> In a deflationary system, someone might expect to earn a 2% real return on doing absolutely nothing with their money. So a 2.1% real return on risking money [

> In a deflationary system, someone might expect to earn a 2% real return on doing absolutely nothing with their money. So a 2.1% real return on risking money [by investing in something with an EV of 0.1%] isn't very attractive. Deflation doesn't affect your wealth by making it literally increase in quantity anymore than inflation affects it by making it literally decrease. If you have something with a expected value of 0.1% per year then if you invest $1000 in it, at the end of the year you have $1001 and your wealth has grown even faster than if you did nothing with it. By contrast if you carried out such an investment in an inflationary system then you also have $1001, but your wealth has decreased relatively significantly because it has much less spending power than your initial $1000. In deflation you can invest in literally anything you think is profitable, and even if turns out to be slightly unprofitable, you'll see your wealth grow. In inflation, you need to see infinite exponential growth, or you lose. So gambling and moonshots are incentivized while stable cost-focused ventures are disincentivized. This loops right back into education. You're quite fond of calling things you disagree with memes, yet your perspective of education and its 'organic' value is heavily meme driven, so to speak. The college wage premium peaked in the early 2000s, when college prices were substantially lower than they are now, though still already unreasonably high. [1] And the college premium of 2005 was the same as it was in 1915. [2] It's the funny money, and only the funny money. Whether or not people themselves can convert their dollar to gold is largely immaterial to this discussion. The issue is about government's making the money printer go whirrrrrrr, and that decision's subsequent effect on society. Bretton Woods constrained government's abilities to do this, at least ostensibly. But the 1950s were still relatively constrained. --- The numbers you're giving are misleading. For instance in modern times there's only about 45 million housing units that are owned without debt (don't forget home equity loans as well). [3] And then only some percent of those are owner-occupied, and then only some percent of those are comparable to the type we're looking at - single family, detached. Unfortunately the census does not provide a direct way to combine these data. But we can see as a percent of all housing units (which is about 149 million) we're already approaching quite negligible numbers. Don't get so vested in an argument that you stop sniff testing the things you yourself are saying. Speaking of sniff, it's not like e.g. people just didn't shower in the 50s. The stuff like houses without indoor bathrooms is going to come, overwhelmingly, from things like rural farms and such with outhouses where excreta could then be used as fertilizer. And yes, rental rates began to skyrocket in the 60s, and the trend began to where we are now. That's when the money printer started going out of control, money was being aggressively injected into society, and everything began being unaffordable - except wages which were (and are) now constantly being pushed downward. And so we got the see inequality spiral out of control, housing become unaffordable for the majority of people, people being unable to graduate without being drowned in debt, and all of these other fun things that modern society has created. [1] - https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/what-happened-to-the-college-wage-premium https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/what-happened-to... [2] - https://www.nber.org/papers/w12984 https://www.nber.org/papers/w12984 [3] - https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2023.B25081 https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2023.B25081