( Eg: Collapse of the Spanish Empire )
> small outliers that don't matter.
The Spanish Empire that spanned a globe and had a footprint in North America only recently eclipsed by the modern USofA is a "small outlier" ?
Uh-huh.
Yes. That's exactly my claim. Without instruments to support growth, the pre-industrial economy did not grow.
The European Industrial Revolution was kick-started by looted gold and other precious materials (like spices) that were looted from the colonies. It provided unexpected inflation by physically increasing the amount of available currency.
> I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.
If you are bringing up 6000 years of stagnation, then our current economic growth is nothing but an outlier.
I assume that you're just completely ignorant, and as such, you can't be educated.
> Before 1971 we had a gold-backed monetary system
We didn't.
> and no record of deflation in the history of mankind.
Germany, 1932-1933. US, 1927-1933. And so on.
See also: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
> Or do you seriously claim we had stagnation in the thousands of years of civilization, and only started to have groth since 1971?
The economic systems have not been based on precious metals for quite a while. There simply has not been enough gold (or silver) to back up the economy for at least 200-300 years. Instead, the global economy was based on the _promise_ of getting gold.
In other words, fiat money.