> On 15 August 1971, the United States ended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency
The dollar was convertible into gold at a fixed rate. We still printed more dollars than there was gold.
You have the causality backwards. We left the gold standard because we created too much currency and were facing a run [1].
[1] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/nixon-shock
The point is it was always broken. I wrote a comment in response to someone describing the 19th century as some panacea of monetary stability. It wasn't [1].
The anomaly isn't the 70s or 80s. It's the post-War era of the 1950s and early 60s.
If you're wondering why everything in society outside of technology is getting worse and being replaced with cheap substitutes, you need to look at the money itself.
Read Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street, published in 1873 [1]. It's the treatise by arguably the world's first modern central banker. What makes it neat is it's entirely on the gold standard.
Britain, on the gold standard, still faced each of inflation, bank runs and credit crises. It was an imperial military power almost constantly at war. And yes, its contemporaries lamented its industrial consumerism and rising inequality. (And that's Victorian Britain, mind you!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombard_Street:_A_Description_...
It turns out that interest rates are still manipulated by banks and governments whether it's gold or something else. The difference is that at least under gold there's constraints and a price to be paid for debasing.
... but note that most money was already at that time created by commercial banks through loans (a fractional reserve system).