It would be a good idea to site your facts rather than relying on instinct, because I suspect you write be surprised.
For instance this [1] is the US monetary supply. If we only dump money on the economy when "bad things are happening" then it must be assumed that really bad things are always happening, and at a rapidly accelerating rate.
And similarly Wiki has a passable section on the history of wealth inequality in the US [2] : "In the late 18th century, “incomes were more equally distributed in colonial America than in any other place that can be measured,” according to Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson. The richest 1 percent of households held only 8.5% of total income in the late 18th century...
In 1860, the top 1 percent collected almost one-third of property incomes, as compared to 13.7% in 1774. There was a great deal of competition for land in the cities and non-frontier areas during this time period, with those who had already acquired land becoming richer than everyone else. The newly burgeoning financial sector also greatly rewarded the already-wealthy, as they were the only ones financially sound enough to invest.[19]"
And once again many of the problems with our current system are already highly visible, completely quantified, and have clear causal backings.
You won't catch me defending ZIRP, but other than that and a weird dip in the 90s, M2 seems to track the value of the US economy pretty well. Why didn't things immediately go to shit after Bretton Woods? Why did it take 40 years and huge, long-lived Fed rate cuts before M2 started outpacing GDP? Could it be that floating currencies maybe aren't disastrous?
> And similarly Wiki has a passable section on the history of wealth inequality in the US [2] : "In the late 18th century
I'm not going back to the economy of literally 1774 to find proof that the gold standard works. "Are banks a good idea" is something you'll have to take up with Hamilton, not me.
> And once again many of the problems with our current system are already highly visible, completely quantified, and have clear causal backings.
Again feel free to post any evidence here, or respond to any of my questions (also with evidence).
> M2 seems to track the value of the US economy pretty well
Ah, now you are seeing! The US prints completely ridiculous amounts of money. The superpower we have/had is to then dump a significant chunk of the resultant inflation onto other countries. So we get to turn a far larger chunk of that printed money into "growth", keep the currency stronger, suffer less inflation, etc than would be true for other countries engaging in identical behavior.
BTW to make sure we're on the same page here. There are two distinct topics at play. One is quality of life for the average person. I think that has stagnated to declined for the plethora of reasons illustrated on the 1971 page. The second is the economic state of the country (as opposed to the people). And that has obviously substantially improved since 1971, particularly with our superpower, but I am arguing that as our ability to export inflation continues to decline we're towards a major inflection point that I suspect will be the end of this economic system.
For instance this [1] is the US monetary supply. If we only dump money on the economy when "bad things are happening" then it must be assumed that really bad things are always happening, and at a rapidly accelerating rate.
And similarly Wiki has a passable section on the history of wealth inequality in the US [2] : "In the late 18th century, “incomes were more equally distributed in colonial America than in any other place that can be measured,” according to Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson. The richest 1 percent of households held only 8.5% of total income in the late 18th century...
In 1860, the top 1 percent collected almost one-third of property incomes, as compared to 13.7% in 1774. There was a great deal of competition for land in the cities and non-frontier areas during this time period, with those who had already acquired land becoming richer than everyone else. The newly burgeoning financial sector also greatly rewarded the already-wealthy, as they were the only ones financially sound enough to invest.[19]"
And once again many of the problems with our current system are already highly visible, completely quantified, and have clear causal backings.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...