In March of 1971 the house eliminated "teller votes", where representatives' votes on amendments to bills were private; the system then moved to recorded votes, initially with red/green cards, and then in 1973 with electronic votes. After March of 1971, the public could learn exactly which representatives voted for exactly which amendments. In practice, this accountability change meant that lobbyists and their clients gained knowledge of which representatives defected and which ones towed line.
The person saying transparency wasn't a good thing was saying that because transparency allows for more efficient lobbying, it has resulted in a more easily gamed system.
The tradeoff they are pointing out isn't "transparency or lobbying" it's "transparency + rampant lobbying vs secrecy + less effective lobbying"
Agreed that many of them are spurious (or the cause of other things that probably have no causal link to Bretton-Woods, such as no-fault divorce or the war on drugs) but there are still a lot that do seem to have a sharp discontinuity at 1971, particularly income vs productivity, and CPI, which is actually a more frightening chart in my opinion
They all seems to point to 1971, nothing random about that
I understand that correlation != causation, but it also seems obvious that getting out of Bretton Woods has some major impact
The "oil crisis" was a couple of years later but could be seen in the production figures from 1971. I find it odd that it's not mentioned. Oil was far more important for the US economic miracle than gold!
I too have mused endlessly about what happened in the early 1970s. It seems like we really, really went off the rails in so many ways at that time. I love that site for its graph collection but I am not convinced of its hypothesis (nor do I completely dismiss it).
The end of super-cheap easy domestic oil has long been my go-to hypothesis for what happened around 1971. Monetary systems and policy are social constructs, but energy is physically fundamental.
Everything that has happened since then including reckless monetary policy and wage stagnation could be argued to be symptoms of the rising real cost of energy. By real cost of energy I mean physics, EROEI. Wage stagnation happens because without super cheap energy the actual physical cost of providing increasing living standards to a huge number of people become too high. Even if they live lavishly, a smaller number of rich people don't consume nearly as much energy as a huge number of middle class people. As a result the rich are not affected. Reckless financial and monetary policies can be explained by politicians who don't understand physics trying to get the magic unicorns to come back.
If either solar/wind + batteries or some form of nuclear power can be made to scale well enough, we may see a return to the post-war era. Otherwise we will not, and returning to the gold standard (or Bitcoin) won't make much difference.
I'm pretty optimistic about renewable power. I glance at this every once in a while:
During the day California often runs on >50% solar/wind. Two decades ago that was a small single digit percentage. It's pretty spectacular. If we can scale storage similarly and then if the costs of both continue to fall for a while due to industrial scaling of production, we could be back to the 50s but with a renewable instead of non-renewable basis.
A fusion breakthrough or finally figuring out how to safely and sustainably scale fission would have a similar outcome.
BTW: I also wonder if you can explain the Chinese miracle in energy terms. China just decided to chase growth and fuck the environment, so they went wild with cheap coal. The magic was not only using cheap coal but doing so with no scrubbers (which consume a surprising amount of power) and no other energetically costly environmental controls to speak of, maximizing physical EROEI. They lifted vast numbers of people to middle class status and became a superpower at the cost of accelerating climate change and air that burns your eyes.
That is interesting. Though is appears to try to tie unrelated things together. For example, incarceration rates are related to the War on Drugs that started around that time - which isn't related to the gold standard. The War on Drugs was declared in 1971 but it wasn't monetary policy.
I think you'll find it was precisely 1971.