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The thing that has nagged at you as it has me, is the simple fact that not only was “economics” conjured and molded by and for the interests of the upper echelo

The thing that has nagged at you as it has me, is the simple fact that not only was “economics” conjured and molded by and for the interests of the upper echelon of society, to control the language and thoughts about its terms; but that at the core of it, it’s nothing more than fraud, deception, con artistry. That’s all inflation is too, fraud that if you would commit it, e.g., you added filler to some product you delivered or forged signatures on delivery paperwork, you would be punished for. You are given currency coupons in exchange for your work, and then more of those coupons are just forged than correspond to actual work having been done, thereby defrauding you out of the value of your work, also commonly called theft of service.

lordnacho 4y ago
> The thing that has nagged at you as it has me, is the simple fact that not only was “economics” conjured and molded by and for the interests of the upper echelon of society, to control the language and thoughts about its terms; but that at the core of it, it’s nothing more than fraud, deception, con artistry. Yeah this true, but I wonder if it's as straightforwardly sinister as that. I'm sure there are a lot of economists, esp in the mid 20th century, who would have liked to turn economics into physics. Some of those ideas are of no real merit after further inspection, but are kept alive by political interests. You do come across a lot of thought pieces by think tanks, which seem to be more political than science. > You are given currency coupons in exchange for your work, and then more of those coupons are just forged than correspond to actual work having been done, thereby defrauding you out of the value of your work, also commonly called theft of service. The problem with that is there are legitimate reasons for printing more coupons, they're just mixed in with less legit reasons. If people want to exchange more, they need more coupons. Otherwise everyone would have to wait for their income to arrive before sending it on, and while they wait some of the opportunities will vanish. A little bit of creation isn't so bad.
- flybrand 4y ago
  > straightforwardly sinister If the impact is sinister, then debating the motive just extends the duration of the pain experienced. Motives matter at the time of trial - when the action and pain are over. Until then, debating motive is just a distraction from stopping the unjust activity.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > f people want to exchange more, they need more coupons. thats a fallacy. nothing prevents you from exchanging more even if you had a fixed number of coupons. you would just have to consider that the value of each coupon becomes more, not less, over time, so you need to use subdivisions of coupons more. Inflation, even at low levels, is ultimately value destruction over time.
  - klipt 4y ago
    > the value of each coupon becomes more, not less, over time Deflation has historically been a bad thing every time it's happened.
    - ibeckermayer 4y ago
      Nonsense. Sure, deflationary shocks can be calamitous, like the Great Depression or the GFC. But steady deflation over time is logically the natural and good outcome of improvement over time—as technology advances and we get better at producing things, they should get cheaper, on average. Instead, our savings are buying us LESS over time, so that government can buy votes, fund wars, bail out defense contractors, pharma companies, financial institutions, and other cronies, etc. Inflation via the printing press, which is now just considered by many a normal phenomenon, is actually legalized wealth transfer from the savings of ordinary citizens into the coffers of giant government bureaucracies and the large corporations that feed off them.
      - mrow84 4y ago
        Goods getting cheaper broadly means that supply is going up relative to demand - we call this deflation. If the supply of money goes up relative to demand then we call that inflation. It seems like you are conflating the two categories.
      - simonh 4y ago
        Devaluing in-the-mattress savings is a good thing, hence all the many government schemes to incentivise small scale productive investment. Here in the UK that's through tax free consumer savings accounts like ISAs, but also pensions. Savings that are invested do work in the economy fund businesses, promote economic activity and aid job and wealth creation. Stuffed mattresses are a boat anchor on the economy. Having said that, deflation isn't always the awful spectre of doom it's sometimes made out do be, especially if it's due to technological improvements or increased supply. As the article we're all notionally discussing explains, inflation in a reasonably well managed economy is generally differential and reflects shifts in the structure of the economy.
pjc50 4y ago
> then more of those coupons are just forged than correspond to actual work having been done Is this Karl Marx's critique of inflation?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throw0101a 4y ago
> You are given currency coupons in exchange for your work, and then more of those coupons are just forged than correspond to actual work having been done, thereby defrauding you out of the value of your work, also commonly called theft of service. All currency is made up. Even gold, or bitcoin, or giant rocks: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones The only thing that has "inherent" value to humans is air/oxygen, shelter, water, and food. Everything else is psychological projection for convenience. See The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Bernstein: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_L._Bernstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_L._Bernstein And Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Goldstein: * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50358103-money https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50358103-money * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Goldstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Goldstein
