Gold standard support among postwar economists was below one percent

Evidence

To properly understand the debates among neoliberals about alternative international monetary systems it is key to situate them in the general intellectual climate of the postwar decades. Even amid a prevailing mood of skepticism towards market forces, the price system, and liberalized and deregulated capital markets, the gold standard and flexible exchange rates were rejected particularly strongly. This situation lasted well into the 1960s. The gold standard was widely regarded as an outdated artifact of the past and was only supported by an extremely small minority of economists—estimates suggest well below 1 percent. One advocate of the gold standard, MPS member Murray Rothbard, described the situation in 1962 aptly: “now [the gold standard] is considered an absurd anachronism, a relic of a tribal fetish.” — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 426

Categorization

• XREF: Rothbard’s marginality here fits the book’s broader fracturing of the neoliberal caricature: even within the MPS, the gold standard orthodoxy was a tiny viewed as anachronistic.