Does the Decline of America Track the Decline of the Dollar?

I’m always interested in borders, even shadowy ones like when exactly our society started to decline.

I recently saw a graph of the decline of the silver content in the money of Rome and it seemed a reasonable proxy for their own decline. As the value of the money went down, Rome started to fail and eventually spectacularly. 

From a post online:

“The history of banking is in many ways the history of this dilution—as governments soon discovered that through mere legislation they could declare that everyone within their borders had to accept that this year’s coins were equal to last year’s coins, even if the new coins had less silver and more lead...In Imperial Rome, this currency-degradation, which today might be described as a ‘financial innovation,’ would go on to finance previously-unaffordable policies and forever wars, leading eventually to the Crisis of the Third Century and Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices.” 

So I thought about how I could describe the economic and moral decline of the U.S. with the decline of the dollar.  

A book on the midwest says that “Peak Midwest” (meaning greatest political influence and economic success within the U.S.) seems to be roughly from 1865 to 1917, which coincided (coincidentally or not) with peak midwestern values in America, i.e. thrift, work ethic, religious sensibilities. The 1920s and beyond brought Hollywood values and the east and west coasts became much more powerful relative to the midwest. 

Looking purely at the dollar and inflation (also known as Roman currency degradation) I divided the epochs into 25 years and what the American dollar was worth at the beginning of the period (i.e. $1) and what it ended up at:

1800-1825: .67

1825-1850: .74

1850-1875: 1.32

1875-1900: .76

1900-1925: 2.11

1925-1950: 1.37

1950-1975: 2.24

1975-2000: 3.2

2000-2023: 1.76  (so far! 2 years to go…)

So a dude from outer space, looking at no other data, might say that America was rising from 1800-1850 (dollar was worth more after those years), had some sort of inflationary trouble from 1850-1875 (the Civil War), was very strong again from 1875 to 1900, had some sort of inflationary trouble from 1900-1925 (WW I) and has been declining (in the Roman sense of currency debasement) ever since with an especially rapid decline between 1975 and 2000. 

Even if it doesn’t describe things in term of economic or political power, it seems coincidentally reasonable in terms of morality of America.

But in actuality it’s probably just an indicator of our war focus. We became extremely warlike in the 20th century, didn’t stand down our armies for first time in our history after WW2, and began extending our empire with lots of forever wars and defending far-flung outposts. That naturally would lead to inflation.