Steve Forbes, June 18, 2014.: "As Brad indicated, the book is about money & monetary policy, & money, particularly monetary policy is one of those topics, that seems to intimidate a lot of people, for some strange reason, and, as a result, the Federal Reserve, for example, has less formal oversight from Congress than do our intel agencies. The thesis of this book is that:
- The topic of money is very straightforward & simple, even though it's shrouded in a lot of jargon & a lot of equations, the idea of money is very basic. We've gotten away from it.
- Our policymakers today know less about money & monetary policy than they did 100 years ago. And since the early 70s, even though we've had booming decades in the 80s & 90s, overall, since we went off the Bretton Woods system, the old gold standard, in 1971, the U.S. average growth rates are less than they were before 1971.
If we'd maintained the growth rates we had for 180 years up to
1971, if we'd maintained those growth rates after 1971, on average, the U.S. economy today would be 50% larger than it is now. Forty years compounding adds up to a lot. Savor for a moment having 50% higher incomes, what it would mean for the deficit, what it would mean for Social Security, what it would mean for a lot of the social divisions today. This thing over time adds up. It's a critical reason why it takes two incomes in a family, to do what one income could do in previous generations. Obviously, taxes are a large part of it, but the debasement of the dollar since the early 70s is a critical part of it as well. And when this thing happens, when you don't have a stable currency, you end up with people not getting ahead the way they should, median incomes not growing the way they should, & leading to a fraying of the social fabric, reduction of social trust, & more divisions. As Keynes said, it's a process that not one in a million will be able to diagnose. And so that's why we wrote the book."