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> If your goal is stability this is the thing to be questioned. Stability, at what cost? Is it worth tearing up the environment, tricking people into buying

> If your goal is stability this is the thing to be questioned. Stability, at what cost? Is it worth tearing up the environment, tricking people into buying shitty disposable consumer products, financializing the economy, and stealing from the poor and unborn to give to the rich in the here and now? I don't really see anyone challenging the tradeoffs of stability in the economic discourse, it's just so often given as an unquestionably good thing.

jbay808 5y ago
Hmm; all of those things are what I would associate with breaking the stability promise, that is, reneging on inflation control and holding interest rates low. That encourages borrowing and propels the price of assets. I'd expect your objection to be associated with growth at all costs, not with stability.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I'm not the person you responded to, but to me stability also implies artificially propping up parts of the economy that should otherwise be in-decline. It's not necessarily the same as growth at all costs, but I sense it is related.
  - batshit_beaver 5y ago
    Counter point: maybe prices (including on assets) should be allowed to go up, so that their prices better reflect their value relative to productivity? The fed didn't really prop up any major industry this time around (unlike in 2008), just added fuel to the fire to keep the whole economy going.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      > The fed didn't really prop up any major industry this time around (unlike in 2008), just added fuel to the fire to keep the whole economy going. So, what you are saying, is: they propped up the financial industry.
- dnautics 5y ago
  Stability in the current economic discourse implies growth at all costs due to the way that our monetary systems are organized. "If we didn't raise the debt limit our economy would collapse"; discourse on "countries must meet their growth targets" e.g.
  - refurb 5y ago
    It absolutely doesn’t imply grow at all costs. And, you seem to think GDP is consumer goods, but GDP is what pays for social safety nets, healthcare, etc.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      It actually does. What happens if you stop growing the money supply? The system crashes because you force a cascading inability to repay debts (this is just math and is unavoidable). Growing the money supply without growing the economy also means crashes. So, yeah. Stability under our current system means grow at all costs.
robbedpeter 5y ago
A significant part of answering that question in a good way depends on how exactly the current policies and infrastructure are responsible for the unprecedented-in-human-history decline in suffering and extreme poverty and increase in population and average quality of life. To frame the question - in order for things to be as good as they are, is it required to have a system in which winners like Jeff Bezos are inevitable, or in fact necessary for the system to function? You can plan and abstract theories and rule changes and ethics and morals, but human systems are chaotic and strange. Fallibility and mistakes and whim make economics at scale a really hard thing to predict. Another question would be if you think things are relatively good, does switching to better policies run the risk of destabilizing and losing all the relative gains for extended periods before the better system breaks even?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
imtringued 5y ago
Consider the case of a depreciating asset like a factory. If the factory is not running and selling products then the factory will still incurr maintenace costs to keep it immediately deployable. Consider that money carries no such depreciation. The owner will fire people and sell the factory parts to save himself the hassle of a depreciating asset. Workers lose their jobs. They incur costs of living like food even when they are unemployed. People depreciate just like capital does. The money capitalist abandons both his physical capital and his human capital. If you tell this story a marxist who hasn't read marx' second and third volume (specifically the parts that engels wrote) he wouldn't believe you. Anyway, the conclusion is quite simple. Money is above everything. Therefore everything strives to be like money. Gold is permanent, human life is not, therefore we must grow the economy and reproduce faster than the rate we die, to create an artificial appearance of permanence.

jbay808 5y ago

Hmm; all of those things are what I would associate with breaking the stability promise, that is, reneging on inflation control and holding interest rates low. That encourages borrowing and propels the price of assets. I'd expect your objection to be associated with growth at all costs, not with stability.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
I'm not the person you responded to, but to me stability also implies artificially propping up parts of the economy that should otherwise be in-decline. It's not necessarily the same as growth at all costs, but I sense it is related.
- batshit_beaver 5y ago
  Counter point: maybe prices (including on assets) should be allowed to go up, so that their prices better reflect their value relative to productivity? The fed didn't really prop up any major industry this time around (unlike in 2008), just added fuel to the fire to keep the whole economy going.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    > The fed didn't really prop up any major industry this time around (unlike in 2008), just added fuel to the fire to keep the whole economy going. So, what you are saying, is: they propped up the financial industry.
dnautics 5y ago
Stability in the current economic discourse implies growth at all costs due to the way that our monetary systems are organized. "If we didn't raise the debt limit our economy would collapse"; discourse on "countries must meet their growth targets" e.g.
- refurb 5y ago
  It absolutely doesn’t imply grow at all costs. And, you seem to think GDP is consumer goods, but GDP is what pays for social safety nets, healthcare, etc.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    It actually does. What happens if you stop growing the money supply? The system crashes because you force a cascading inability to repay debts (this is just math and is unavoidable). Growing the money supply without growing the economy also means crashes. So, yeah. Stability under our current system means grow at all costs.

robbedpeter 5y ago

A significant part of answering that question in a good way depends on how exactly the current policies and infrastructure are responsible for the unprecedented-in-human-history decline in suffering and extreme poverty and increase in population and average quality of life. To frame the question - in order for things to be as good as they are, is it required to have a system in which winners like Jeff Bezos are inevitable, or in fact necessary for the system to function? You can plan and abstract theories and rule changes and ethics and morals, but human systems are chaotic and strange. Fallibility and mistakes and whim make economics at scale a really hard thing to predict. Another question would be if you think things are relatively good, does switching to better policies run the risk of destabilizing and losing all the relative gains for extended periods before the better system breaks even?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

imtringued 5y ago

Consider the case of a depreciating asset like a factory. If the factory is not running and selling products then the factory will still incurr maintenace costs to keep it immediately deployable. Consider that money carries no such depreciation. The owner will fire people and sell the factory parts to save himself the hassle of a depreciating asset. Workers lose their jobs. They incur costs of living like food even when they are unemployed. People depreciate just like capital does. The money capitalist abandons both his physical capital and his human capital. If you tell this story a marxist who hasn't read marx' second and third volume (specifically the parts that engels wrote) he wouldn't believe you. Anyway, the conclusion is quite simple. Money is above everything. Therefore everything strives to be like money. Gold is permanent, human life is not, therefore we must grow the economy and reproduce faster than the rate we die, to create an artificial appearance of permanence.