{"id":11245,"date":"2015-08-19T20:07:05","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T01:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11245"},"modified":"2015-08-19T20:07:05","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T01:07:05","slug":"ten-things-every-economist-should-know-about-the-gold-standard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11245","title":{"rendered":"Ten Things Every Economist Should Know about the Gold Standard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ten Things Every Economist Should Know about the Gold Standard<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????\"<\/a>At the risk of sounding like a broken record (well, OK\u2013at the risk ofcontinuing<\/em>\u00a0to sound like a broken record), I’d like to say a bit more about economists’ tendency to get their monetary history wrong.\u00a0 In particular, I’d like to take aim at common myths about the gold standard.<\/p>\n

If there’s one monetary history topic that tends to get handled especially sloppily by monetary economists, not to mention other sorts, this is it.\u00a0\u00a0 Sure, the gold standard was hardly perfect, and\u00a0gold bugs themselves sometimes make silly claims about their favorite former monetary standard<\/a>. \u00a0 But these things don’t excuse the errors many economists commit in their eagerness to find fault with that “barbarous relic.”<\/p>\n

The false claims I have in mind are mostly ones I and others\u2013notably Larry White<\/a>\u2013have countered\u00a0 before.\u00a0 Still I thought it would be useful to address them again here, because they’re still far from being dead horses, and also so that students wrapping-up the semester will have something convenient to send to their misinformed gold-bashing profs (though I urge them to wait until grades are in before sharing!).<\/p>\n

For the sake of those who don’t care to wade through the whole post, here is a “jump to” list of the points covered:<\/p>\n

1. The Gold Standard wasn’t an instance of government price fixing. Not traditionally, anyway.<\/a>
\n2. A gold standard isn’t particularly expensive. In fact, fiat money tends to cost more.<\/a>
\n3. Gold supply “shocks” weren’t particularly shocking.<\/a>
\n4. The deflation that the gold standard permitted\u00a0 wasn’t such a bad thing.<\/a>
\n5.\u00a0 It wasn’t to blame for 19th-century American financial crises.<\/a>
\n6.\u00a0 On the whole, the classical gold standard worked remarkably well (while it lasted).<\/a>
\n7.\u00a0 It didn’t have to be “managed” by central bankers.<\/a>
\n8.\u00a0 In fact, central banking tends to throw a wrench in the works.<\/a>
\n9.\u00a0 “The” Gold Standard wasn’t to blame for the Great Depression.<\/a>
\n10.\u00a0 It didn’t manage money according to any economists’ theoretical ideal.\u00a0 But neither has any fiat-money-issuing central bank.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ten Things Every Economist Should Know about the Gold Standard At the risk of sounding like a broken record (well, OK\u2013at the risk ofcontinuing\u00a0to sound like a broken record), I’d like to say a bit more about economists’ tendency to get their monetary history wrong.\u00a0 In particular, I’d like to take aim at common myths […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8283,124,3918,1856,374,1183,8284],"class_list":["post-11245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-barbarous-relic","tag-central-banks","tag-fiat-money","tag-financial-crises","tag-gold","tag-gold-standard","tag-monetary-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11246,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11245\/revisions\/11246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}