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  > All currency is made up. Even gold, or bitcoin, or giant rocks Yes, but gold, bitcoin, and giant rocks can't be inflated at will, which is what the OP was complaining about. Simulated pieces of green paper can. Even with the formerly-used real pieces of green paper, there's a physical limit to how fast printing presses can run. With simulated pieces of green paper, you can just type some numbers into a computer and suddenly there are twice as many of them as there were before. Or a hundred times as many. Or a trillion times as many...
  - orwin 4y ago
    Okay, but creating money at will is not a bug, its a feature. I know there is this myth of the "no crisis ever during the gold standard era", but this is false. We had a crisis every ten years or so, sometime way bigger than the 2008 crisis despite the economies being less interconnected. And those crisis sometimes were entirely disconnected from production issues, unlike 2008 that is clearly linked with the conventional oil/gas peak. Because having liquidity that allow easy trading of ressources actually help recover faster and avoid made up crisis like the 1893 one in the US.
simonh 4y ago
So you seem to be adding your voice in support for the article which, er, directly contradicts your views about money printing and current inflation. Right now we know for a fact that current inflation is a genuine global shortage of actual stuff. Crude oil, cooking oil, wheat, Chinese products. Plus American government overspending, to be fair, but that's just a US phenomenon. Of course that's inconvenient if you really desperately want to complain that you specifically are being cheated. After all if you have less, it must be because somebody else has more, right? If we're all screwed, who do you blame? Putin and Xi are far away and broadly hated already, so there's no satisfaction to be had blaming anything on them.
- bko 4y ago
  > Plus American government overspending, to be fair, but that's just a US phenomenon. That's not true. US spent the most, but Europe spent €3.2 trillion. US spent $12 trillion but they had to "shore up" a lot of global banks because that's just what they do. About half went into asset purchases and liquidity measures. I take a simple approach. What would you expect to happen if you just created trillions out of thin air and distributed it? Arguing nothing would happen is the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. It just doesn't pass the smell test to me because you can just create global wealth from changing some numbers in a computer with no repercussions. It's alchemy. Can I "prove" that there are negative consequences that in the long run outweigh the benefits? No. But I can say that I cannot find a single case of high inflation that did not coincide with government printing money. Printing a lot of money doesn't always cause inflation, but any time there is inflation there has been a lot of money printing. Sure what happens may not be predictable, but its obvious that you're messing with a complex system and effects aren't instantaneous or uniform. That's why you see things like product X is going up 50% while product Y is going up 5%. And the people that point this out think they're debunking something. With complex systems its best to keep things simple. You can get lost in the data from all the noise and overconfidence will bite you in the ass. Which is why it's not a smart idea to increase the money supply by 30+% in a year and dump it into the market. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/european-union-finance-fiscal-money-support-covid-coronavirus/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/european-union-financ... https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/ https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/
1ncorrect 4y ago
My current thesis, from a position of absolute agnostic ignorance, is economics is what filled the void in society vacated by religion after the enlightenment. They’re functionally indistinguishable, with mythology replaced by mathematics, and God replaced with GDP. Similarly, they’re both arbitrary rules; conjured, imposed, and protected from scrutiny by the ruling class. That’s not to say it’s not useful, but I find it baffling that an imaginary concept is unquestionably granted veto over tangible and visceral phenomena.
- lukifer 4y ago
  I've used to think the Reagan-era political coalition (persisting to this day) made no sense: the values and worldviews of evangelicals and economic libertarians have terribly little in common. Then it clicked, the common belief that united them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
- achenatx 4y ago
  the difference between economics (or science) and religion is that economics is used to predict the future. When economics fails to predict the future, the models are changed until they can predict the future. religion tells you what goals you should have and how you should live a life, passing judgement and establishing morality. They are orthogonal to each other.
  - lukifer 4y ago
    "Economists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions."
perfecthjrjth 4y ago
Also, note that mainstream monasteries are at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. That's where these secular priests 'corrupt'/preach the next generation of elites.

