At one point, I worked out that US dimes, quarters, and half dollars all weigh $20/lb (iirc), which made the task of counting my accumulated change a lot easier.
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Dime: 35 gr
Quarter: 87.5 gr
Half-dollar: 175 gr
Dollar: 350 gr
So quarters weren't worth 25¢ because the government said so; they were worth 25¢ because they were made out of 25¢ worth of silver.
That's the same reason "peso" means "weight" and the "shekel" and "pound" take their name from units of weight.
This ended in 01965 in the USA, followed by the end of the gold standard, since which the dollar has lost 96% of its value relative to the precious metals that used to define it. The consensus among economists is that this is a good thing because it prevents deflation. I'm not sure.
You're not the only person I've seen do it on this site, and I can't recall ever seeing it not on this site, so I'm wondering if its because you're in the habit (or wanting to be in the habit) for some technical thing you do like working on a database that needs years in that format, or if there's some reason you feel that its better to write them that way in prose?
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"Nickel" and "penny" break that pattern, with the first referencing the composition of the coin (originally called a "half-dime"), and penny is a measure of weight, varying by locale. The British penny is 1/240 of a Tower pound (later decimalised to 1/100 in the 1960s), whilst an American pennyweight (used for example in reference to nails) is 1/1000th of a pound.
Why is this important?
Economists generally believe that the US's gradual shift from commodity money to fiat money over the period 01932–01971 was beneficial.
But I suspect that the shift to a fiat-money basis may be having some effects on the economy that are not well understood.
Inflation is something that is generally considered good by economists because it allows for growth. If the money supply is fixed at how much of a certain metal you have mined, then the economy cannot expand without the money deflating. Deflation completely stops growth because no one will lend, and people will be reluctant to spend something that gets more valuable over time.
It's possible that the mainstream economists are right, and that things would be far worse without the shift to fiat money, and it's just a coincidence that it happened at the same time everything started falling apart. We don't have anything like a controlled experiment. A lot of things happened to the US around 01971: the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the end of the Apollo program, the War on Drugs, the New Age movement, CREEP, rapprochement with the PRC, the energy crisis, the Clean Air Act, second-wave feminism, Love Canal, etc. Most of these seem like things you'd naïvely expect to reduce domestic economic inequality, though, however detrimental they might have been to the residents of Taipei and especially My Lai. So why did it skyrocket instead?
PG has an innocent explanation: as I understand it, he thinks companies suddenly had to compete for superstars in the job market, abandoning seniority-based pay and thus creating the yuppie and growing wealth inequality. But a plausible alternative explanation is that fiat money rewards elites in nonobvious ways, enabling them to concentrate ownership of the economic base in a smaller and smaller subset of the population. Certainly that was the merit Marco Polo claimed for paper money when he became the first European to describe it in writing.
It's not a widely accepted theory today, more associated with crackpots actually, but it certainly isn't new.
I don't think everyone agrees on that. There was a huge crash which posed an existential threat to capitalism in the middle of the first one.
> Most of these seem like things you'd naïvely expect to reduce domestic economic inequality, though, however detrimental they might have been to the residents of Taipei and especially My Lai. So why did it skyrocket instead?
What does any of this have to do with currency policy?
> But a plausible alternative explanation is that fiat money rewards elites in nonobvious ways, enabling them to concentrate ownership of the economic base in a smaller and smaller subset of the population.
Even more plausible than 'post-WWII cold war politics and domestic upheaval due to civil rights, the rise of the middle class, birth control and women getting control over their own lives caused society to shift in unexpected ways and gained reactions from all segments of society which shape our modern world'?
> It's not a widely accepted theory today, more associated with crackpots actually, but it certainly isn't new.
Yet you are doing that thing where it is obvious that you believe this but won't say it openly.
Probably you would benefit from learning to engage with people capable of seriously considering ideas without embracing them, because it seems like you're looking for some kind of partisan struggle instead.
(I'm not going to, because currency arguments existed well before 1971; eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver#Climax . But if any of you all find anything, I'm all ears...)