From Gold to Clicks: How the 1970s Rewired the Modern World

...How 1970s Megatrends Inform Smarter Scenario Planning Today...

The 1970s are often remembered—or imagined—as a decade of disco, gas lines, and bell-bottoms. But beneath the surface, it was the most structurally transformative decade in modern history. The foundations of today’s political polarization, economic volatility, and attention-driven culture were all laid during this quiet revolution.

Seven core shifts from the 1970s reshaped the modern world—not with fanfare, but with deep, lasting impacts and consequences. If you want to understand how power, influence, and scarcity operate today, look no further than this underappreciated decade.

Table of Contents: From Gold to Clicks

1. From Gold to Oil  The Dollar’s Redefinition and the Birth of Modern Monetary Policy

2. The Primary System That Undermined Democracy  How Candidate Selection Became a Polarization Engine

3. The Attention Economy  From Scarcity of Information to Scarcity of Focus

4. Regulatory Realignment, Not Just Deregulation  Why the 1970s Expanded Government in New Ways

5. The Birth of Unaffordable Housing  How Civil Rights Reform Was Rewritten Through Zoning Codes

6. China’s Economic Opening  The Global Shockwave Sparked by Deng Xiaoping’s Reforms

7. The Birth of Environmental Consciousness  How the 1970s Laid the Groundwork for Today’s Climate Debate

What This Means To You

Resources For The Curious

1. From Gold to Oil: The Dollar’s Redefinition and the Birth of Modern Monetary Policy

In 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system and unleashing the era of fiat currency. This was not just a technical tweak—it transformed the very nature of money.

Floating currencies gave central banks newfound power. They could now manipulate interest rates, expand credit, and inject liquidity into the economy without commodity constraints. This flexibility enabled tools like:

• The federal funds rate (to control short-term interest rates)

• Quantitative easing (to influence long-term liquidity and asset prices)

But it also introduced risk. Without the discipline of a gold standard, governments could print money to fund political priorities, creating new temptations for inflation and unsustainable debt.

That risk materialized almost immediately:

• The U.S. experienced stagflation (high inflation + low growth) throughout the 1970s.

• Inflation peaked at over 13% in 1979, before Paul Volcker’s harsh rate hikes tamed it.

To stabilize global demand for the dollar, the U.S. struck a petrodollar agreement with Saudi Arabia in 1974: oil would be priced exclusively in dollars in exchange for American military and economic support. This deal:

• Cemented the dollar’s global dominance

• Fueled Wall Street with recycled oil profits

• Deepened U.S. geopolitical entanglements in the Middle East

The dollar was no longer backed by gold—it became the default oil trade currency, sustained by U.S. power and global trust. That trust is now a key fragility.

While the expanded toolkit of modern monetary policy has helped manage crises, the system it created is more prone to them. Since 1971, economic volatility and the severity of financial shocks have increased, driven by excess leverage, politicized spending, and global capital flows unmoored from real assets. The open question remains: Are we better off?

2. The Primary System That Undermined Democracy

In the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the McGovern-Fraser Commission introduced sweeping reforms to the process of selecting presidential candidates. These reforms, introducing primaries for selecting candidates, were initially put into practice in 1972. The goal was democratic: shift power from party insiders to voters through primaries and caucuses.

But this well-meaning reform had unintended, long-term consequences:

• Moderation collapsed. Candidates no longer had to appeal to broad coalitions but could now focus on energizing ideological bases.

• Fundraising overtook governing. Success in primaries depended on media performance and donor access, not coalition-building or legislative skill.

• Congressional dysfunction exploded. Elected officials began fearing primary challengers more than general elections, resulting in rigid partisanship and performative politics.

Today, party leadership in Congress often dictates outcomes, not through debate but through top-down negotiation and fundraising quotas. Legislators rarely write laws; they vote on omnibus packages designed by leadership to satisfy narrow coalitions and donor classes.

As John Adams warned:“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties… This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

That political evil is now normalized. McGovern-Fraser did not democratize politics—it fragmented it, shifting power from voters to funders. The next graphic shows how party-line voting has changed since 1972—revealing how much party leadership drives outcomes versus how much freedom lawmakers have to represent their constituents' interests.

