Is 1971 the timeline split?
Yes this is part of it.
What happened is Nixon fucked up fiat and fucked us all:
Stop perpetuating the gold standard myth. There’s as much point having a gold standard as there is any other stable finite chemical.
The problem was neoliberalism/conservatism, which systematically removed all the labor and wealth redistribution policies of the post WW2 era, at the same time as boomers AND women were entering the workforce — higher supply of workers = lower demand and wages — the EU and Japan were rebuilt and competitive, offshoring and automation was gearing up (wage suppression + higher profits for capitalism), the deregulation of financial markets and regulatory/financial capture of government that enabled extreme financial predation, etc, etc.
The gold standard change would be irrelevant if we didn’t live in oligarchies masquerading as democracies — where your level of wealth is directly proportional to your level of freedom, speech, and political representation.
While topically interesting, a lot of those graphs are either saying the same thing or are misinterpreting an exponential.
Yup this is left wing pseudo science instead of right wing pseudo science. These are just some graphs that don’t prove anything without a scientific paper to back it up.
“pseudo science”
It’s a website with “wtf” in its name, chill. It just shows the degradation of purchase power firstly as a consequence of the 70s oil crisis, and then as a consequence of increased neoliberalism.
Well what you’re calling left wing psudoscience is an article by Economic Policy Institute: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
They explain their methodology and data sources in meticilous detail, even more so in their report on how they do; https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-divergence-between-productivity-and-a-typical-workers-pay-why-it-matters-and-why-its-real/
If that’s not enough here’s some more stuff:
In case you, like me, prefer to have depressing data in the form of a webcomic:
i see this often and have ambiguous feelings.
on the one hand yes, this illustrates a huge shift in paradigm of the degree to which laborers are woefully undercompensated in a trend toward a massive wealth gap favoring the wealthy.
on the other, it sort of implies a “good old days” ideal which is utterly unrealistic. as though somehow before 1971 laborers were fairly treated, and if we could “just get back” to that point, everything would be fine.
oppression under capital has existed for centuries, not decades. the implication that Nixon or Reagan are the root of absolutely all of current economic suffering, while enjoyable and tasty to say, is patently untrue.
this graph and that one website are often presented as raw evidence, but the reader is left to draw their own conclusions as to wtf this all means for policy.
best case, the reader gets a “fuck Reagan and the capitalist conservative party” vibe.
worst case, you get totally led astray into thinking that bringing back the gold standard is going to fix every problem with wealth inequality and white supremacy in america or something.
Another bash.org memory (paraphrasing)…
User: I just downloaded a song on Napster and when it finished, I noticed the guy I downloaded it from was now downloading it from me
User: I sent him a message saying I just got that song from him
User: He said, “I know, I’m getting my song back asshole”
