You don't need fancy academics to see why the gold standard was a bad idea.
You need money to function as a proxy for the economy. Every time grows up and enters the workforce, you need to add money to the economy to be able to serve as a proxy for his or her labor. As population and economic activity grows exponentially, you need to add exponentially increasing amounts of money to the economy just to avoid deflation.
Now, explain to me how we could've sustainably kept mining exponentially increasing amounts of gold out of the ground?
Can you name an industry in which the much-feared deflation has occurred in the last fifty years? How has that industry done in terms of wealth creation?
Why do you think that the economy isn't capable of adding money if necessary? Are there any historical examples of the opposite occurring?
Why do you think that exponential growth makes sense in a finite world?
Keep an open mind: the banks would prefer that you didn't.
You need money to function as a proxy for the economy. Every time grows up and enters the workforce, you need to add money to the economy to be able to serve as a proxy for his or her labor. As population and economic activity grows exponentially, you need to add exponentially increasing amounts of money to the economy just to avoid deflation.
Now, explain to me how we could've sustainably kept mining exponentially increasing amounts of gold out of the ground?