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Can you elaborate? I'm a complete novice in this area, so genuine question.

The typical argument is that the value of gold is somehow super stable (often the story is brought up that in biblical times, an amount X of gold would purchase Y loaves of bread, and today it is still the same!). By contrast, the dollar lost 96% or so of its purchasing power over the last century, so clearly gold is much better, and if you tie the value of the currency to gold (=gold standard), you have the best of both worlds.

However, that story neglects many things.

1. A worker can buy many more loaves of bread (not to mention other things) with a week of wages than two thousand years ago. So, who cares about the price of gold?

2. Everyone is free to buy gold with their money, anyway, if desired [0].

3. A moderate amount of inflation is not bad, and in fact what most central banks target for, and what they have achieved for decades.

4. If you have a lot of money lying around, invest it in the markets (or into gold), don't leave it in currency.

5. A gold standard would remove the central bank's ability to control the money supply, and hamstring its ability to conduct monetary policy. Gold standard proponents consider that a feature, but almost all modern economists consider it a bug. An instructive parable is the story of the Babysitting Coop [1].

My overall take is that

good fiat > gold standard > bad fiat,

and policy should be focused on good fiat, ie keeping the central bank competent and politically independent and with a clear mandate.

[0] There have been exceptions, eg in the US in 1933, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

[1] https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy....

The "competent" part is doing some really heavy lifting there, and to be frank.

I personally have a lot more trust in the competency of a central bank than some random, unchangeable numbers an anonymous person pulled out of their hat in 2008. Or the gold mining cartels, for that matter. At least the central banks have some vague semblance of democratic control.

Central banks have their problems, but a history of banking in the US, especially in the early 1800s make modern central banks look amazing.

Said Central Bank was famously killed once, for equally good reasons, in our country's history. We've quite literally built in "endless growth" imto the fundamental architecture of our monetary system, which breaks the fractal self-similarity between the different levels of abstraction of an ideal State.

(Given nature's love of pattern reuse, finance on micro ()individual), should resemble finance slightly more macro (family), dhould resemble finance even more macro, (industry, state, nation))

Whereas what we have now is some horrible abomination where at the top-end, we get these debt fueled monstrosities that continually push asset prices into more and more ludicrous places where barrier to entry gets higher and higher, and the requisite concentrations of resources one must accrue before the power laws start kicking in relegates a greater and greater portion of the population to basically treading water in the hopes less than a single percent of it makes good capital allocation decisions.

Call me a contrarian nut if you want, but something is completely off. I accept unintuitive things can exist, but modern economic theory requires too mich fairy dust (Dude, trust us) to keep churning along for my liking. .

The problem with “good” fiat is that it is never good for everyone. Inflation usually hits discriminatorily. And it doesn’t last. Even the US now has high inflation.

The gold standard has its problems, but putting hard limits on currency creation and manipulation is prudent.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com is a good start. The wheels seem to start falling off of everything when you can just create fake money out of thin air. Most of the money goes to those near the money printer and you get massive wealth inequality and all the problems that causes. Maybe gold is silly but it at least pegs the money creation to something.

A serious reply with a link: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/i9ycy9/the_br...

But I always feel like I should reply to people who argue via a link (whether re: the gold standard, COVID-19, or any other topic) with http://web.archive.org/web/20160112000701/http://www.timecub... .

It's a standard "(hyper-)inflation is coming" line.

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