Source: The Brookings Institution

Vital Statistics on Congress

3. The Attention Economy: From Scarcity of Information to Scarcity of Focus

In economics, scarcity defines value. What’s limited and in demand becomes the most valuable resource—and the organizing principle around which companies innovate, compete, and profit. In the industrial era, value was created through land, labor, and capital, with scarce knowledge applied to optimize those inputs. In the information era, the scarcest resource is no longer knowledge itself—it’s human attention.

In the past, the belief was: “If you build it, they will come.” Today’s reality is a more sobering: “If you build it, they may come—but only if you can capture their attention.”

The late 1970s marked the beginning of this shift. When Apple released the Apple I in 1976, it wasn’t just launching a product—it was catalyzing a new era of information abundance. What followed was an explosion of access, powered by Moore’s Law-driven advances in computing power and dramatic increases in bandwidth that enabled the rapid movement of data across the economy. Newspapers gave way to blogs, libraries to search engines, and television to infinite scroll.

Fast forward to today: In a world flooded with data, the economic incentive shifted from controlling supply to meet demand to capturing demand by influencing behavior at the level of neurobiology—your time, clicks, and cognitive bandwidth.

Scarcity formerly existed in the external world—raw materials, goods, information. Today, it lives inside your head. That’s where the market now competes for your attention.

Today’s most powerful companies—Meta, Google, TikTok—do not sell knowledge. They sell curated attention attractors, optimized to hijack your dopaminergic reward system:

• Notifications, reels, and algorithmic feeds trigger instant gratification.

• Each engagement reinforces habitual behavior and fine-tunes algorithms, turning users into recurring revenue streams.

The implications extend beyond social media:

• Cognitive overload undermines critical thinking and long-term decision-making.

• Polarized content outperforms nuance, weakening democratic discourse.

• Mental health suffers, especially among teens navigating identity in attention-hacked spaces.

The 1970s created the infrastructure for abundance—but with it came a new frontier of exploitation: the competition for your mind.

The big change – From data scarcity to data abundance

4. Regulatory Realignment, Not Just Deregulation

The 1970s did not reduce regulation—they recast it. While industries like airlines and trucking were deregulated to foster competition, social and environmental oversight expanded significantly. Agencies like OSHA, EPA, and EEOC gained sweeping new powers to enforce rules around workplace safety, civil rights, and environmental standards. The regulatory focus shifted from controlling prices to enforcing fairness and risk mitigation.

Though the foundations of “Big Government” were planted during the Progressive Era under Woodrow Wilson, it was in the 1970s that the regulatory state matured—expanding more in that decade than any other in U.S. history.

5. The Birth of Unaffordable Housing

The housing crisis didn’t begin with a crash. It began with a rulebook.

While rising prices and interest rates get the blame for unaffordable housing, the deeper cause is more subtle: zoning and NIMBYism evolved as second-order tools of discrimination. After the Civil Rights Act outlawed explicit bias, the 1970s saw a surge in land use regulations that preserved exclusion by other means. What once was spoken outright became embedded in code—quietly deciding not only who gets to live where, but who reaps the zoning-driven gains in housing wealth.

Housing and income data:  Federal Reserve Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

• MSPUS:  Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States, Dollars, Quarterly, Not Seasonally Adjusted

• MEPAINUSA646N:  Median Personal Income in the United States, Current Dollars, Annual, Not Seasonally Adjusted

Personal (individual) income was used, not household income.  Household data can be misleading.  Over time, households change with less children and more people likely to work.  This family-level compensation could obscure the affordability challenge. 

Zoning data:  Cato Institute:  Zoning, Land-Use Planning, and Housing Affordability, Estimate based on data from Daniel Shoag of the Harvard Kennedy  Daniel Shoag and Peter Ganong note that “[land use] rules are often controversial and any such rule, regardless of its exact institutional origin, is likely to be tested. . . . This makes court decisions an omnibus measure, which captures many different channels of restrictions on new construction.”

__________

Under the banner of preserving “community character” and protecting home values, local governments adopted policies that restricted density, banned multi-family housing, and imposed costly building requirements. These rules were framed as neutral, but their effects were anything but. They created artificial scarcity, locking out lower-income and minority families from high-opportunity areas and turning housing into a gatekeeping system.

In economic terms, we traded dynamic adaptability for regulatory exclusion. Instead of allowing supply to adjust to demand, we froze cities in time—enshrining the preferences of incumbents and insulating them from demographic and economic change.

