efaardvark
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I saw a comment online that it isn't the price of gold (and silver) going up in dollars but the price of dollars going down in gold. It took a minute for my head to adjust to the concept and I wanted to see it graphically so of course I hit the the search engines. Strangely enough it is very hard to find a plot of the value of the dollar over time when priced in gold. Especially since I wanted a yearly data set going back to before the Federal Reserve was instituted in 1913. I wound up having to make my own by collecting the price of gold for all the years and doing my own math in a spreadsheet and plotting that.
The resulting plot was very interesting. One can clearly see a flat line back when the US was on a gold standard at $20 per (troy) ounce and when it was devalued to $50 per ounce. (That's actually the official face value of gold coins even today. If you look at something like a 2025 gold Eagle, which is a 1 ounce gold coin being sold now by the US mint, you'll see "50 dollars" on the face of it. Of course nobody actually spends it as $50.)
More interesting - and the reason I started the project in the first place - is that you can clearly see when the country officially dropped the gold standard in 1971. After that the value of the dollar was allowed to "float" at market rates. That's fine but it has down and to the right ever since. It is clear from the graph that the value of the dollar dropped off a cliff after 1971. People clearly would have been better off if they'd been allowed to keep their gold instead of being forced to trade them for paper.
Also note the huge, nearly vertical drop between 1971 and 1980. Those were the "stagflation" years, during which the value of dollars dropped by well over 50%. (At least in terms of gold.) In 1971 the value of a dollar was 1 dollar per 0.025 ounce. In 1980 the value of a dollar had dropped to 0.00163 ounce. That's a drop of 15x in less than 10 years! That's like depositing $150 into a bank account in 1970 then climbing into a time machine and going to the future thinking that you're going to be rich, only to find out that your account in 1980 only contains $10!
