> I'm not the one arguing about definitions. You chose to take us down that path, adding a bunch of ad hominem while simultaneously misusing the terminology you

> I'm not the one arguing about definitions. You chose to take us down that path, adding a bunch of ad hominem while simultaneously misusing the terminology you were trying to be patronizing with. I 100% agree that it's completely inconsequential Technically I suppose it is me that keeps insisting you can't just redefine terms to make them mean the opposite of what they mean because that would be convenient to your argument. I didn't realise you considered making up new definitions of words "completely inconsequential", but it explains a lot. But one of the things about posting complete nonsense like "expected value [2] is a term you do not seem familiar with. It is a risk adjusted value of expected return on something" is that I'm going to patronise you for responding by posting incorrect definitions in a ill-advised attempt to patronise the person who knows what the words actually mean. > I'm also trying to, within reason, respond to each thing you're stating And yet your latest response to me continues to ignores all my points about risk, base interest rates, opportunity costs and the relative unprofitability of investing in productive ventures when average prices are falling and instead links to a trend line for Campbell's soup prices. I realise it's easier for you to triumphantly assert that inflation is correlated with the price of Campbell's soup to rise (well done, you managed to not get a basic economic relation the wrong way round for once!) than to learn why interest rates have an inverse relationship with money supply and why that might be relevant to the return on productive ventures, but it's a whole lot less relevant to anything I've said. Because, funnily enough, I never expected anything other than Campbell's soup increasing their prices in the last 50 years. Still, the proportion of budget spent on food, which matters a lot more, has gone down a lot since the gold standard era[1][2] and it's not like that's because Americans are getting skinnier! > One major thing I'd emphasize here is that you're acting like the consequences of non-inflationary systems are speculative. The entire point of this discussion is we have a wealth of data to draw from, from both systems. With a non-inflationary system we have a system that was, more or less, stable over nearly 200 years through numerous catastrophic events. With the modern inflationary system we have something that already not only seems unsustainable, but is causing major societal issues after just 50 years of relative super-utopia. I say super-utopia because not only have we avoided anything on the scale of e.g. WW2, but it kicked off alongside the once-in-a-civilization super-economic boom of mass digitization that is now plateauing. If we want to talk about stability verus "catastrophic events", the most notable periods of of sustained deflation (the thing you kicked off this exchange by praising) were called the Great Depression, Panic of 1893, Panic of 1873, the Panic of 1837 and the 1818-21 depression. So yeah, economists' alarm about deflationary spirals are not speculation but backed by a lot of data. If we're doing a natural experiment between deflation and steady 2% inflation even the names are a hint that the former state of affairs might be more problematic. It's funny that you think there was a single monetary system over that 200 year period (again, you're disputing a universally agreed historical fact rather than making a defensible theoretical argument about causation here) and perhaps funnier still that you believe there were no societal issues over that period and that "mass digitization" has been more transformational than the Industrial Revolution was. Disruptions like the Civil War and WWII were dealt with by completely disregarding convertibility to gold and the growth of 1950-1970 was sustained by the US giving away quarter of the entire world's gold supply, a luxury it can no longer afford. The Bretton Woods trade arrangement that made everyone need dollars largely worked for the US; the attempt to link it to gold was what killed it. And it would have died much earlier if FDR hadn't already suspended the ability of anybody that wasn't a foreign central bank to demand gold in exchange for dollars... > So on the data issue - the way you determine an inflection point on a noisy graph is just to look at the midpoints of the noise and graph them. The way you determine an inflection point is to determine the breakpoint between upward and downward trends or concavity or convexity. Neither of the graphs of labour share of income you have linked to have that functional form, irrespective of what averaging method you use to remove the economic cycles. I laughed mostly because it's actually really easy to find similar time series that do appear to have an inflection point some time around 1971, or at least between 1965 and 1990[3]. Here's one[4]. The trouble for you is that although it shows a fall in employee compensation as a proportion of GDI in the last 50 years, it also shows that it was lower still in the gold standard era's heyday back in 1929 (the 1920s were also the peak of post-industrial wealth concentration)... and that wage growth happened when the Fed inflated its way out of that mess... It's almost like those billionaire funded think tanks promising that a return to the monetary economics of 1931 (but keeping the tax cuts of the 1980s and other policy and technology shifts you're furiously pretending didn't affect anything) would make ordinary people get paid a higher share of income aren't telling the truth. [1]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-family-disposable-income https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa... [2]fun aside: there probably is an inflection point in this time series at 1932, the last full year in which people could redeem their USD for gold with food becoming relatively more affordable afterwards. Although you'd probably want to see the trend for the 1920s and earlier to be sure, and since I'm not as monomanically currency obsessed as you I would never make the mistake of arguing that decoupling from gold is the only reason why food is much more affordable to the average person today than it was at any point during the gold standard era... [3]I mean, the silly website on that theme manages to find a graph to blame the end of Bretton Woods for divorce rates... [4]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A4002E1A156NBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A4002E1A156NBEA