I’m wondering if there’s a graph or chart made such that it is easy to see a pattern in economic failures and policy decisions - by any country - over the last hundred or so years… So for example the US had an economy of a certain size, then the FED was created, and then the currency was inflated.
I would imagine some economist or libertarian groups would have plotted all this data out from a zoomed out perspective. It’s commonplace these days to hear the same few references to cycles and patterns in the rise and fall of empires. But we have so much data now I feel like we should be able to make more specific predictions and deduce more accurate causality.
There are numerous timelines of world events, but history is never simple. Economics doesn’t happen in a computer lab spreadsheet, it is the sum total of many factors, policy being just one of them. You also have trade, foreign influences, innovation, acquisitions, labor movements, climate changes, migration, investor confidence, unemployment, housing prices, shifts in industries/sectors, disasters, politics, blah blah.
US GDP has steadily increased: Long-term real growth in US GDP per capita 1871-2009 — Visualizing Economics
What is the conclusion from that graph? To spur economic growth, we should send the country into a deep depression and then start a world war?
If it were that simple, we wouldn’t have entire throngs of economists and analysts and politicians and generals.