"Bar car" on the NYC subway, 1962

It was a temporary stunt as part of a city-wide cleanup. The goal was to give a “first class experience” to commuters.

It looks like something has broken in the USA in the '70s. It only went downward from there…

Ever since I learned of this, I think of it frequently:

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

WTF Happened In 1971?

https://inflationdata.com/articles/2022/08/10/u-s-cumulative-inflation-since-1913/ "I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop." - F.A. Hayek…

WTF Happened In 1971?
so wtf happened in 1971 then?

My guess is the end of the gold standard as its being referenced quite a few times across the webpage and it’s at the inflexion point of lots of these graphs.

But I didn’t check if it was a major cause or just correlation.

Yeah, what happened in 1971 is the end of the gold standard. But what happened in the late 60s, and early 70s was a major increase in the workforce as boomers began entering it, and increasingly women were working careers instead of staying home to raise the children. Meanwhile Japanese and European manufacturing were finally recovering from the war, so the American prosperity from being the only major manufacturing power aside from the much smaller countries in the Americas and Oceania was ending. Later in the 70s the MBAs would begin taking power economically, and the new deal reforms began being whittled down in the name of deregulation, especially in the 80s.

I’m old enough and have been on the internet long enough to be able to spot gold nuts…