Comment by BigTTYGothGF

5 hours ago

> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active

I've got some news for you about modern levels of inequality.

20 comments

BigTTYGothGF

Reply
throw0101d  4 hours ago

I am aware of today's inequality (e.g., I read Piketty back when he was making a splash). But the critique is that Greenspan argued gold standard = less inequality and that fails on the historical record.

If we want to talk about the causes of the 'New Gilded Age' that's something else. As a general starting point I'd begin with:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcherism

  • 4er_transform  4 hours ago

    Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality but the forces pushing inequality today are just much stronger. Technology that creates winner take all markets and incredible leverage with few people being one.

    • throw0101d  3 hours ago

      > Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality […]

      Is there evidence for this?

      During the Gold Standard era there were many periods of deflation, which is bad for people with debt: back in the day this was often farmers, nowadays it'd be anyone with student loans or a mortgage.

      11 replies →

    • cyberax  1 hour ago

      Historically, I'm not aware of a single major case of the Gold Standard helping with inequality.

      In all cases where inequality went down, it was helped by inflationary spending.

      Yet Gold Standard (and its intellectual descendants) directly led to several examples of stagnation. The most recent one was in Europe, it lost a decade of growth after 2008 by insisting on austerity.

curiousllama  4 hours ago

Yea, that's his point. The gold standard neither prevents nor encourages inequality, except inasmuch as it limits policy flexibility (which, similarly, could be used to promote or limit inequality).

  • hashmap  1 hour ago

    The gold standard mechanistically is a driver of wealth inequality, due to its deflationary effects and lack of a governmental mechanism to create more of it. It is not the only driver of wealth inequality, but when we used it that is what it did.

  • roughly  3 hours ago

    Policy flexibility is the only one of those that’s in theory responsive to democratic governance. Your opinion of whether that’s a good thing or not depends somewhat on which side of the inequality you’re on, I think.