Episode description

Saifedean introduces his next book, The Gold Standard: an alternative economic history of the twentieth century, where fiat money died in 1915. 

What would the world look like if we had a gold standard in the twentieth century? What would life be like with constantly appreciating money and declining prices? What would have happened if governments could not have financed themselves with inflation in the last century without accountability? How would living standards and wages have changed? How would the state have evolved? What would have happened to education, technology, politics, and our production of energy?

The Gold Standard attempts to answer these questions with a fictional economic history of an alternative twentieth century in which the fiat money experiment fails in 1915. French aviation pioneer Louis Blériot partners with the Wright brothers in 1911 to build an airplane-based decentralized peer-to-peer gold clearance service, the Bleriot Transport Corporation (BTC). Contrary to expectations, BTC is a success and demand for its services is robust, and when the Great War begins in the summer of 1914, BTC offers citizens everywhere the chance to escape central bank inflation by exporting their wealth to neutral countries. The result is a global financial panic in September 1915 that bankrupts all the world’s major central banks and destroys their currencies. A new decentralized modern gold standard is built around peer-to-peer airplane gold clearance, and an entirely different twentieth century unfolds.

Read the first four chapters for free on saifedean.com and pre-order your copy now for delivery in March 2025!