pull down to refresh
10 sats \ 5 replies \ @stack_harder OP 4 Jul \ parent \ on: Would life have been better if we had stayed on a gold standard? econ
That's being dramatic, many of the most prosperous periods in world history happened under some form of the gold standard - including the Industrial Revolution.
Shit, the world was on a gold standard for thousands of years.
Maybe what failed wasn't gold, but the governments' not being able to control themselves because, if nothing else, gold limited how much their ability to blatantly print.
Many of the darkest periods happened under it too, correlation yada yada... gold didn't invent the steam engine or factory any more than fiat invented the microchip or the internet.
The revisionist gold history is a myth too, wealth has always been measured in land and legion.
As a currency it was constantly clipped, diluted or substituted. Even then, it was only useful to the extent a governmental monopoly on violence made such use-cases possible, because it doesn't work as money without the governments endorsement.
Since money is a tool, it is self-evident that gold is not a useful enough tool in shaping human organization. Governments are themselves human organizations, shaped by the tools they are built with.
There's no escaping the fact that fiat is gold's legacy. Play "what if" all you want, the result will always be the same. Bitcoin had to be created to break that cycle of golds failure.
Goldbugs sound like college leftists, puerile dullards that insist real communism has never been tried.
reply
the simple fact is that for thousands of years, gold was the best form of money, and it wasn't because a gov said so, it was because people valued it.
King's clipping it etc, just speaks to the constant desire of rulers and govs to debase to enrich themsevls.
Anyway, i'm not a gold bug, this was just a question to see if people thought the world would be a better place if there was a hard money standard, imperfections and all
no point asking, would the world be better on a btc standard because it would just be a simple 'yes'
reply
Kings didn't clip, Kings had to mint coins with edges because of what happens in circulation
Change goalposts if you must, your OP wasn't about if gold was the best attempt at a solution available... But "what if" it hadn't been a failure (which it was)
reply
it's just a theoretical question, doesn't matter why it failed or ended per se.
it's like asking, what would the world be like if the Nazis won the war, nobody is debating who won or why, who was the better army, it's a hypotehtical question
reply
To hypothesize then we must distill the question down to its essence...
Since gold failed to sustain itself in human organization, would the world be a better place if humans were less flawed to such an extent that gold were actually an effective money. Then sure the obvious answer is yes, less shitty humans would improve a lot of conditions.
Something we can credit gold with are the lessons learned from it to improve ourselves. It failed, but at least it failed forward.
reply