[HN Gopher] WTF Happened in 1971?
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WTF Happened in 1971?
Author : EMIRELADERO
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-05-22 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wtfhappenedin1971.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wtfhappenedin1971.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Nothing that Bitcoin can fix.
|
| Around that time Hunter S. Thompson was writing for a magazine
| and had just attended an oil industry conference where the
| attendees were terrified that the United States was about to
| experience an "oil peak" for domestic production.
|
| His editor killed the story because it seemed too alarmist.
|
| We know the story now that the whole world economy was
| reorganized around this event
|
| https://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm
| car_analogy wrote:
| > Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, IMF members
| have been free to choose any form of exchange arrangement they
| wish (except pegging their currency to gold)
|
| I had no idea gold-backed currencies were actually _forbidden_.
| Seems suspicious - why should the IMF use its vast influence to
| prevent countries from trying out gold-backed currency? Can
| such attempts somehow unfairly damage other currencies?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Some people blame WWII on the gold standard.
|
| Certainly before the managed Bretton Woods standard the US
| economy had "the panic of XXXX" every few years. Price
| stability might have been better but unemployment,
| investment, and everything else was unsteady.
| tmn wrote:
| Of course it's suspicious. A floating fiat based system is a
| great tool to enslave the global population. Backing a
| currency by gold erodes this tool by constraining the ability
| to grow and manage debt
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The American populists thought that the gold standard was a
| great tool to enslave the American population. Back then it
| was unthinkable that farmers would be able to invest to
| say, buy fertilizer:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
|
| The "goldfinger scenario" that goldbugs dream of is the
| collapse of the global economy which is orders of magnitude
| too big to be served by the amount of gold we have, they
| hope that they'll get to live like French aristocrats
| before the revolution.
| car_analogy wrote:
| > Back then it was unthinkable that farmers would be able
| to invest to say, buy fertilizer
|
| This seems very misleading. It wasn't unthinkable in
| 1969, when the gold standard was still in place.
|
| > they hope that they'll get to live like French
| aristocrats before the revolution.
|
| While not a goldbug myself, ascribing base motivations to
| adherents of some idea is a poor substitute for an
| argument against the idea itself.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Under Breton woods the gold standard was managed in a way
| quite different from the pre WWII regime.
| hajile wrote:
| A bunch of things happened.
|
| Women entered the workforce in large numbers almost doubling the
| labor pool across the 1970s. This instantly stagnated wages.
| Meanwhile, all the things those women were doing at home weren't
| free, so cost of living also skyrockets. Pretty soon the
| reasonable "right to work from home" becomes "go to work or go
| broke"
|
| Welfare state kicked off in earnest and corporate taxes were
| increased to compensate while it was removed from your pay via
| wages not keeping up with inflation.
|
| Related to welfare, 60% of people pay ZERO or NEGATIVE income
| taxes. Rich people are paying for all those negative taxes and
| taking it out of YOUR paycheck. Then, because they are paying
| most of the taxes, they are the people politicians actually
| listen to.
|
| You are outright lied to about inflation. The calculations were
| changed in 1980 by the incoming Reagan administration to make it
| look like their policies were more effective than they actually
| were. CPI indicates that inflation from 2000 to 2020 was right at
| 50%, but if you look at price comparisons for stuff in 2000 and
| stuff now, they've generally gone up 100% or more. You can see
| these shenanigans represented in things like how the wholesale
| inflation index is currently 2-3% higher than the CPI rate. When
| your employer says "we're giving you a 2% cost of living because
| that's the CPI" and real inflation is actually 4%, this adds up
| over the years.
|
| Finally, even after accounting for everything, almost everyone is
| STILL getting screwed relative to inflation. We as devs think we
| have "the good life", but we're generally making LESS than median
| salary adjusted for inflation compared to programmers 30-50 years
| ago despite being massively more productive.
| zaik wrote:
| > Rich people are paying for all those negative taxes and
| taking it out of YOUR paycheck.
|
| If somebody is able to get richer by lowering your pay they
| will eventually do so, taxes or not.
| metadat wrote:
| Previous HN discourse:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25188457 (2021, 454
| comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20811004 (2019, 44 comments)
| llamaLord wrote:
| First state to legalise no-fault divorce was in 1969 and in the
| late 1960's was when birth control was becoming widely available.
|
| I suspect a lot of this is to do with the effective doubling of
| the full-time workforce.
|
| To be clear, I'm NOT saying women being able to work full-time is
| a bad thing. But I DO think that average people have been totally
| fucked by the transition to 2 person incomes economically.
|
| Prior to the 1970's, one middle class partner could bring in
| enough money to support a family, own a home, pay all the bills
| etc. Whilst at the same time having one person at home meant cost
| of living was lower and everyone had SIGNIFICANT amounts more
| free time.
|
| Now, the average middle class family struggles to survive on two
| incomes and once mum and dad have both completed their 40hrs a
| week each at work, they both have another 20hrs a week of
| domestic responsibilities to complete in "their own time" that
| originally would have been done by the stay at home partner.
| marcoloco wrote:
| President Richard Nixon announcing the severing of links between
| the dollar and gold as part of a broad economic plan on Aug. 15,
| 1971
| op00to wrote:
| The 26th amendment to the US constitution was ratified in 1971,
| giving 18 year olds the right to vote. why not that instead of
| some obscure monetary change?
