>Do you realize that this makes no sense whatsoever? How many people do you know that would give up beer for a year if they knew that beer was going to be twice

>Do you realize that this makes no sense whatsoever? How many people do you know that would give up beer for a year if they knew that beer was going to be twice as cheap next year? Okay, let's replace beer with cars. How many people wait until someone else has driven the car off the lot to buy it? In 2010, 2.5x more used cars were sold than new cars. Imagine if no one bought new cars, though. Eventually, no one would be able to buy used cars either. Beer is a bad example because it's cheap enough that people don't do the math. Once you get into very large purchases, like cars, houses, or productive capital, companies can (and do) factor inflation/deflation into their profitability calculations. If a refinery will cost half as much next year, and the amount of money it will produce for you this year is less than half its price tag this year, you will wait to buy it until next year. Otherwise, you'll end up less profitable than the person who bought in a year later, who can then out-compete you, only to be out-competed by the person who bought in the year after that, and so on. > This doesn't make sense, because each product has its own growth curve: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/620814301289316352/photo/1 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/620814301289316352/photo/1 So even if you inflate at the average growth of all prices, you still are not accurately tracking any particular product. "Solved" is a strong word - inflation matching growth is the most practical solution currently. You could produce a more "correct" solution by giving each commodity its own currency, but that's clearly impractical.