As I read, I thought of the abandonment of the Gold back dollar...so our venture into fiat money didn't start out so good and has been downhill from there.
Interesting the changes in the culture at the same time, as if God said: Ok boys, you're on your own now.

The WTF guys are bullish on bitcoin and yes it would help to create sound money but my feeling is that "money" should remain physical.
digital...scares the hell out of me...the block chain goes down, the servers blow up...it's all lost in smoke just as surely if you put fire to the $$'s in your wallet.

I place the philosophical change at Earth Day, April 22, 1970 -- wherein we turned away from the Moon, Nuclear Power, technology and growth in favor of the pseudo-science of environmentalism.

Lots of things happened around then, Johnson's great society, the Vietnam war, etc., But the the big change in thinking that I remember was the shift to environmentalism and the anti-population thinking of ZPG.

Ayn Rand spotted it happening in 1969 https://courses.aynrand.org/works/apo... .

It is usually a mistake to try and oversimplify such trends to make a big impact of a good point. However, 1971 is pivotal with the advent of total fiat money. The consequences intended or unintended just ripple from there.

One can follow the undermining of sound money for well over a hundred years. Initially taking silver out of the precious metal backed currency. Ripples of wobbling economies begin in the 1870's, 1890's, and 1907. Then we end up with the Federal Reserve as a forced solution to a government created problem of abandoning a constitutional principle. And a sorry history of decline from there.

My first visceral experience with this was with the removal of silver in our coinage in 1964. I was 9 years old and knew something was wrong. But I had spent hours with my grandfather pouring over his coin collection with all those decades and decades of silver coinage. So, I proceeded to go to the bank, buy a roll of dimes or quarters, take it home, replace the few remaining silver coins with the new devalued trash, and then go back and trade it for another. I still have all that "junk" silver. And then Silver Certificates were discontinued. Gold has had an analogous trajectory. I had other motives for calling him Tricky Dick.

All formative in its way. I guess that it is all influential in how I ended up as a gold mining geologist my whole career.

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I've always kept at least 5% of my portfolio in GLD as insurance against hyper inflation. This year I increased that three-fold. It's interesting to to me, though, that gold pricing really hasn't been a good indicator of inflation. Real estate has done a much better job of that.

It's an hour, but worth the time. Just more evidence that we are on an unsustainable trajectory.

it has been changing for the worst for a long time....

That was the last year of real horsepower too...until technology caught up with regulation.