[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.