I think it's inflation. And I don't just mean Covid era inflation. Inflation has been an on-again, off-again problem since the collapse of Bretton Woods.
It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps on climbing.
Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse anyway?
We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of the bright spots in all this).
But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what you're doing?
Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve defaults and wars.
Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation trend.
The problem isn't just laziness or corporate greed, though those play a role. It's the result of a financial system that has spent years prioritizing short-term profits over lasting value. When success is measured by clicks, quarterly earnings, and engagement metrics rather than quality or truth, the natural outcome is a flood of cheap, disposable content. The AI-generated newspaper supplement isn't an exception, it's exactly what the system was designed to produce. Think about the ripple effects: as money flows toward fast, scalable content instead of deep, meaningful work, the people who actually care, journalists, editors, even readers, are left with fewer resources and less reason to invest effort. Local news shrivels, media gets bought up by profit-driven investors, and algorithms push whatever keeps people scrolling. When the financial incentives don't support real journalism, why would anyone bother?
The deeper damage is harder to see. A society fed on algorithmically generated mediocrity starts to lose its ability to recognize, or even expect, better. It's not that people suddenly stopped caring; it's that the system has made caring unrewarding. Underpaid workers cut corners, audiences grow numb to low standards, and the cycle keeps spinning. The "Who Cares Era" isn't about moral failure, it's what happens when the economy no longer values quality. The irony is this same system depends on trust to function. But when readers doubt what they read, workers take no pride in their jobs, and institutions lose credibility, the foundation starts to crack.
It’s easy to blame money, for it’s the most visible and measurable metric in a technologically driven culture. But other scholars have pointed to technology itself as being the issue, the relentless chase of data-driven efficiency, not money, which is just a secondary effect downstream. We went from being a tool-making species, to using tools to organize every aspect of our lives. I recommend Neil Postman’s Technopoly and, of course, good old Uncle Ted.
On the other hand, not paying with money for quality content is breeding the even worse cancer of shallow ad-driven content. Where the only thing that matters now is enough of an illusion to generate a click, horizontally scaled with AI-slop to trawl coverage of every possible search term.
Success of online advertising model seems to have destroyed a lot. It is now so bad that even if you pay you get the advertisements... So you end up with worst of the both worlds...
And all the reasons why economists say inflation is necessary and a good thing seem to make assumptions that aren’t true if taken to their logical conclusion (e.g. infinite growth) and hand wave away negative consequences in order to maintain what amounts to psychologically manipulating people into not saving their money.
Index all wages to inflation and we’ll see how much those holding all the assets feel about it.
I agree with you. The Fed prints trillions, mortgage rates plunge, and suddenly BlackRock's buying up entire neighborhoods with cheap debt while renters get priced out. Inflation is "healthy" if you're the one holding the deeds. But tell that to the family paying 40% of their paycheck just to keep a roof over their heads while wages crawl.
Or look at food prices. The USDA says inflation's "moderate," but try explaining that to the diner owner who's paying double for eggs and bacon while his customers stiff on tips on tips because their paychecks buy less. Meanwhile, Tyson Foods posts record profits, not because they're more efficient, but because they've got pricing power and a Fed that's terrified of "deflationary shocks" (corporate margins shrinking).
And don't even get me started on healthcare. Hospitals jack up bills 8% a year, insurers shrug and pass it on, and the economists call it "normal." But when a nurse asks for a raise to keep up? Suddenly it's "wage-price spiral" panic. Funny how inflation's a "tool" when it's squeezing workers, but a "crisis" when it threatens profits.
The game's rigged. Inflation's just the cover story. They'll print to save banks, but let Main Street eat the inflation tax. They'll cheer "record GDP" while your real paycheck buys less. And if you dare demand wages indexed to inflation? You're "unrealistic", but God forbid the bond market misses its 2% target.
So yeah, inflation's not the problem. The problem is who gets the upside (asset owners) and who gets the shaft (everyone else). And until that changes, all this talk about "necessary inflation" is just a con.
It’s Blackstone that’s investing in single-family homes, not BlackRock. They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock. Easy mistake to make.