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| rayiner wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
|
| > The Nixon shock was a series of economic measures undertaken by
| United States President Richard Nixon in 1971, in response to
| increasing inflation, the most significant of which were wage and
| price freezes, surcharges on imports, and the unilateral
| cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the
| United States dollar to gold.
| dionian wrote:
| Gold standard dropped
| rob_c wrote:
| That is a lot of inflection points...
| Lammy wrote:
| See also: "An Interim Report to the President and the Congress
| from the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future"
| (1970). Copy and paste this link or it won't load properly:
| https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10
|
| "The time has come to ask what level of population growth is good
| for the United States. There was a period when rapid growth made
| better sense as we sought to settle a continent and build a
| modern industrial Nation. And there was a period, in the 1930's,
| when a low birth rate was cause for concern. But these are new
| times and we have to question old assumptions and make new
| choices based on what population growth means for the Nation
| today. Despite the pervasive impact of population growth on every
| facet of American life, the United States has never developed a
| deliberate policy on the subject. There is a need today for the
| Nation to consider population growth explicitly and to formulate
| policy for the future."
|
| "The difference [between two-child and three-child American
| families] is important not simply because of the numbers but
| because it bears vitally upon a fundamental question about the
| Nation's future: Do we wish to continue to invest even more of
| our resources and those of much of the rest of the world in
| meeting demands for more services, more classrooms, more
| hospitals, and more housing as population continues to grow?"
| jleyank wrote:
| Well, the PDP-8E was introduced in 1970 and by 1971 it was
| probably present in a significant portion of us high schools.
| This, coupled with commercial time-sharing service access started
| training the second generation of hackers who are responsible for
| spreading the MIT spirit and inventing all sorts of things done
| with computers. This has created a staggering amount of wealth
| since then, which might be reflected in the wall of charts cited
| in this article. Probably more wealth in a single segment than
| the looting of precious metals and gems due to colonization.
|
| Edit: games, process control, the follow-on PDP--11 which redid
| the phone system, and enabled Unix to explode. The need to follow
| DEC which brought forth the minicomputer business, ...
|
| Go ahead, explain 44B being spent for Twitter to somebody from
| 1971.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| >, the PDP-8E was introduced in 1970 and by 1971 it was
| probably present in a significant portion of us high schools.
|
| Was there a special program to support a roll-out of this era's
| PDP-8 boxes to U.S. high schools? Or some other reason how/why
| this is? (I recall access to a PDP-8I in high school circa the
| same time).
| jleyank wrote:
| It was not staggeringly expensive. Google says 6-7k and I
| vaguely recall a trustee ponying up 15k so that the (private)
| school had a computer. Time sharing services were probably a
| manageable expense.
|
| While not cheap it's way less than "real" computers and
| tended to be open for the hackers not the staff.
| FunnyBadger wrote:
| Well, we went entirely off the gold standard and starting
| printing money. This was started by FDR but the nail in the
| coffin was Nixon.
|
| https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/gold-convertibi...
|
| Probably related to this was US domestic Peak Oil was predicted
| to occur in 1970. Peak Oil merely means that 50% of a finite
| reserve has been used: there's another 50% still left but
| production will get more expensive and eratic. That was the year
| we largely switched to Saudi oil and the Arab Oil Embargo came
| only 3 years later. Before 1970, the US modulated the US dollar
| value with increasing or decreasing oil production/exports. In
| 1970 that strategy ended. Some believe that Saudi Arab and the
| countries that became OPEC realized they were now in control of
| the US dollar as reserve currency. Both the Six Day War and the
| Yom Kippur war combined with Arab nationalism led to flexing this
| power by OPEC doing the oil control the US had.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory
|
| Here's a data point on the inflation that caused: the in-store
| menu and prices of McDonald's in 1972. Nothing over $1.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/2lubC0D
|
| This is also related to how bread prices never changed FOR
| CENTURIES until the 20th century with the big rise happening in
| 1970.
|
| A lot of this also came from having no effective industrial
| competitors after WW2 and then being lazy through the 1950s and
| then screwing up with a very expensive wars in Korea, Vietnam and
| other places that were NOT funded by war bonds as in WW2 but were
| funded with deficit spending with no equivalent back-stop. In the
| 1950s and 1960s we were still using industrial technologies from
| the 1920s in terms of fundamentals like steel, aluminum, cars,
| etc. Germany and Japan had lost all their legacy infrastructure
| and had the advantage of starting from scratch.
|
| Basically a lack of monetary and fiscal self-discipline.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Interesting to note that Nixon essentially did nothing more
| than come clean by making official what the US had already been
| doing for years, printing money they didn't have gold for.
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