the quote at the bottom of a logo of the merch store.

> Something forced the US off the gold standard

We printed more dollars than gold [1]. The idea that we weren't printing more dollars than we had in gold until 1971 is total fiction.

[1]https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/nixon-shock

So the US government, for example, funded a war in the 1960s by simply printing dollars and not making a good effort to collect the same amount in revenue. This provoked currency market crises that led to suspension in dollar convertibility. That's simple and obvious.

What's less simple is how any of this connects to the rise in the two-earner household. Prices went up, women enter the workforce to compensate, but demand for labor was stangnent? What then was everone spending on? There clearly are confounding variables that make this an interesting discussion, beyond "pretty rocks".

> the US government, for example, funded a war in the 1960s by simply printing dollars and not making a good effort to collect the same amount in revenue. This provoked currency market crises that led to suspension in dollar convertibility

We also did this in the Revolution [1] and Civil War [2].

> how any of this connects to the rise in the two-earner household. Prices went up, women enter the workforce to compensate, but demand for labor was stangnent?

Why do you suppose labour demand was stagnant?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenback_(1860s_money)

[2] https://www.amrevmuseum.org/collection/continental-currency-...

The first email was sent in 1971

Yeah I think the sites broader point is that a lot of indicators of the health of American society start trending definitively down with an inflection point around 1970. The fact that the U.S. went off the gold standard on 1971 might be related to that but it's clearly not the sole causal factor.

So what's the rebuttal blaming then?

The rebuttal is something like "things are complicated, large scale societal trends are always rough descriptions of reality at best and can never be reduced to a single 'cause'"

do you think that would be the case if you had a supercomputer with billions of GPU clusters trained on every single digital data ever generated by the people involved in the study?

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