Also, there was absolutely inflation before Bretton Woods, and significantly worse inflation at that. See, for example, the hyperinflation during Weimar Germany which led to WWII. Or the nearly 10% deflation in the US during the Great Depression, which just exacerbated the effects by severely discouraging investment that would have helped kickstart the economy again. Post-Bretton Woods, major currencies are generally substantially more stable and predictable.
The Weimar hyperinflation wasn't caused by gold's limitations - it was the inevitable result of political cowardice and monetary arson. After WWI, Germany made the fatal decision to abandon gold convertibility and fund reparations through the printing press, transforming the mark from 4.2 to $1 in 1914 to 4.2 trillion to $1 by 1923. This wasn't some unavoidable monetary phenomenon but a deliberate policy choice to avoid fiscal responsibility. The Great Depression tells a similar story of government malpractice rather than gold standard failure. During the Roaring Twenties, the Federal Reserve artificially suppressed interest rates, creating massive distortions in credit markets and fueling the stock bubble. When the inevitable correction came, instead of allowing the market to clear, Hoover's administration compounded the crisis through disastrous interventions - hiking interest rates during a liquidity crunch, imposing Smoot-Hawley tariffs that strangled global trade, and strong-arming businesses into maintaining unsustainably high wages. The resulting deflationary spiral wasn't gold's fault but the direct consequence of central planning arrogance. The Bretton Woods system's collapse in 1971 followed the same pattern of political expediency overriding monetary integrity. The U.S. promised dollar convertibility at $35/oz gold but only to foreign governments while banning domestic ownership. When LBJ's simultaneous Vietnam War and Great Society spending spree drained U.S. gold reserves, Nixon simply severed the dollar's last tether to reality rather than confront fiscal discipline. The post-Bretton Woods era of pure fiat has created the illusion of stability while systematically eroding purchasing power - the dollar has lost 87% of its value since 1971, with the Fed responding to every crisis by printing trillions to bail out financial elites while main street struggles under crushing inflation. Weimar, the Depression, and Bretton Woods all share the same root cause: governments refusing to accept that money must be anchored to something beyond political whims. Gold doesn't cause collapses. It reveals them. Fiat doesn't prevent crises , it merely delays them while making the eventual reckoning worse. The historical record is clear: when governments treat money as a policy tool rather than a sacred trust, the result is always catastrophe dressed in different eras' clothing. Today's $35 trillion debt and monetary debasement suggest we've learned nothing from these lessons.
> One of the main themes of the book is the role played by the central bankers' insistence to adhere to the gold standard "even in the face of total catastrophe."[1] As Joe Nocera, a book reviewer at the New York Times, stated, "the central bankers were prisoners of the economic orthodoxy of their time: the powerful belief that sound monetary policy had to revolve around the gold standard...Again and again, this straitjacket caused the central bankers — especially Norman, gold’s most fervent advocate — to make moves, like raising interest rates, that would allow their countries to hold on to their dwindling gold supplies, even though the larger economy desperately needed help in the form of lower interest rates."
The argument that the gold standard was some kind of economic straitjacket that worsened the Great Depression is nothing more than elite gaslighting, a convenient myth peddled by central bankers and Keynesian apologists to justify their disastrous experiments with fiat money. The reality is that the gold standard didn't fail; governments and central banks did.
Take Britain's catastrophic return to gold in 1925. Churchill, egged on by Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, made the fatal error of pegging the pound at its pre-war parity, overvaluing it by 10-20%. This wasn't gold's fault, it was sheer political hubris. Had they adjusted the peg to reflect actual economic conditions, the ensuing deflationary spiral could have been avoided. Instead, British industry was crushed under the weight of an artificially strong currency, all so London's financial elites could cling to the illusion of imperial prestige.
Then there's France, whose central bank, rather than stabilizing the global monetary system, hoarded gold, which ended up sucking liquidity out of the world economy. And let's not forget the Federal Reserve, which in the early 1930s raised interest rates during a depression to defend gold reserves, turning a recession into a full-blown catastrophe. These weren't flaws of the gold standard, they were acts of economic malpractice by central bankers who either didn't understand the system or deliberately sabotaged it to serve creditor interests.
