The Strange World of WTFHappenedIn1971.com [Video]
Sketchy Stats, The Bitcoin Standard, and Matters of Faith
I first came across wtfhappenedin1971[dot]com on the Internet forum HackerNews in 2020. For me, at least, it has a strange Internet half-life, resurfacing every year or during times of economic anxiety. As a data scientist, I was naturally intrigued out the gate: how could I resist looking at a graph like this…
…and asking “what happened in - hold on - 1991?” My mind immediately goes to the Soviet Union’s collapse and the international contagion that came with that, especially in Eastern European and Western Asian countries with deep ties to the Soviet Union. My mind doesn’t jump straight to the US departure from the gold standard in 1971. So, what’s with the 1971 annotation?
That’s what I’m exploring in this video. And the more I looked, the more fascinated I became with the associations being drawn between monetary policy and…everything:
There are 79 graphs that are very real, the data isn’t fabricated, but the implied insights range from bizarre to surreal and leave me with a lot of questions like:
Why do some annotations not really point to anything significant that happened in 1971 at all?
How could confounding factors be ignored so explicitly?
Is there an Internet movement that sees 1971 as some kind of schism between a sound and unsound economy? (Yes. They’re super into Bitcoin.)
This corner of the Internet and its faith - what I see as “free market fundamentalism mixed with deep anti-institutionalism” - are fascinating to explore. But my most important question of all still remains: is wtfhappenedin1971[dot]com a result of a woefully bad analysis or a willfully bad analysis?
Check out the full exploration of the claims and movement below here.
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