Cointelegraph Magazine

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Ran into trouble backing the currency with gold in the late 1960s, after printing too much money to pay for things like the Vietnam war and various welfare programs, which was the rationale for Nixon killing the system on August 15, 1971.Yeah, but it was a good thing.

"We spend the vast majority of every day especially Ben and I just in private, discussing these things back and forth and sending, you know, trying to poke holes in our ideas."

Even though the charts on the site show a strong correlation between the end of the gold standard and a variety of different things, that doesn't prove it caused the issue.

"We get a lot of people who think that we're attributing things to the end of Bretton Woods that we shouldn't be," says Collin.

Could these things help explain why that year changed everything?

Things have improved out of sight: in the early 1970's half the world's population lived in extreme poverty, now only 10% do.

The number of illiterate people has dropped by more than 50%, while the number of people worldwide who live in a democracy grew from 32% to almost 56%. Prentice believes technological progress is the reason these some things have improved.

"We used to spend hours a day washing our clothes and hanging them up and drying them. Now I don't even think about it. Technology improves things like crops, right? Look at all the agricultural gear that we use now, these giant harvesters and all these things that allow us to get our food cheaper. In general, I believe all of the things you just listed are due to deflationary pressure inside an inflationary system."

So essentially he's saying that all of the things that got better, would have performed even better if they hadn't been hampered by the end of the Bretton Woods system.

Prentice says the pair are well aware their ideas are outside of conventional economic thinking, but say that's because they've attempted to approach things from first principles and "Expose the errors that other economists make."

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