I agree that the supposed 'experts', who in most cases are little more than panderers to power, love to cherry pick data points to prove that which cannot be proven. The interesting part for me was how they gloss over the fact that World War I could not have taken place unless governments chose to abandon the gold standard. Since no population in Europe was willing to pay the full costs of the war governments chose to hide the real costs by abandoning convertibility. Before that war was totally over the world had more than 17 million dead, progressives and socialists came to power everywhere and Western society was in decline.