The Decade That Bent the Arc – How the 1970s Redefined Money, Power, and Culture

I'm Jeff Hulett, Founder and President of Personal Finance Reimagined. Our organization is dedicated to helping clients and students master their decision process. We operate by an old saying: "If you name it, you can tame it." This means understanding the essential, often hidden, inputs to your decisions can help you navigate complexity better. This article goes beyond process; it's about naming the big, foundational trends still impacting us today. By identifying these challenges, we believe you gain the clarity needed to create better outcomes. The 1970s linger in our memory as a hazy period of disco, gas lines, and regrettable fashion. Yet, beneath bell-bottoms and stagflation lay the most profound structural shift in the modern world. That decade didn't just give us the digital seed of the personal computer; it fundamentally rewired our money, our medicine, and our global order. It was the moment the U.S. dollar broke its anchor to gold, transforming currency into a weapon of political will. It saw quiet zoning codes become the new architecture of social division. It is when the American healthcare industry learned to profit not from health, but from enabling chronic illness. Every defining challenge of our current world—from relentless boom-bust cycles to algorithmic inequality and the debt spiral—was engineered in the shadows of the 70s. To understand the present, we must look beyond the caricature and grasp the new operating system installed fifty years ago.

These changes were not loud revolutions but quiet rewrites of the rules that still govern our politics, markets, and daily lives. The foundations of today’s political polarization, economic volatility, and attention-driven culture were laid in these years.

Eight core shifts from the 1970s reshaped the modern world—not just in what we buy or how we vote, but in how power, influence, and scarcity operate. If you want to understand today’s headlines, start with this underappreciated yet massively influential decade.

Table of Contents

The Decade That Bent the Arc – How the 1970s Redefined Money, Power, and Culture

1. The Insatiable Dollar Why Politicians Can’t Stop Using Currency to Buy Tomorrow’s Crisis

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

3. The Attention Economy  From Information Scarcity to Attention Scarcity

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. Healthcare’s Hidden Pivot How the 1970s Put Medicine on a Cost Spiral That Still Shapes the System

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

8. 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. The Insatiable Dollar: Why Politicians Can’t Stop Using Currency to Buy Tomorrow’s Crisis

President Richard Nixon's August 1971 order severed the dollar's link to gold, unilaterally ending the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system. This pivotal event immediately transformed the U.S. dollar into a pure fiat currency and ushered in a new era where both monetary and fiscal policy became unbound.

The shift provided central banks with an expanded toolkit—the flexibility to control the money supply and set the Federal Funds Rate. Simultaneously, it removed the primary external constraint previously disciplining politicians' appetite for debt-fueled spending and credit expansion. While monetary flexibility was intended as a counterweight to economic cycles, it instead became the enabler and amplifier: the new freedom to print money and reduce rates provided politicians with the means to easily finance ever-larger deficits, which in turn amplified the boom-bust cycle, inevitably requiring deeper interventions and more debt.

Fact 1: The Immediate Consequence—Stagflation

The new system immediately faced severe instability. The U.S. economy experienced stagflation throughout the 1970s, a toxic combination of high inflation and slow economic growth.

• U.S. inflation peaked at over 13% in 1979 (a level not seen since the Bretton Woods system was established).

• The volatility of the dollar was dramatic, with the currency experiencing severe swings throughout the 1970s.

Fact 2: The Dollar's New Anchor—The Petrodollar System

To preserve global demand for the unbacked dollar, the U.S. secured a 1974 agreement with Saudi Arabia: oil would be priced and traded exclusively in dollars. This petrodollar system effectively replaced the gold anchor with a demand anchor tied to the essential global energy supply, deepening U.S. geopolitical involvement in the Middle East and fueling global capital flows.

The Systemic Result: Deeper Cycles and Escalating Interventions

The greatest long-term shift has been the change in the nature of economic cycles. Economic research suggests the post-1971 regime, characterized by expansionary monetary policy and financial deregulation, is prone to a different type of crisis.

Fact 3: Increased Frequency of Financial Crises

The frequency of financial crises, particularly systemic banking crises, has been documented to be significantly higher in the fiat money era (post-1973) compared to the Bretton Woods and classical gold standard periods.

Fact 4: Escalating Policy Interventions and Debt

To fight subsequent crises—from the Savings and Loan crisis to the Dot-com Bubble, and critically, the 2008 Financial Crisis—central banks have increasingly relied on radical interventions.

