Hacker News

Maybe I am confused but how is this hacker news?

Women entered the workforce, and the rest of the developed world finally recovered from being bombed to hell. This was a double whammy of reducing labor value in the US, since there was more supply domestically (women) and abroad (offshore production).

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/gold-standard.asp

This explains it.

Not sure if it makes sense to try to pin it down to a specific year or even one specific "thing" that happened, but there was a massive anti-antitrust (so "pro-monopoly") movement that started in the early 1970s and really took off under Robert Bork:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork

Corporate raiders came along in the 80s and started gutting everything a company did that wasn't purely maximizing shareholder value. Any publicly traded company that resisted got a hostile takeover (not really a common thing before then). Followed by fifty years of judges "learning" that every corporate action that someone can claim will lower consumer prices is to be allowed (whether the claim actually comes to pass or not).

I recommend Robert Reich's online class about wealth and poverty. It lays out a lot of interesting concepts.

https://youtu.be/1f2blKai7HA

Also Elizabeth Warren pointed out in "the coming collapse of the middle class" that in the 70s companies realized they could feed the expectation of improving quality of life by withholding raises but offering unsecured credit in the form of credit cards.

https://youtu.be/akVL7QY0S8A

What happened in 1971? One of the largest booms in population entered the workforce. Large infrastructure projects and long term investments began paying off after the destruction of some of the most industrialized countries in the world. The entering of Japan and South Korea as major industrial figures. The rise of people whose skills, background, and education were in business not in a business. The rise of a new stage of industrialization as the industrial engineering concepts that were used in WWII and then rejected by American businesses, began showing their use after adoption in Japan. The new deal became old and those who opposed it began succeeding at their attempts to start gutting it. American anti communist propaganda became effective enough that concessions to workers in exchange for not overthrowing capitalism stopped being seen as crucial.

What happened in 1971? Not much, but 25 years earlier rebuilding began after the decimation of two/three continents and a generation and large swaths of the world began self governance. 40 years prior America began controversial programs to ensure the common person got their share, but such programs became seen as unnecessary by those who never needed them.

Also tying food consumption is wild. Potatoes are still dirt cheap. Beef has lost popularity since the 70s in part because heart health consciousness has grown.

But this motherfucker probably wants you to blame us ditching the gold standard