Closing the gold window: Gold, dollars, and the making of Nixonian foreign economic policy
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historians are quick to end Bretton Woods. Most argue that the postwar monetary system came to an end with Richard Nixon's August 1971 decision to suspend the dollar's convertibility to gold. Closer examination suggests otherwise. With the opening of the Nixon presidential archives, historians can examine the process by which the New Economic Policy (NEP) was created and employed as bargaining chip in monetary and trade negotiations. It quickly becomes clear that the Nixon administration did not seek either to end Bretton Woods or radically change the existing monetary system. The NEP was above all an attempt to bring inflation under control and grow the domestic economy in time for the 1972 elections. American goals were narrow: new exchange rates that would end the United States' current account deficit, wider margins for currencies to fluctuate around par, greater flexibility to alter exchange rates, increased sharing of defense costs by the United States' NATO allies, and the removal of trade restrictions. Indeed, the NEP's foreign elements were secondary, added to the domestic program in order to shield them from criticism. Domestic politics gave birth to the NEP, but the demands of Nixonian foreign policy—détente with the Soviets, 'opening' China, and concluding the Viet Nam conflict—brought about its demise. Henry Kissinger's warnings of the dangers of monetary strife moved the President, never much interested in foreign economic policy, to settle. The result was December's Smithsonian agreement: a compromise by which the dollar was devalued in terms of gold, European and Japanese currencies were allowed to appreciate (the United States' largest trading partner, Canada, did not change the value of its dollar), and the existing monetary system was preserved. Study of the NEP can tell us a great deal about not only American foreign economic policy in a period whose economic and political atmosphere is similar to today's, but also the Nixon White House and the process by foreign economic policy decisions were made.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it