The classical gold standard, which had functioned smoothly for nearly two centuries before World War I, delivered price stability, facilitated global trade, and forced fiscal discipline on governments. It only broke down when politicians, eager to fund their wars and welfare schemes, suspended convertibility, then tried to haphazardly reinstate it in the 1920s without proper adjustments. The problem wasn't gold; it was the refusal of policymakers to play by the rules.
The truth is, central bankers like Norman didn't cling to the gold standard out of blind orthodoxy, they used it as cover for deflationary policies that protected the financial elite at the expense of workers and industry. The Bank of England sacrificed British manufacturing to maintain London's position as a financial hub. The Fed tightened money when it should have eased, deepening the Depression. The Banque de France hoarded gold, destabilizing the global system. These weren't "prisoners of economic dogma", they were architects of disaster, hiding behind gold to justify their incompetence.
And what did we get when we abandoned gold for the "flexibility" of fiat money? The stagflation of the 1970s, the financial crises of 2008, and the inflation surge of the 2020s, each one a direct result of central banks printing money with no anchor to reality. The Keynesian promise that we could spend and inflate our way to prosperity has been exposed as a lie. The gold standard didn't fail; governments failed the gold standard, and now we're paying the price.
The lesson of history is clear. Every time we discard monetary discipline, we get short-term euphoria followed by long-term collapse. The "gold standard caused the Depression" narrative is nothing more than a smokescreen, designed to absolve the real culprits, central planners and political elites, of their catastrophic mistakes. The bill always comes due, and this time, it's going to be paid in devalued dollars and economic ruin.
Further reading: "Did France Cause the Great Depression?
by Douglas A. Irwin"
As long as US Dollar supply was increasing at the rate of 2% per year (I don't know the exact rate but some predictable small rate) which is commensurate with Gold supply increase, everything was ok with the world, nobody cared whether it was USD or Gold. It is only when US started abusing this privilege that system started breaking.
The claim that the dollar system worked perfectly until the Fed got greedy is pure fantasy. The post-WWII Bretton Woods system wasn't a gold standard, it was a dollar hegemony masquerading as one, a rigged game where America played banker to the world while quietly running the printing press overtime. The U.S. promised dollars convertible to gold at $35 an ounce, but only for foreign governments, while internally, the Federal Reserve and Treasury operated with the restraint of a coked-up stockbroker. This was never sustainable. By 1971, the U.S. had a mere $24 billion in gold reserves backing $140 billion in foreign-held dollars, a laughable imbalance Nixon tried to conceal with capital controls and strong-arm diplomacy. But when France, under the leadership of then-President Georges Pompidou (a former Rothschild banker who, unlike today's economists, actually understood monetary games), started demanding physical gold in exchange for its dollar reserves, the gig was up. The London Gold Pool, a desperate central bank cartel formed in 1961 to artificially suppress gold's price, collapsed by 1968, precisely because the market smelled the rot.
The idea that the Fed "matched" gold supply growth with disciplined printing is historical revisionism at its worst. Throughout the 1950s, the Fed quietly monetized Treasury debt to bankroll Cold War spending. By the 1960s, it was cranking the dollar printer into overdrive to fund Vietnam and LBJ's Great Society fantasies, policies that sent inflation to 6% by 1969, even as the Fed kept interest rates below inflation (a.k.a. financial sabotage of savers). The so-called "2% rule" was fiction; the Fed was juicing the system for political convenience long before Nixon officially torched the gold window. And let's not forget the Fed's role in the speculative Eurodollar market, where offshore dollar lending exploded without reserve requirements, an early preview of the unregulated shadow banking systems that would later implode in 2008.
The fatal flaw was baked into the Bretton Woods design from day one, a paradox economist Robert Triffin warned about in 1960: To serve as the world's reserve currency, the U.S. had to supply dollars globally, but the more dollars it printed to meet demand, the shakier confidence in its gold backing became. This wasn't an accident; it was a structural time bomb. By the late 1960s, foreign central banks were drowning in dollars they couldn't redeem without triggering a run on Fort Knox. Meanwhile, the U.S. hollowed out its own industrial base, outsourcing manufacturing to Asia and Germany while replacing real production with financialization, Wall Street alchemy turning debt into "wealth."