• Each major downturn has been met by dropping the Federal Funds Rate to progressively lower historical lows (approaching zero after 2008 and 2020) and employing unprecedented asset purchases (Quantitative Easing).

• Concurrently, the U.S. National Debt as a percentage of GDP has surged, especially following periods of monetary accommodation and crisis response, rising sharply in the 1980s, the 2000s, and post-2008. The policy of deficit spending, enabled by the unconstrained fiat currency, has become a political and economic norm.

A Reasonable Conclusion

The evidence suggests the birth of modern monetary policy in the 1970s successfully introduced flexibility but failed to instill fiscal discipline. The very tools used to stabilize the economy—unrestricted credit expansion and debt-based stimulus—create the financial imbalances leading to the next inevitable crash. Therefore, the conclusion each "fix" lays the structural foundation for a larger, more debt-intensive crisis, where the "lows" of each cycle are only avoided by increasingly desperate monetary and fiscal policy, is reasonably drawn from the documented trends of increased financial volatility and escalating national debt since the end of the gold standard.

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 Information Scarcity to Attention Scarcity

In economics, scarcity defines value. What is scarce 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.

The market era ushered in great advances and wealth—what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment—reducing disease, increasing lifespan, and lifting billions out of poverty. But the latest era, the information age, has shifted the economic battlefield inside our own heads. The ability to manage attention amid information abundance has become the dividing line between success and mediocrity, yet most schools still teach as if information were scarce.

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 shrink government—they reshaped it. While high-profile deregulation in industries like airlines and trucking encouraged market competition, social and environmental regulation expanded at a historic pace. Agencies such as OSHA, EPA, and EEOC gained sweeping authority over workplace safety, civil rights, and environmental policy. The focus shifted from setting prices to enforcing fairness, compliance, and risk mitigation.

The results often reflected what Thomas Sowell calls the “unintended consequences” of well-intentioned policies. Many regulations imposed heavy compliance costs, slowed innovation, and reallocated resources from productive investment to administrative overhead. In practice, these rules often failed to deliver the promised gains—sometimes even producing outcomes contrary to their goals, such as reduced job opportunities from stringent labor mandates or higher consumer prices from environmental restrictions.

The seen effects of these rules were often celebrated: the visible compliance checklist, the cleaner factory discharge, the diversity training seminar. The unseen effects were more difficult to measure but often more economically significant: the capital never invested in new equipment because it was diverted to meet regulatory paperwork, the jobs never created because small firms could not bear compliance costs, and the innovations left on the drawing board because approval timelines stretched for years. These hidden costs—spread across millions of private decisions—quietly slowed economic dynamism far more than policymakers anticipated.

While the Progressive Era under Woodrow Wilson planted the seeds of the modern regulatory state, the 1970s marked its maturity—expanding more in that decade than any other in U.S. history. This growth cemented a model in which political incentives, rather than market feedback, increasingly dictated economic outcomes.

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.

"[A] home's value is directly tied to the scarcity of housing for other people. The system by its nature pits incumbents against newcomers."

- Jersusalem Demsas, "The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake"

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. Healthcare’s Hidden Pivot

By the end of the 1970s, U.S. healthcare had quietly stepped onto a new economic trajectory—one that would make it nearly one-fifth of the economy by the 21st century. In 1970, healthcare spending stood at about 6% of GDP; today, it hovers around 18%. This steep climb traces back to a convergence of policy, technology, and demographics that rewrote the financial incentives of medicine.

The pivot began with Medicare and Medicaid. Created in 1965, these programs hit their first full stride in the 1970s, expanding enrollment, benefits, and provider participation.

Outside of Medicare and Medicaid, the system is designed around short-term fixes, which is often tied to the reliance on employer-provided health insurance. The fee-for-service model, accelerated by Medicare/Medicaid and subsidized through employment, financially rewarded providers for immediate, high-volume procedures rather than preventative care or long-term wellness. From an employer's perspective, this system incentivized getting an employee "repaired" and back to work quickly, prioritizing short-term job retention over investing in comprehensive, long-term health outcomes that might require more upfront cost or time off. This fundamental misaligned incentive structure drives up overall costs while sidelining durable health improvements. Effectively, people are on their own for their long-term health. The problem is a marketing problem. Our system is called "health care," which confuses people. A more accurate name would be "repair-so-you-can-work care."

