I don't know exactly when it was the dollar started to tank. If you look at the chart, it looks like a steady decline since the start of the 20th century.
I wasn't born until the Clinton era, so I remember a world before the internet ruled our lives. Kids still give me the ol' "ok boomer" and that's fine. There was a sense of impermanence once, in a time before the internet; as a youth, one got the sensation that one could actually screw up, learn from mistakes whilst at the same time having their mistakes slowly forgotten and forgiven.
Unfortunately, just like the blockchain, the internet never forgets our mistakes, and it won't let us forget them, either. Maybe we should be applying the same kind of crowdsourced scrutiny to the whale hodlers and managers of the world's reserve currency the same we would to Vitalik Buterin, or any other pseudonymous project developer.
I don't know where my parents were as the dollar declined, because they were presumably traipsing around the deserts of the American southwest like hippies: listening to good tunes, vibing and generally enjoying life. Nothing wrong with that.
I don't know, but I tried to find out. And, spoiler-alert: I got no clear answers...
The dollar entered the twentieth century in a position of great strength.
By most modern accounts, it feels like the 1950's were peak dollar; that magical, mystical point in history when American wages were dwindling, but still felt powerful: when it was possible for a blue collar high school graduate with a solid union job and good perks could afford a house, a car, a garage and any other luxuries they could think of, with enough left over to retire on comfortably.
Some might say it's the 1970's, when oil became scarce for a time and industries around the world starved for petroleum.
Some might say it's the 1980's, when Ronald Reagan's yuppie stockholders blasted the American economy to new heights... in service of the glorious few.
Some might say it's the 1990's, when George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton's bipartisan hand-holding created even more opportunities for private for-profit prisons, shadow contractors and government subsidies on private weapons of war made by Northup-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin.
Some might say it's the 2000's, when the internet dot-com boom/bust catapulted some into monopoly while leaving others' lives shattered and spread about lackadaisically.
Some might say it was the Obama era, when the full tower of cards composed of laissez-faire lending practices collapsed in a glorious implosion, and barely anyone even saw the inside of a court.
Some today say it's Trump and Biden, both, who contributed to the dwindling power of the dollar in the modern world, both trying to pump up a struggling economy in the face of a devastating pandemic.
All of these are explanations. None of them are excuses for the mismanagement of the economy over the past century. All of these things contributed their own slice to this putrid pie.
What actually happened to the value of a dollar?
I'm just one observer looking from my perch in 2021. I couldn't tell you exactly what happened to the value of the dollar over the past hundred years. All I know is that it went from being one of the most powerful currencies in the world to being, like many tin-pot dictatorships of various partisan leanings, inflated and worth a fraction of its former glory.
Some readers might be asking themselves, why is it that something like Bitcoin seems to appealing to so many people, to the point where they become semi-religious evangelists preaching a new gospel like a fervent priest?
The answer is simple: once you understand the principles behind the creation of Bitcoin, you understand that all money is, itself, a human-imagined construct; a fictional system of value we import onto objects to allow us to measure exchanges of goods and labor. When the money is corrupt and the scales of the exchange are weighted against you... what other choices could a person be expected to make? We have to live in this world, too, and we do have to eat.
The average American income is measured in the tens of thousands of dollars, but it's just an average; it doesn't take into account the sheer weight on the wealthy side of the scale, pushing it far higher than reflects the actual income of most people here. The median income in the US is below $20,000/year, and when it takes over $10,000 just to live with the cost of living, many truly are a paycheck or less from destitution at any given moment, taking sudden expenses into account.
In other parts of the world, far, far less than that is considered a "norm," whether it should be, or not.
Poverty exists all around us, sometimes inside our own home. It takes different forms, but often more money is what's required to solve poverty.
We shouldn't just print more money and mail it out in checks to poor workers who are already struggling... That devalues even further the tiny bit that these folks managed to hang onto!
If the US government thinks it can measure human life by a few thousand dollars worth of stimulus per worker and pat itself on the back for a job well done... in the words of Rob Halford, "you got another thing comin'." That isn't going to be anywhere near enough to make up for the devastation caused in the past year, to say nothing of the past hundred.
In the end, I just wish peoples' dollars went a little bit further. Then again, look at how far a Bitcoin already goes!
What would be the value of a human life in an inflation-resistant currency, I wonder? Would we still prefer to measure in dollars and cents spent? Can we ever recover to a sense of economic normalcy? Why do we even TRUST our government to MAKE THESE KINDS OF MEASUREMENTS IN THIS MANNER? Not as they sell stocks in anticipation of a global pandemic and reap countless millions while businesses and families struggle to make the ends justify the unfair means.
I think we can recover. I hope we can. I also think crypto can help... if even more are willing to let it.
Thank you for your time, and as always, stay curious my friends...