lordnacho 4y ago

> The thing that has nagged at you as it has me, is the simple fact that not only was “economics” conjured and molded by and for the interests of the upper echelon of society, to control the language and thoughts about its terms; but that at the core of it, it’s nothing more than fraud, deception, con artistry. Yeah this true, but I wonder if it's as straightforwardly sinister as that. I'm sure there are a lot of economists, esp in the mid 20th century, who would have liked to turn economics into physics. Some of those ideas are of no real merit after further inspection, but are kept alive by political interests. You do come across a lot of thought pieces by think tanks, which seem to be more political than science. > You are given currency coupons in exchange for your work, and then more of those coupons are just forged than correspond to actual work having been done, thereby defrauding you out of the value of your work, also commonly called theft of service. The problem with that is there are legitimate reasons for printing more coupons, they're just mixed in with less legit reasons. If people want to exchange more, they need more coupons. Otherwise everyone would have to wait for their income to arrive before sending it on, and while they wait some of the opportunities will vanish. A little bit of creation isn't so bad.

flybrand 4y ago
> straightforwardly sinister If the impact is sinister, then debating the motive just extends the duration of the pain experienced. Motives matter at the time of trial - when the action and pain are over. Until then, debating motive is just a distraction from stopping the unjust activity.
ekianjo 4y ago
> f people want to exchange more, they need more coupons. thats a fallacy. nothing prevents you from exchanging more even if you had a fixed number of coupons. you would just have to consider that the value of each coupon becomes more, not less, over time, so you need to use subdivisions of coupons more. Inflation, even at low levels, is ultimately value destruction over time.
- klipt 4y ago
  > the value of each coupon becomes more, not less, over time Deflation has historically been a bad thing every time it's happened.
  - ibeckermayer 4y ago
    Nonsense. Sure, deflationary shocks can be calamitous, like the Great Depression or the GFC. But steady deflation over time is logically the natural and good outcome of improvement over time—as technology advances and we get better at producing things, they should get cheaper, on average. Instead, our savings are buying us LESS over time, so that government can buy votes, fund wars, bail out defense contractors, pharma companies, financial institutions, and other cronies, etc. Inflation via the printing press, which is now just considered by many a normal phenomenon, is actually legalized wealth transfer from the savings of ordinary citizens into the coffers of giant government bureaucracies and the large corporations that feed off them.
    - mrow84 4y ago
      Goods getting cheaper broadly means that supply is going up relative to demand - we call this deflation. If the supply of money goes up relative to demand then we call that inflation. It seems like you are conflating the two categories.
    - simonh 4y ago
      Devaluing in-the-mattress savings is a good thing, hence all the many government schemes to incentivise small scale productive investment. Here in the UK that's through tax free consumer savings accounts like ISAs, but also pensions. Savings that are invested do work in the economy fund businesses, promote economic activity and aid job and wealth creation. Stuffed mattresses are a boat anchor on the economy. Having said that, deflation isn't always the awful spectre of doom it's sometimes made out do be, especially if it's due to technological improvements or increased supply. As the article we're all notionally discussing explains, inflation in a reasonably well managed economy is generally differential and reflects shifts in the structure of the economy.

pjc50 4y ago

> then more of those coupons are just forged than correspond to actual work having been done Is this Karl Marx's critique of inflation?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

throw0101a 4y ago

> You are given currency coupons in exchange for your work, and then more of those coupons are just forged than correspond to actual work having been done, thereby defrauding you out of the value of your work, also commonly called theft of service. All currency is made up. Even gold, or bitcoin, or giant rocks: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones The only thing that has "inherent" value to humans is air/oxygen, shelter, water, and food. Everything else is psychological projection for convenience. See The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Bernstein: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_L._Bernstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_L._Bernstein And Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Goldstein: * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50358103-money https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50358103-money * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Goldstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Goldstein