The result is today’s affordability crisis. Home prices far exceed incomes. Essential workers can’t live near where they work. And upward mobility is choked off at the front door. This was certainly not the intent of the Civil Rights Act—but it became one of its most damaging second-order effects. The promise of equal opportunity was undercut not by open resistance, but by zoning quietly wielded as a new form of control.

To solve the problem, we must go beyond building more homes. We must unwind the regulatory sediment that has buried opportunity—layer by well-meaning layer—since the 1970s.

6. China’s Economic Opening

Deng Xiaoping’s rise in 1978 marked a decisive break from Maoist central planning. Though gradual, the shift toward “socialism with Chinese characteristics” laid the foundation for China’s manufacturing boom, global supply chains, and today’s geopolitical power struggle. Globalization as we know it began in a quiet pivot behind the Great Wall.

7. The Birth of Environmental Consciousness

With the founding of the EPA (1970) and the first Earth Day, environmental policy became institutionalized. Laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act embedded long-term thinking into public governance. What began as activism became regulation—and now underpins everything from ESG investing to carbon markets.

Today’s World, Rooted in the 1970s

The structural changes of the 1970s weren’t theoretical—they launched the systems we live with today. From inflation management to fractured governance to attention-based tech platforms, we’re still operating within the frameworks built five decades ago.

The table below highlights seven high-impact, real-world examples that clearly trace back to one of the megatrend shifts:

Modern Example	Description	1970s Root Cause
U.S. National Debt Exceeds $34 Trillion (2025)	Unshackled from gold convertibility, U.S. policymakers embraced expansive fiscal and monetary tools. The result is decades of deficit spending enabled by fiat flexibility—and now, mounting debt and systemic risk.	From Gold to Oil: The Dollar’s Redefinition
Congressional Gridlock and Declining Lawmaking	Once a dynamic lawmaking body, Congress has ossified. Party polarization and primary system distortions have turned compromise into career risk, sidelining legislative productivity.	The Primary System That Undermined Democracy
Rise of Trump and Political Polarization	Trump’s rise reflects deep voter alienation and institutional distrust. The collapse of party filters and the surge of performative media culture—amplified by his masterful use of social media—opened space for celebrity populism.	The Primary System That Undermined Democracy; The Attention Economy
Austin’s Resistance to Upzoning	Despite housing crises, progressive cities resist zoning reform. Exclusionary land use laws persist under the guise of “neighborhood character,” driving costs up and opportunity down.	The Birth of Unaffordable Housing
TikTok’s Algorithm and U.S.–China Tensions	TikTok’s influence in shaping youth attention spans and data flows highlights new-age geopolitical risks. What began with China’s opening now challenges Western information sovereignty.	The Attention Economy; China’s Economic Opening
ESG Regulation and Green Mandates	Corporate boards now answer to social and environmental scoring systems. What began as Earth Day idealism now drives trillion-dollar flows, supply chain audits, and policy battles.	The Birth of Environmental Consciousness; Regulatory Realignment
Dodd-Frank Act (2010)	Financial reform following the Great Recession revived regulatory complexity. It mirrored the 1970s shift away from market freedom and toward fairness-based administrative oversight.	Regulatory Realignment, Not Just Deregulation

These examples illustrate how the rules, incentives, and defaults built in the 1970s still shape both public policy and personal experience. Clearly, there are many other examples. From the structure of digital platforms to the behavior of political leaders, we are living downstream from the choices made in that pivotal decade.

Final Reflection

The 1970s did not just signal the end of an era—they launched the systems that define our modern world. This pivotal decade untethered money from gold, restructured the democratic process, and birthed the attention economy. It realigned regulatory priorities, opened China’s economy, redefined environmental consciousness, and institutionalized land-use exclusion. Together, these seven megatrends quietly rewired the incentives behind how we govern, spend, and think.

These were not temporary shocks. They were foundational shifts that altered the architecture of power—moving it from tangible assets to monetary discretion, from voters to funders, and from institutions to algorithms.

Understanding the 1970s is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a strategic imperative. To make better decisions today—financially, politically, and personally—we must first understand the deep structures we inherited from this pivotal decade. Only then can we begin to redesign them.

The 1970s did not fade. They embedded. And their influence is still unfolding.

What This Means for You

Understanding these structural shifts is not just an academic exercise—it’s a strategic advantage.

