1971 is the single most important year in modern economic history and almost nobody knows why.

When Nixon closed the gold window, he did not just change monetary policy. He changed the incentive structure of every government on earth. Without a physical constraint on money creation, the structural incentive shifted permanently toward debt expansion.

Every major economic trend since — wealth inequality, financialization, housing unaffordability, wage stagnation relative to asset prices — traces back to this single structural change. The system did not break. It started working exactly as the new incentives predicted.

wtfhappenedin1971.com is the best single-page education in economics that exists.

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