My book on the early career of Arthur Laffer, that advocate of gold within the Nixon administration in 1971, contains the following passage:

“A major sociological hegemon, the profession of economics, had produced, or at the minimum been complicit in, the cashiering of remnant classical economic arrangements in favor of techniques of governmental economic management whose result was stagflation. This was an epic failure.”

The “remnant classical economic arrangements” cited in “The Emergence of Arthur Laffer: The Foundations of Supply-Side Economics in Chicago and Washington,” were two: the dollar was fixed in a rate of exchange to gold, and the major currencies were fixed in rates of exchange to the dollar. The former was gone as of August 15, 1971, the latter by February 1973.

Have we failed to remember that the economic history of the United States, and much of the world, following the dispatching of gold and fixed rates was horrendous? The post hoc, propter hoc qualities are remarkable.

Immediately preceding the nine years in which, between 1973 and 1982, America’s economic growth rate was more than halved, to less than 2% from more than 4%; in which consumer price inflation averaged 9%; in which, in 1975, unemployment lurched up to 9% before nearing, by 1982, 11%; in short, immediately preceding the onset of an unprecedented stagflation, the United States took the dollar off gold and bid the world to abandon fixed rates.

The economics textbooks insist that it all happened because of the 1973 oil crisis. Notwithstanding that the price increase in gasoline in the United States lagged the increase of the consumer price index from 1973 until 1979, they argue it was “cost push” inflation that inflicted stagflation upon the country. In a paper in 1983, Mr. Laffer and Charles Kadlec exposed the flaws in this argument.

How can one abandon the monetary system of the ages — gold and the fixed rates — and not suffer the consequences? One cannot.

Amid all the apparent unanimity among economists regarding the supposedly benighted and unworkable gold standard, what might be their answer to this question: “How did it go after gold was dropped on your advice?”

For as economist Marina von Neumann Whitman reminded everyone as stagflation raged in 1975, the proponents of going off gold had predicted that the economic result would be “nirvana.”

Nirvana or stagflation: which one came, immediately and persistently, after the dropping of gold and fixed rates? What was promised was the former; what arrived was the latter. It is not merely that official and academic attitudes toward gold in the matter of the monetary system are condescending. It is that, as my own book puts it:

“The major macro schools (Keynesianism and monetarism) collectively dropped their differences so as to make a unified push to bring down all remaining elements of a classical monetary system, from gold to fixed rates to multiple competitive currency issuers at par. The results, of the 1970s, proved the effort a manifest failure, surely one of the worst in the history of the academic-policy nexus.”

We need to remember 1971 because it represented one of the worst pieces of advice ever taken by policymakers — as ensuing developments unmistakably made clear.

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Mr. Domitrovic is the Richard S. Strong Scholar at the Laffer Center and Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. Image: Detail of a photograph of President Nixon, seated in white chair, and aides in August 1971 in the room where it happened at Camp David. Via the Nixon Library.