The gold standard’s self-regulating automaticity became politically fatal once workers got involved.

Evidence

With everyone on the gold standard being open to trade and financial flows, the promise of convertibility combined with the flexibility of prices and wages to act as the mechanism of adjustment to ensure that the global economy produced a balance between imports and exports in one country and a balance across the system of countries as a whole. This is how the gold standard created the conditions for the growth of trade across the world, free from government interference and the danger of inflation. It was self-regulating, automatic, and impersonal—which was precisely the problem the moment ordinary people got involved. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 491

Categorization

• APHORISMS: ‘Self-regulating, automatic, and impersonal—which was precisely the problem the moment ordinary people got involved’ reads as a durable insight about technocratic institutions.
• XREF: Echoes the same logic that later justifies austerity as an impersonal ‘automatic’ discipline in the EU. — connects to: Rising democratic power forced the gold standard into terminal crisis — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 415; The gold standard self-corrected trade imbalances through domestic price and wage adjustment. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 490

Broader Connections

• Rising democratic power forced the gold standard into terminal crisis #expands (0.92) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 415
• The gold standard self-corrected trade imbalances through domestic price and wage adjustment. #responds-to (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 490