For individuals:

In an age where information is abundant but attention is scarce, how you make decisions matters more than ever. The systems launched in the 1970s rewired the modern world—and now require you to adapt. Navigating today’s world means:

• Curating high-quality, decision-relevant information

• Using structured tools and frameworks—especially for high-stakes, financial choices

• Recognizing the biases and incentives embedded in the platforms and institutions you rely on

Success no longer comes from accessing more data—it comes from applying better decision architecture.

For business and government leaders:

These historic shifts form the baseline for strategic planning. Whether you're crafting policy, running a business, or leading a nonprofit, understanding the incentives and system structures behind modern challenges enables smarter decisions.

At the center of this is scenario planning—the disciplined process of envisioning multiple plausible futures so you can adapt before disruption hits. In an information-abundant, fast-changing world, scenario planning is what prepares you to respond emotionally, culturally, and operationally when the unexpected becomes reality.

It enables:

• Smarter choices under uncertainty, informed by historical context and emerging signals

• Policy and product innovation that aligns with long-term trends, not short-term noise

• Resilient strategies grounded in first principles—not just reaction to headlines

  
  

To guide the future, you must first understand the past—not just what happened, but why.

The 1970s built the infrastructure of today’s complexity. Your success depends on how well you navigate it.

Resources For The Curious

Explore the economic, political, and technological shifts that emerged from the 1970s—and still define our world today.

• Hulett, Jeff. “Your Vote Does Not Matter as Much as It Should!” The Curiosity Vine, January 6, 2022 (updated July 11, 2024). → Analyzes how party-centered reforms, particularly the rise of primary elections, have weakened citizen power and shifted political incentives.

• Hulett, Jeff. “A Question of Choice: Optimizing Resource Allocation and an HOA Example.” The Curiosity Vine, October 29, 2023 (updated July 23, 2024). → Explores decentralized decision-making, incentive design, and structural inefficiencies in governance—key to understanding post-1970s policy systems.

• Hulett, Jeff. “The Hidden Wealth of Time: Turning Challenges into Opportunity.” The Curiosity Vine, January 2025. → Examines how attention, time management, and mindset became critical currencies in the post-industrial, information-driven economy.

• Hulett, Jeff. The Simple Answer to the Affordable Housing Crisis: Stop Making Home Building Illegal. Personal Finance Reimagined, August 22, 2024. → Argues that restrictive zoning—not market failure—is the root cause of unaffordable housing and proposes “blank slating” as a structural solution to unlock housing supply and restore opportunity.

• Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. University of Chicago Press, 1962. → Explains the economic philosophy behind deregulation and monetary policy liberalization.

• Greenspan, Alan. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. Penguin Press, 2007. → Offers insights into central banking after the gold standard and the evolving role of the Fed.

• Volcker, Paul, and Toyoo Gyohten. Changing Fortunes: The World's Money and the Threat to American Leadership. Crown Business, 1992. → Chronicles the shift in global monetary policy, including Volcker’s efforts to defeat inflation.

• Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. Liveright Publishing, 2020. → Dissects the donor-driven, post-primary political structure rooted in reforms of the 1970s.

• Adams, John. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States. Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850. → Includes the original warning against factionalism and party-driven governance—now a defining feature of modern politics.

• Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press, 2014.→ Tracks wealth inequality trends accelerated by post-gold standard monetary and fiscal policies.

• Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. → Defines cognitive biases and dual-system thinking—essential for navigating attention-scarce, decision-dense environments.

• Hayek, F.A. “The Pretence of Knowledge.” Nobel Prize Lecture, 1974. → A caution against central planning and overreliance on technocratic models—delivered during the heart of the 1970s policy shift.

• Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. → A foundational analysis of how information technology, born in the late 1970s, reshaped global economic structures.

• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019. → Explores how attention became the core tradable good in digital markets—rooted in the early tech revolutions of the 1970s.

• Eichengreen, Barry. Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System. Princeton University Press, 2008. → Explores the shift from the gold standard to fiat currency and the rise of U.S.-driven global monetary policy post-1971. Essential for understanding the monetary foundations of today’s economy.

• Glaeser, Edward L., and Gyourko, Joseph. “The Impact of Building Restrictions on Housing Affordability.”Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review, June 2003, pp. 21–39. → Analyzes how zoning and land-use regulations drive up housing costs and exacerbate inequality—core evidence for understanding how modern regulation impedes affordability.