alt Hacker NewsIt's a confluence of various factors. Explosive population growth, for example. The modern economy (of which fiat currency plays a pivotal role) relies on that of course, as the lending system is a bet on future growth. If that fails the whole thing can enter a state of catastrophic failure. But population growth has more precedence. Fiat currency, bureaucratization, etc. were adopted as reactions to increasingly explosive populations and unchecked rationalism developing the absolutely ridiculous modern state system.
If you want demons to point a finger at, you're going to have to look further back in time than the 20th century. Then and now we're just doing a frantic tap dance to keep what we inherited from catching on fire.
Huh, what? Population increased a lot in the 19th century, and many countries did not have fiat currencies back then; and the price level most went down slowly as the population grew.
(Modern day 2%-ish stable inflation is mostly fine for the economy, even if it technically erodes the value of money in the long term. The classic pre-WW1 gold standard was also fine-ish. The Frankenstein gold standard-ish they until the 1970s was bad. And so was the rampant inflation that followed for a while.)