Turing_Machine 4y ago
> All currency is made up. Even gold, or bitcoin, or giant rocks Yes, but gold, bitcoin, and giant rocks can't be inflated at will, which is what the OP was complaining about. Simulated pieces of green paper can. Even with the formerly-used real pieces of green paper, there's a physical limit to how fast printing presses can run. With simulated pieces of green paper, you can just type some numbers into a computer and suddenly there are twice as many of them as there were before. Or a hundred times as many. Or a trillion times as many...
- orwin 4y ago
  Okay, but creating money at will is not a bug, its a feature. I know there is this myth of the "no crisis ever during the gold standard era", but this is false. We had a crisis every ten years or so, sometime way bigger than the 2008 crisis despite the economies being less interconnected. And those crisis sometimes were entirely disconnected from production issues, unlike 2008 that is clearly linked with the conventional oil/gas peak. Because having liquidity that allow easy trading of ressources actually help recover faster and avoid made up crisis like the 1893 one in the US.

simonh 4y ago

So you seem to be adding your voice in support for the article which, er, directly contradicts your views about money printing and current inflation. Right now we know for a fact that current inflation is a genuine global shortage of actual stuff. Crude oil, cooking oil, wheat, Chinese products. Plus American government overspending, to be fair, but that's just a US phenomenon. Of course that's inconvenient if you really desperately want to complain that you specifically are being cheated. After all if you have less, it must be because somebody else has more, right? If we're all screwed, who do you blame? Putin and Xi are far away and broadly hated already, so there's no satisfaction to be had blaming anything on them.

bko 4y ago
> Plus American government overspending, to be fair, but that's just a US phenomenon. That's not true. US spent the most, but Europe spent €3.2 trillion. US spent $12 trillion but they had to "shore up" a lot of global banks because that's just what they do. About half went into asset purchases and liquidity measures. I take a simple approach. What would you expect to happen if you just created trillions out of thin air and distributed it? Arguing nothing would happen is the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. It just doesn't pass the smell test to me because you can just create global wealth from changing some numbers in a computer with no repercussions. It's alchemy. Can I "prove" that there are negative consequences that in the long run outweigh the benefits? No. But I can say that I cannot find a single case of high inflation that did not coincide with government printing money. Printing a lot of money doesn't always cause inflation, but any time there is inflation there has been a lot of money printing. Sure what happens may not be predictable, but its obvious that you're messing with a complex system and effects aren't instantaneous or uniform. That's why you see things like product X is going up 50% while product Y is going up 5%. And the people that point this out think they're debunking something. With complex systems its best to keep things simple. You can get lost in the data from all the noise and overconfidence will bite you in the ass. Which is why it's not a smart idea to increase the money supply by 30+% in a year and dump it into the market. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/european-union-finance-fiscal-money-support-covid-coronavirus/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/european-union-financ... https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/ https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/

1ncorrect 4y ago

My current thesis, from a position of absolute agnostic ignorance, is economics is what filled the void in society vacated by religion after the enlightenment. They’re functionally indistinguishable, with mythology replaced by mathematics, and God replaced with GDP. Similarly, they’re both arbitrary rules; conjured, imposed, and protected from scrutiny by the ruling class. That’s not to say it’s not useful, but I find it baffling that an imaginary concept is unquestionably granted veto over tangible and visceral phenomena.

lukifer 4y ago
I've used to think the Reagan-era political coalition (persisting to this day) made no sense: the values and worldviews of evangelicals and economic libertarians have terribly little in common. Then it clicked, the common belief that united them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
achenatx 4y ago
the difference between economics (or science) and religion is that economics is used to predict the future. When economics fails to predict the future, the models are changed until they can predict the future. religion tells you what goals you should have and how you should live a life, passing judgement and establishing morality. They are orthogonal to each other.
- lukifer 4y ago
  "Economists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions."

perfecthjrjth 4y ago

Also, note that mainstream monasteries are at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. That's where these secular priests 'corrupt'/preach the next generation of elites.