How Tight Jeans Almost Ruined America's Money

I actually liked the title, because my initial guess was that no one wanted to pull banknotes from the pockets and everyone switched in droves to plastic. It turned out to be wrong but it was interesting trivia nevertheless.

No, the choice to use natural fibers is a deliberate defense against counterfeiters. Forgive me for pasting such a large portion of the Esquire article cited in another comment:

"In the late 1980s, a new counterfeit hundred, the most perfect counterfeit yet made, began appearing in circulation. It looked identical to the real thing, betrayed visually, at least, under only the most rigorous forensic testing. (Some minor flaws were visible after enormous copies of the bills were made, but these were probably purposeful. Its makers didn't want to be suckered by their own handiwork.) Although the counterfeit came to America mostly on boats from gangs in China, it was eventually traced to North Korea, where it was believed to have been manufactured by the North Korean government on its own presses. Since then, new generations of the same counterfeit have appeared, including a big-head version, mimicking the redesigned hundred that entered circulation in 1996. This family of bogus notes has been given its own title, one that befits its almost mythical stature: the North Korean supernote.

Some stories about the supernote sound more like legend than fact — like its being laundered by a bank in Macao called the Banco Delta Asia, or several thousand of them somehow appearing overnight in Lima, threatening to tip over the entire Peruvian economy. But there remains one truth in the supernote's history that has never been forgotten: It was first detected at the Central Bank of the Philippines by a teller, given pause only by the same nebulous flaw that betrays the majority of counterfeits. It just didn't feel right."

We don't have the choice. The Federal Reserve controls the production and distribution of Federal Reserve Notes, as a privately-owned pseudocontractor to the U.S. Government.

If we wanted polymer notes, they would have to be United States Notes, to be issued by the U.S. Treasury. These have not even existed since 1996.

Polymer banknotes are not necessarily better. I find the new Canadian bills to be much harder to count, since they are so slippery. Also there have been reports of them melting in the heat and breaking in the cold.

No it doesn't. The gold standard is and always was ridiculous. Pegging a currency to an arbitrary rare metal limits the tools of monetary policy that now prevent inlfation spikes and worse. the rapid deflationary cycles common 100 years ago. Without the gold standard, we are able to add more money supply when demand for our currency spikes, this prevents spikes and crashes in prices. In case you aren't familiar with business planning, large price fluctuations are bad, very bad. If prices are falling, people stop buy (counter intuitive right?) because they put off purchases until they can get a cheaper future price. Then demand slacks, and companies lay off workers. Then demand slack further due to unemployment. Contemporary monetary policy allows us to constrict money supply and adjust interest rates to prevent price collapses. A gold standard arbitrarily prevents these actions.

TL:DR; The gold standard is an arbitrary limitation on an already abstract system, that offers us nothing. Historical revisionism is the only reason the gold standard looks appealing.

*edit for readability

I know, right? Denim isn't even shiny. How can a society collectively agree on assigning value to something to use as currency and not use shiny things we dug up!

Same thing it was worth before, I would imagine. Money, like anything else, is worth exactly what people think it's worth, nothing more or less.

I expected jeans too tight to carry a wallet.