The US had net deflation for most of its history (except during wars) from 1600-1910, and certainly there was plenty of growth.
And for all but the last 45 years of that 410-year period, the US also had the ability to obtain labor by force and without compensation. And even afterward, for many decades and well beyond the 1910 cutoff, the US had labor arrangements which only were not classified as slavery due to legal hair-splitting over the definition of the term.
Thus, we can just as easily argue that slavery is correlated with economic growth. Or that disregard for the intellectual-property laws of other countries is associated with growth (see the US in the 19th century, China in the 20th and early 21st). Or... well, lots of complicated factors that you seem to want to gloss over to make an argument in favor of one and only one factor.
(and that's without getting into the volatility of gold-backed currency, the boom/bust cycles, the fights over whether to have a single or bimetallic standard, etc. etc.)
Thus, we can just as easily argue that slavery is correlated with economic growth. Or that disregard for the intellectual-property laws of other countries is associated with growth (see the US in the 19th century, China in the 20th and early 21st)
I am sympathetic to both claims, given that it's possible that economic growth in the modern era is only made possible by massive credit expansion (voluntary, fractional slavery.
boom/bust cycles are normal, what's so bad about them? If the claim is that people get hurt then the question we have to ask is why aren't we stepping forward to help them? As for single or bimetallic standard, those are of course political issues, I'm not as well versed to the reasons for them but it appears to me to basically be a pre-hashing (if you will) of the same arguments we're having now about inflationary vs. deflationary currency, except with more of granularity concern (not an issue with bitcoins).
The bimetallic argument was basically a fight between those who already were wealthy and wished to preserve their position, and those who were not yet wealthy but wanted to improve their position.
Backers of a gold-only standard (mostly in the eastern US) wanted it because their fortunes were already amassed, and denominated in gold or gold-backed currency, and they did not want this diluted by the influx of silver from mines in the western US. Backers of the bimetallic standard had access to silver mines, or to the resulting silver, and wanted the ability to either have silver coined, or to present it and receive in return legal tender (which had been taken away in 1873).
For an edifying take on the populist/bimetallic position, consider reading William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, which is full of eminently-quotable and still-relevant lines. For example, a rebuttal of what came to be known as the "trickle-down" theory:
Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between "the idle holders of idle capital" and "the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country"; and, my friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side will the Democratic party fight; upon the side of "the idle holders of idle capital" or upon the side of "the struggling masses"? That is the question which the party must answer first, and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic party, as shown by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic party. There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.
The question that is whether the assertion that diluting the value of gold by introducing to serve as a second currency actually did improve the lot of the less wealthy. Historical evidence suggests that a fiat devaluation hurts the poor (well ultimately it hurts the rich when the poor overturn the wealthy in revolution). Moreover, the architects of this policy failed to see in-retrospect-obvious problems like arbitrage destabilization of bimetallism as the gold-silver exchange rate was, effectively fixed by law. Suffice it to say my confidence in their ability to be correct about the complex net social effects is low, given they missed this crucial, first-order economics problem.
Backers of bimetallism knew it would "dilute" the value of existing currency (i.e., would cause inflation, with subsequent known negative effects). They did not "miss" that, or overlook it; they accepted it as part of a tradeoff. They knew there would be some pain at the outset, but believed that the eventual outcome -- of increasing the number of people who could turn metal into legal tender at a favorable rate, and breaking up some of the power of established wealthy interests -- would outweigh that pain through resulting economic mobility and wider-spread prosperity.
Hence the argument for "trickle up", effectively, as opposed to "trickle down".
And for all but the last 45 years of that 410-year period, the US also had the ability to obtain labor by force and without compensation. And even afterward, for many decades and well beyond the 1910 cutoff, the US had labor arrangements which only were not classified as slavery due to legal hair-splitting over the definition of the term.
Thus, we can just as easily argue that slavery is correlated with economic growth. Or that disregard for the intellectual-property laws of other countries is associated with growth (see the US in the 19th century, China in the 20th and early 21st). Or... well, lots of complicated factors that you seem to want to gloss over to make an argument in favor of one and only one factor.
(and that's without getting into the volatility of gold-backed currency, the boom/bust cycles, the fights over whether to have a single or bimetallic standard, etc. etc.)