It is anachronistic. China's productivity, especially in shipbuilding, cannot be explained by reference to this historical analogy, since the trade deficit is a function of America's inability to produce.
@LukeGromen Productivity is the time per unit of value from input to output. Under that formula, a revalued gold cannot explain why the US has a trade deficit with China. The time per unit of value from input to output is unproductive in the US.
China has been investing so much in shipbuilding over the past 18 years that it can now build more ships in a month than the United States can in a year. Measured by time rather than gold or dollars, the situation draws into stark relief America's lack of productivity.
Shipbuilding is just one example. Productivity has fallen widely across the US because the FBI's imposition of a "final solution" on labor has prevented workers from achieving the gains for which productivity soared during WWII.
It serves my argument well that the US is in the fifth period of its steepest state of its decline as a global superpower. The financialization of the economy has so undermined productivity that America is incapable of producing at the required rate of innovation.
The financialization of the economy by way of the US Federal Reserve's insistence upon a fiat currency has led inevitably to its current situation where the dollar is disintegrating, as the incentives for higher productivity decline against the disintegrating dollar.
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