Fast-forward to today, and the chickens are coming home to roost with a vengeance. The dollar's purchasing power has cratered, 92% loss since 1971. The national debt has ballooned to $35 trillion, nearly triple U.S. GDP. Decades of negative real interest rates have turbocharged asset bubbles, turning housing into a speculative casino while wages stagnate. And now, thanks to Washington's rampant weaponization of dollar sanctions, the BRICS nations are actively dismantling the dollar's reserve status, with China stockpiling gold and brokering oil deals in yuan. The Fed's response? More printing, more deficits, more pretending the laws of monetary gravity don't apply.
The breakdown wasn't caused by "abuse" of the dollar system, it was the inevitable result of a system designed to be abused. Fiat currencies don't fail because people mismanage them; they fail because they enable mismanagement. Gold didn't collapse in 1971, the U.S. government simply abandoned it to avoid fiscal accountability. Now we're stuck with the consequences: a financialized husk of an economy where billionaires mint fortunes in leveraged speculation while workers get paid in depreciating digits.
I have question. If new value is produced in the system (say an iphone or google search), isn't it ok to produce more dollars to represent that value, which is also the reason why people didn't care for decades, because the system was working.
You're asking the right question but the answer isn't the Fed's money printer, it's the real economy's ability to back that money with actual productivity. Yes, an iPhone or Google search creates value but not all value is equal in monetary terms. The dollar's legitimacy hinges on scarcity and trust, not just raw economic output. If you could print money every time someone coded an app or assembled a gadget, Venezuela would be an economic superpower.
In a gold system you get rich by innovating, building, and trading. Not gaming financial systems. No Fed to bail out failed banks or corrupt hedge funds. Modern "hoarders" thrive because JP Morgan can lose billions, then get free Fed loans. Tech CEOs pump stock prices with buybacks, not R&D. Politicians borrow trillions, stick taxpayers with the bill. Under gold, these parasites starve. Gold forces all wealth to prove its worth in the free market.
The #1 driver of modern wealth inequality is fiat-fueled asset inflation. The rich own stocks, real estate, and hard assets, which soar as money is printed. The poor own cash and labor, which get crushed.
Hard money (gold) forces productive capitalism. Easy money (fiat) breeds crony oligarchy. The fear that gold leads to wealth hoarding is a myth. In reality, gold has built-in discipline mechanisms that punish idle capital and force productive use of wealth. The exact opposite of today's fiat-driven oligarchy.
Unlike fiat currency (which rots at 2-10% yearly inflation), gold appreciates in purchasing power over time as the economy grows (real deflation). Hoarding cash results in wealth growth, so saving is rewarded. But unproductive hoarding carries an opportunity cost because gold doesn't pay interest or dividends.
The wealthy can't just sit on mountains of gold. They must invest it to earn returns, fueling productive enterprise. In 19th-century Britain, capital flooded into railroads, factories, and infrastructure, not Wall Street derivatives.
Compare that to today's fiat hellscape where the rich park wealth in low-yield bonds, speculative bubbles, or offshore tax havens and central banks bail out hoarders (2008 bank rescues, 2020 PPP "loans" for billionaires).
Under fiat regimes, the politically connected get new money first (banks, corporations, government contractors) before inflation hits the working class. Gold eliminates this. No central bank can create gold out of thin air to enrich cronies. All wealth accumulation must come from actual production. No Fed-backed stock buybacks or real estate bubbles. No "passive income aristocracy" living off monetary inflation. Capital flows to useful ventures (factories, tech, agriculture), not unproductive asset-stripping.
Under gold, interest rates are set by real savings, not central planners. This means that reckless spending gets punished and long-term investing gets rewarded. If the rich hoard gold without investing, interest rates naturally rise (less gold available for loans), forcing them to deploy capital or lose out. Contrast this with yesterday's Fed-set near-zero rates, which allowed billionaires to borrow cheaply and speculate endlessly without real productivity. In the 1800s, Vanderbilt couldn't just borrow free money from the Fed to buy up railroads. He had to convince investors with real profits.
Unlike feudal systems (where land means power) or modern equities (where BlackRock/Vanguard dominate), gold's physical nature prevents monopoly hoarding. No "too big to fail" banks because gold can't be bailed out. No endless financialization because hard money kills derivatives casinos. And it's easily tradable because unlike real estate or fine art, gold circulates freely. The wealthy can't lock up the system. Gold moves to where it's most useful, not where it's politically protected. Bring back hard money. Watch the rentier class collapse.
