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Money is only valuable if it is scarce. If you print quadrillions of dollars and give each person 1 billion, a sandwich will soon cost 1 billion. Then, if you

Money is only valuable if it is scarce. If you print quadrillions of dollars and give each person 1 billion, a sandwich will soon cost 1 billion. Then, if you manage to somehow to preserve the value and actually give each person 1 billion, they would have large families and a lifestyle with a higher carbon footprint.

Avshalom 3y ago
That makes one unit of money less valuable than that same unit at some previous period of time. "Money" though is still just as required to not starve as it was in that past.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Increasing money without increasing productivity doesn't change anything. It's a representation of something real.
dr-detroit 3y ago
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vkou 3y ago
> Then, if you manage to somehow to preserve the value and actually give each person 1 billion You're making the same mistake most people discussing these questions, by focusing on money. Money is a convenient medium of exchange, and monetary policy is one of the many inputs into the economy. But at the end of the day, people don't care about money. You can't eat t-bills. Greenbacks won't put a roof and four walls around you, and you don't burn them to keep the lights on. What really matters, and what people really care about is wealth. Material wealth. Wealth is only produced when people work. Whenever we talk about society as a whole 'not having the money' to afford something (Social security, social services, pensions, etc), money isn't the limiting factor. Our society's wealth is. And that wealth is measured in labour that goes towards producing useful goods and services - not in how fast money can be siphoned up by rent-seekers, or in how fast labour hours can be pissed away on make-work ditch-digging-and-ditch-filling. Unlike money, you can't just magic up widgets into existence, by pretending to work. On the one hand, labour participation is up. Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history. But so is waste, active parasitism, and passive inefficiencies[1], due to the high upkeep requirements of modern societies. [1] Car ownership is a great example of this. A mind-boggling amount of labour is poured into providing everyone with cars, and keeping them, and the infrastructure that they need running. And there's no practical way to opt out of it in most of North America. So much of the wealth we generate goes right back into maintaining the systems that we inflicted on ourselves.
- lukev 3y ago
  > Wealth is only produced when people work. This is a little simplistic. Say a farmer can grow 20 bushels of wheat in a year. A farmer with a tractor can grow 200 bushels. Does the guy who invented the tractor work as hard as the farmer? Probably not. But they (arguably) created much more wealth. What about the banker who provided financing for the tractor? Let's assume it's a totally fair financial service, no need to stipulate anything predatory. The banker didn't work very much compared to the farmer at all, just wrote down some ledger entries. Yet without him, farmer is tractorless. Any full view of the economy has to account for services and invention (and many more things, these are just illustrative examples.)
  - bschne 3y ago
    "Wealth is only produced when people work." does not imply every kind of work creates wealth at the same rate. I think the point was merely that creating money out of thin air without anything corresponding changing in the real world does not cause there to be more of what people actually want there to be more of.
  - vkou 3y ago
    A guy who spends 12 hours a day, 365 days a year, digging a hole and filling it does a lot of work, without producing any wealth. Work is a requirement for producing wealth, but is not a sole and sufficient requirement. Useful work is. There are, however, plenty of ways to produce money without doing any useful work.

Avshalom 3y ago

That makes one unit of money less valuable than that same unit at some previous period of time. "Money" though is still just as required to not starve as it was in that past.

pixl97 3y ago
Increasing money without increasing productivity doesn't change anything. It's a representation of something real.

dr-detroit 3y ago

[dead]

vkou 3y ago

> Then, if you manage to somehow to preserve the value and actually give each person 1 billion You're making the same mistake most people discussing these questions, by focusing on money. Money is a convenient medium of exchange, and monetary policy is one of the many inputs into the economy. But at the end of the day, people don't care about money. You can't eat t-bills. Greenbacks won't put a roof and four walls around you, and you don't burn them to keep the lights on. What really matters, and what people really care about is wealth. Material wealth. Wealth is only produced when people work. Whenever we talk about society as a whole 'not having the money' to afford something (Social security, social services, pensions, etc), money isn't the limiting factor. Our society's wealth is. And that wealth is measured in labour that goes towards producing useful goods and services - not in how fast money can be siphoned up by rent-seekers, or in how fast labour hours can be pissed away on make-work ditch-digging-and-ditch-filling. Unlike money, you can't just magic up widgets into existence, by pretending to work. On the one hand, labour participation is up. Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history. But so is waste, active parasitism, and passive inefficiencies[1], due to the high upkeep requirements of modern societies. [1] Car ownership is a great example of this. A mind-boggling amount of labour is poured into providing everyone with cars, and keeping them, and the infrastructure that they need running. And there's no practical way to opt out of it in most of North America. So much of the wealth we generate goes right back into maintaining the systems that we inflicted on ourselves.

lukev 3y ago
> Wealth is only produced when people work. This is a little simplistic. Say a farmer can grow 20 bushels of wheat in a year. A farmer with a tractor can grow 200 bushels. Does the guy who invented the tractor work as hard as the farmer? Probably not. But they (arguably) created much more wealth. What about the banker who provided financing for the tractor? Let's assume it's a totally fair financial service, no need to stipulate anything predatory. The banker didn't work very much compared to the farmer at all, just wrote down some ledger entries. Yet without him, farmer is tractorless. Any full view of the economy has to account for services and invention (and many more things, these are just illustrative examples.)
- bschne 3y ago
  "Wealth is only produced when people work." does not imply every kind of work creates wealth at the same rate. I think the point was merely that creating money out of thin air without anything corresponding changing in the real world does not cause there to be more of what people actually want there to be more of.
- vkou 3y ago
  A guy who spends 12 hours a day, 365 days a year, digging a hole and filling it does a lot of work, without producing any wealth. Work is a requirement for producing wealth, but is not a sole and sufficient requirement. Useful work is. There are, however, plenty of ways to produce money without doing any useful work.