The end of super-cheap easy domestic oil has long been my go-to hypothesis for what happened around 1971. Monetary systems and policy are social constructs, but energy is physically fundamental.

Everything that has happened since then including reckless monetary policy and wage stagnation could be argued to be symptoms of the rising real cost of energy. By real cost of energy I mean physics, EROEI. Wage stagnation happens because without super cheap energy the actual physical cost of providing increasing living standards to a huge number of people become too high. Even if they live lavishly, a smaller number of rich people don't consume nearly as much energy as a huge number of middle class people. As a result the rich are not affected. Reckless financial and monetary policies can be explained by politicians who don't understand physics trying to get the magic unicorns to come back.

If either solar/wind + batteries or some form of nuclear power can be made to scale well enough, we may see a return to the post-war era. Otherwise we will not, and returning to the gold standard (or Bitcoin) won't make much difference.

I'm pretty optimistic about renewable power. I glance at this every once in a while:

http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx

During the day California often runs on >50% solar/wind. Two decades ago that was a small single digit percentage. It's pretty spectacular. If we can scale storage similarly and then if the costs of both continue to fall for a while due to industrial scaling of production, we could be back to the 50s but with a renewable instead of non-renewable basis.

A fusion breakthrough or finally figuring out how to safely and sustainably scale fission would have a similar outcome.

BTW: I also wonder if you can explain the Chinese miracle in energy terms. China just decided to chase growth and fuck the environment, so they went wild with cheap coal. The magic was not only using cheap coal but doing so with no scrubbers (which consume a surprising amount of power) and no other energetically costly environmental controls to speak of, maximizing physical EROEI. They lifted vast numbers of people to middle class status and became a superpower at the cost of accelerating climate change and air that burns your eyes.