It's one of these situations where the correlation seems obvious, but the causation seems very hard to establish. How world changed so drastically over the past century that it always seems a bit strange to pin our current woes on one single factor, "empirical evidence" be damned.

> moving away from hard money has been terrible for the average American

i think outsourcing is the cause, not moving off the gold standard.

> The empirical evidence there suggests that moving away from hard money has been terrible for the average American, and the shrinking middle class is exactly what's predicted by proponents of sound money.

The shrinking middle class, especially in the US, has mostly occurred post-1980s (see Reagan and Thatcher). This can be stopped and probably reversed with redistributive tax policy. See Piketty:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

> That clearly isn't the case or else no country would have experienced hyperinflation after the fall of Rome.

How may countries have actually experienced this?

> Re-arranging the Hanke-Krus list highlights something however: barring three outliers (France, 1795-1796, North Korea 2012, and Venezuela 2016-) there have actually been only five hyperinflation “events”, each associated with particular large, long-term global processes (involving war, decolonization, regime change, foreign denominated debt/currency pegs). The spatial and temporal clustering of these events is perhaps best expressed visually (Chile and Zimbabwe are temporal outliers within their cluster)

* https://clintballinger.wordpress.com/2019/05/24/the-autocorr...

Hyperinflation is generally not caused by printing money, rather the printing of money is the effect of something else:

> In this paper I will argue why the common misconception that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” cannot be used to explain most historical hyperinflations. I will argue that “money printing” is often the response to exogenous and unusual events and not the direct cause of the hyperinflation.

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102

* https://www.pragcap.com/hyperinflation-its-more-than-just-a-...

China ran on paper for a century or two without issues, and only went back to hard money because the Imperial Court wanted more centralized control; this is covered in a chapter of Goldstein's Money.

> but nowhere in these lines does author elaborate how would those countries fare if they weren't offered credit in first place.

For one, in many/most economics textbooks you have the story (fairy tale?) of cultures going from barter to currency (special rocks, shells, etc). There is no sociological or historical record of a culture doing this. The point is reiterated in Money.

My impression is that usury actually inhibits economic development because you’re stuck paying the interest instead of investing in your future. Lower interest rates encourages more risk taking economic activities. Sometimes those risks don’t pan out, but, if you believe that overall your economy will prosper, lower interest rates ensure that proceeds from risks stay more with those generating the activity rather than the lenders themselves. Liquidity is important but not as much value creating (if everyone loans the other person $5, there’s a lot of “economic activity”, but nothing of value has been created in that fake scenario). That’s simplistic of course and liquidity itself can be value-generating if there’s intention behind it (ie vetting that the liquidity generated is going to an enterprise that will likely yield net returns overall for some reason).

That’s also why there’s bankruptcy protection. Sucks for the lenders that their gamble didn’t pay off but generally they’re able to take a loss and their other investments can balance them out. Plus bankruptcy protections apply to them to if they overextended themselves or didn’t manage the investments.

The point is that anyone can suffer an economic hardship but that doesn’t mean society should strive to create punishing conditions if you are unlucky (or, in most payday scenarios, just start off poor). Of course some people will abuse the system. There are abuses happening by lenders too. Economic policies around this though can only work at the macro scale, so you find other ways to mitigate the problems through legal structures.

I think there’s this unhealthy association between lendees not paying and it somehow being a moral failing on their part. No. It’s the fault of the lender for not vetting their investment properly. Sure they should be allowed some attempt at recollection but there need to be strong usury protections too (if you want to allow high interest rates in your economic region, then high usury rates should be pared with much easier ability to limit recovery after some limit is collected. If you think about it, in payday scenarios, the successful “investments” on the part of the lenders (ie the people actually making good on the payments) are subsidizing the lenders loans to those that can’t pay. It’s a vicious cycle frequently for those involved because the loans aren’t actually generating economic value and are really being used just to help people get by. High interest loans really need to be restricted to risky economic investments (starting a business of some kind) or those with the resources that they could pay it back and just have a short liquidity issue. This $500 @ 30% interest to fix your car that’s your only mode of transportation to/from work or $1000 to go to the doctor seems seems like not a useful application. It’s a non-economic need that person has and there’s not really any likely realistic scenario where those loans would have a net positive impact on the economy. Forcing the area to invest in useful public transportation solutions and safety net for medical care would return far more value to the economic prosperity and social stability/welfare of the area.

This is a very astute point and it's how I've always thought about Bitcoin and other crypto assets. I never understood why people have to debate whether it will take over currencies like the USD or EUR, which it will probably never do. Crypto assets can have utily for trading among enemies or situations where normal fiat currency cannot be used. Think about places with dysfunctional institutions, escaping inflation in places like Venezuela or fleeing war. And then there's the programability aspect which is a totally novel use case which I'm not going to go into.

This feels like how Cuba had their own two currency market with the CUP and CUC.