[logicchains]

Did you read the link the person you're replying to posted? The empirical evidence there suggests that moving away from hard money has been terrible for the average American, and the shrinking middle class is exactly what's predicted by proponents of sound money.

>but generally that disaster only needs to happen once before everyone realizes how bad an idea it is and probably never does it again.

That clearly isn't the case or else no country would have experienced hyperinflation after the fall of Rome.

[simias]

It's one of these situations where the correlation seems obvious, but the causation seems very hard to establish. How world changed so drastically over the past century that it always seems a bit strange to pin our current woes on one single factor, "empirical evidence" be damned.

[sleavey]

It's good to keep an open mind, but just look at the sheer number of different metrics on that website that show some kind of change at or soon after 1971. With enough correlation you can make a hypothesis, hopefully a testable one. Unfortunately there are no countries that use a gold-backed currency left where you could perform an experiment.

[chii]

> moving away from hard money has been terrible for the average American

i think outsourcing is the cause, not moving off the gold standard.

[throw0101a]

> The empirical evidence there suggests that moving away from hard money has been terrible for the average American, and the shrinking middle class is exactly what's predicted by proponents of sound money.

The shrinking middle class, especially in the US, has mostly occurred post-1980s (see Reagan and Thatcher). This can be stopped and probably reversed with redistributive tax policy. See Piketty:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

> That clearly isn't the case or else no country would have experienced hyperinflation after the fall of Rome.

How may countries have actually experienced this?

> Re-arranging the Hanke-Krus list highlights something however: barring three outliers (France, 1795-1796, North Korea 2012, and Venezuela 2016-) there have actually been only five hyperinflation “events”, each associated with particular large, long-term global processes (involving war, decolonization, regime change, foreign denominated debt/currency pegs). The spatial and temporal clustering of these events is perhaps best expressed visually (Chile and Zimbabwe are temporal outliers within their cluster)

* https://clintballinger.wordpress.com/2019/05/24/the-autocorr...

Hyperinflation is generally not caused by printing money, rather the printing of money is the effect of something else:

> In this paper I will argue why the common misconception that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” cannot be used to explain most historical hyperinflations. I will argue that “money printing” is often the response to exogenous and unusual events and not the direct cause of the hyperinflation.

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102

* https://www.pragcap.com/hyperinflation-its-more-than-just-a-...

China ran on paper for a century or two without issues, and only went back to hard money because the Imperial Court wanted more centralized control; this is covered in a chapter of Goldstein's Money.