At the same time, the decade saw a wave of medical innovation—CT scans, cardiac bypass surgery, and other high-cost treatments—adopted without strong cost-effectiveness review. The Hill–Burton Act’s hospital construction subsidies, still in effect from the postwar era, fueled a capacity boom. Insurance coverage reached over 80% of Americans, insulating patients from the real costs and weakening price sensitivity. And as the postwar generation aged, chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes became more prevalent, creating a long-term, high-cost patient base.

This mix of expanded public funding, rapid technological adoption, and third-party payment created a structural shift: healthcare spending began growing faster than the economy itself. The “hidden pivot” of the 1970s set the stage for a system that excels at acute interventions but struggles with long-term prevention and cost control—leaving America with longer lifespans, but shorter healthspans.

7. 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.

China’s opening changed not just where goods were produced, but the very nature of manufacturing jobs in America. The great labor arbitrage began in earnest, as companies scoured the globe for the lowest-cost labor. Big brands like Nike built fortunes by driving down costs through Chinese manufacturing, while many U.S. factories closed or shifted to higher-skilled, capital-intensive work. The result was a deep restructuring of the labor market—one that offered consumers lower prices but left millions of American workers displaced from the kind of manufacturing jobs that once anchored the middle class.

8. The Birth of Environmental Consciousness

With the founding of the EPA in 1970 and the first Earth Day, environmental policy moved from protest signs to permanent institutions. Landmark laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act delivered measurable gains—cutting airborne pollutants, improving water quality, and embedding long-term ecological thinking into public governance.

Yet these victories came with trade-offs. The same regulatory structure that reduced pollution also locked in prescriptive compliance methods, creating an environment where firms often had more incentive to meet mandated checklists than to innovate cleaner, more efficient technologies. In some cases, rigid standards even preserved outdated practices or shifted environmental harms elsewhere, undermining the original goals.

As is the case with many forms of regulation, the challenge is rarely the initial intention—it is knowing when to stop or adjust, especially when that adjustment might require reducing government budgets or scaling back agency authority. A telling example came after sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants dropped faster than expected in the 1990s; rather than recalibrating targets to encourage new innovation, regulators maintained outdated mandates, locking utilities into expensive retrofits that provided little additional environmental benefit.

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 high-impact, real-world examples that clearly trace back to one of the megatrend shifts:

Modern Example	Description	1970s Root Cause
U.S. Debt Roll-Over Crisis (2025)	The national debt, unconstrained by gold, is now extremely high relative to GDP. As interest rates surge, the U.S. faces a "roll the debt" problem: refinancing existing debt at higher rates creates a massive, unsustainable increase in debt service, reminiscent of the 2008 toxic mortgage crisis.	The Insatiable Dollar
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. This is a perfect example of Goodhart’s Law in action – “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”	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
Trump’s “Most‑Favored‑Nation” Drug Pricing Executive Order (2025)	Ties U.S. prescription drug prices to the lowest prices in comparable nations, aiming to reduce costs through global price benchmarking.	Healthcare’s Hidden Pivot; Regulatory Realignment

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 eight 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.

• Sowell, Thomas. Knowledge and Decisions. Basic Books, 1980. → Analyzes how well-intentioned policies often fail due to the inability of centralized decision-makers to access and apply dispersed knowledge effectively, leading to unintended economic consequences.

• Bastiat, Frédéric. What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. 1850. → Explores the distinction between the immediate, visible effects of economic actions and the longer-term, often overlooked consequences, providing a framework for evaluating the hidden costs of regulation.

• 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.

• Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Basic Books, 1982. → Traces the evolution of the U.S. healthcare system, detailing how post-1960s policy shifts—especially Medicare and Medicaid—altered incentives, expanded hospital capacity, and set in motion the long-term cost growth that accelerated in the 1970s.

• Lockheed, James. “Nike’s Global Strategy: The Shift to Asian Manufacturing.” Harvard Business Review, June 1988. → Examines Nike’s move of production from the U.S. to low-cost Asian labor markets, highlighting China’s emergence as a key manufacturing hub.

• Ellerman, A. Denny, et al. Markets for Clean Air: The U.S. Acid Rain Program. Cambridge University Press, 2000. → Analyzes the sulfur dioxide cap-and-trade program, noting how emissions declined faster than anticipated and how regulatory rigidity limited further innovation once compliance targets were met.

• McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. University of Chicago Press, 2016. → Argues that the “Great Enrichment” of the past two centuries—marked by unprecedented reductions in poverty, increases in lifespan, and improvements in living standards—was driven primarily by the spread of liberal ideas and social dignity for innovators, rather than by capital accumulation alone.