WTF Happened In 1971?

While there is no doubt that the Nixon shock and gold standard had huge effects in 1971, that website pushes a goldbug agenda that isn't supported by other sources.

For example the labor productivity gap didn't start until after 1979. Which is no surprise given that 1980 was the start of Reagan pushing his trickle down economics.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Propaganda site. You are supposed to superficially read the graphs' titles and notice the big arrow, then uncritically accept the narrative that something happened around 1971.

When you see a personal blog site or social media post with a graph or graphs on it, stop and think.
First, are these real and accurate graphs? What is their source? Look up the same info on reputable sites that track these numbers to verify.
Second, notice attempts to manipulate. All those big arrows pointing to 1971 as if they mean something. In most cases there isn't even an inflection point or other notable feature of the data at 1971, but the arrow makes you think there is if you don't look closely.

edit to add: if you start looking up graphs of things like wages vs productivity and wages compared between income groups, you'll find that things started going to hell during the Reagan era, when Reagan and Thatcher devastated the economy by slashing income taxes on the wealthy and corporations, deregulated industry, and busted the unions, and more.

Leftists: its deregulation and reagan and the destruction of labor unions and forever wars and wall street and the death of manufacturing and and and

Libertarians: "GOLD!"

This site explains absolutely nothing, it just shows a bunch of graphs with limited to no correlation and no reason at all to think they have any common causality

Bullshit libertarian take. And in the wrong community.

Something indeed happened to cause the decoupling of wages and productivity, but dropping the gold standard (like that site would have you believe) ain't it.

This doesn't explain shit. It tosses a bunch of graphs at you with the feeling of someone suggestively waggling their eyebrows. Some of the graphs have completely valid points. Some are of unclear relevance. Most of all, the page busily works to correlate all these in your mind while carefully not actually arguing anything. That should basically always make you thoroughly fucking suspicious - no matter what the message is.

Maybe the site is completely right about whatever its carefully-only-implied point is: that's the beauty of not really taking a clear stance at all, but just throwing information at people that is likely to allow them to extrapolate whatever you want them to. You also don't have to do pesky things like providing citations, justifying your reasoning, or even explaining what that reasoning is.

I would absolutely recommend against using this as a teaching tool. It could (generously...) be used as a reference for yourself, sure, if you can otherwise back up the implied connections in a way this site did not even try. The fact that its implied point, "wealth hoarding bad" (I assume) is a fairly good one, does not mean this is a good way of communicating it.

The divergence of productivity and wages coincides with a lot of things, like the rise of the service industry, and tons of deregulation and lower taxes over those decades.

This site reads like a creepy Ayn Rand fesish tribute page:

As mentioned previously, railroads were the first large scale industry. The railroad revolution brought with it tremendous improvements in standard of living and a fall in the cost of transportation of goods and people. However, as is the case with most revolutions of industry, the government intervened heavily with subsidy and regulation.

Some railroads (for example The Great Northern) were indeed built in this Libertarian fashion, as purely free market enterprises which competed on the marketplace of transportation (coincidentally these were usually the few that did not go bankrupt) and productive land ownership.

At the end it's the big rise in seed oil consumption... Interesting, also WTF the insane rise in health admin staff

year of my birth. still I was born such that I got a glimpse of decent days even if I did not exactly experience them myselves. still initially the fall was slow enough that I got to sorta experience close. My big mistake was to much school when I should have been working asap since it keeps getting worse.

Nixon depagged the dollar from gold and ruined the United States for ever more.