I think Fed's money printers make all the entreprenuers chase value creation. It's like accelerated Red Queen Hypothesis. They are keeping everyone on their toes to gather as much of future new money as possible (that will be printed in future) at the same time creating value. My problem is if people just sit on the gold and not allow it to circulate and suffocate the economy because the gold hoarders would be rest assured that value will be eventually created in the system and their gold would appreciate and capture that value so they don't even try.
> They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock.
This is one of those situations where averages hide the harm. Yes, when you look across everything it's not a big deal. But you can find clear instances where it is a problem, particularly in homes of certain value in growing markets (like Atlanta: https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/data-investors-now-own...).
Ultimately all of this comes down to currency power, which is why I personally hope one of these highly alternative web-of-trust currencies takes off and starts supplanting mainstream currency. (Any currency will end up getting corrupted too, eventually, though)
The only two I remember are Circles and LedgerLoops.
In Circles, each user gets their own currency not fungible with anyone else's. Payment channels are set up between each user and their immediate friends; users also allow automatic conversion between their currency and their friends' currency. Payments are routed through the trust network through a route that has capacity at each step - this is the anti-Sybil design - you always receive coins of your immediate friends' currency. Each user's coins are minted at a certain rate, and the system does accounts for the devaluation over time of each user's currency, so it's a bit like balances can be somewhat negative, and reset towards zero from either direction with time.
That's obviously a complex system, and radically unlike ordinary currencies. There are many reasons it probably doesn't work; I hope they all turn out to be wrong.
LedgerLoops is the other one I remember. Users post things they want to buy and things they want to sell. The system finds loops where each user gives something to the next in the loop. Apparently this is surprisingly efficient. There is no currency at all. This one, by contrast, is extremely simple, and also radically unlike ordinary currencies. This doesn't have a UBI component.
I’m doubtful because things always got a little worse all the time even before money existed. It’s the natural state of nature; erosion. Cleaning up after yourself and maintaining your space is a virtue for that very reason. Seems like that virtue is, itself, is in a state of disrepair (which implies an obvious course of action).
It really didn't always get worse for a while (at least in the US). McDonalds went from just a burger/rare treat to affordable, to so affordable we had to pass laws to limit how much food they gave out. Homes grew in size, stopped having shared bedrooms/bathrooms. Everyone started having dishwashers/microwaves in their kitchens. Clothes purchases moved from planned to spur of the moment. 27 inch TVs stopped being the norm. (I know this one is cliche, we'd rather decent lives than fancier circuses to distract, but at the time it was a 'wow the future is here' moment, big TVs only existed in rich friends homes, and they were HORRIBLE because they upscaled content designed for 27 inch TVs). Exercise clubs went from only for the rich tennis clubs to affordable gyms. Kids got their OWN computers. Meanwhile, quality was improving everywhere. Shoes, oh my god did shoes get better. Clothing quality got better to the point people in the 80s routinely just started wearing silk (SILK!!! can you believe it?) shirts. Sheet thread counts actually became a thing, holy moley the luxury. Computers went from Commodore 64s to modern wonders. Foods people ate at home/out got fancier, with all kinds of new discoveries.
My entire life up until 2008, almost everything around was getting better/cheaper. Yesterday at the store I wanted ice cream. I walked the aisle. Half the brands can no longer call themselves 'ice cream' legally. None of it felt like food to me. There is boutiques super expensive 'ice cream', but there used to be buckets of family friends priced 'ice cream' not whatever slop they sell now for the masses. Every single 'old school' brand I'm familiar with was a hollowed out corpse living off the name but selling trash that I don't consider fit (and remember, this is the junk food, already not really fit, segment).
Inflation is mostly a symptom though. Of natural resources getting scarcer (harder to extract). As you can imagine the price of gasoline is quite tied with the worldwide market price of oil.
And overall we have in the West (and in the US in particular) been living way "above our means" for more than half a century. And this 'debt' is starting to come due. It will get a lot worse too, for longer, before it starts getting better again.
It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps on climbing.
Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse anyway?
We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of the bright spots in all this).
But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what you're doing?
Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve defaults and wars.
Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation trend.