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From the founding of this country until 1971, with a handful of brief pauses during genuine emergencies, government spending was constrained by the USD being ba

From the founding of this country until 1971, with a handful of brief pauses during genuine emergencies, government spending was constrained by the USD being backed by various metals. You are right that this does not guarantee deflation for a variety of reasons. That's a part of the reason I swapped my terminology away from deflationary to non-inflationary. When I speak of non-inflationary systems I am speaking of ones where the government's ability to 'print' money is externally constrained. If you want to play No True Scotsman with the overwhelming majority of this time period and insist that this wasn't 'real deflation', awesome! Feel free to. Because it's exactly these eras that I believe we ought endeavor to return to. I'm not appealing to some past that did not exist, but the rather real one that we had. I have not ignored your claims of interest and such. I have responded to them with real data repeatedly. If you want to argue that landing on the Moon is impossible because of the Van Allen Belts, why bothering digging into the issues with such a claim instead of simply pointing out the numerous times that we have successfully traversed such, repeatedly? This is what I was talking about when I said that you are largely ignoring data in favor of hypothetical arguments. And again you are being goofy with terminology, literally right after complaining about such. The mathematical definition of inflection point is useless outside of mathematics, and even specific subdomains within such. With the mathematical definition of inflection point a system that goes from linear to hyper-exponential would have no inflection point, which would be wholly nonsensical for our discussion. This is yet another argument you've made in bad faith. ------- As for the socioeconomic side of things, again I'd just appeal to the data. The current system is driving inequality that completely dwarfs times past. Elon is worth more than Carnegie and Rockefeller combined, inflation adjusted. US median wage is about $43k [1] so Elon's worth about 22 million years of median wages. Rockefeller was worth about $900 million in 1913 when the median income was around $600, so he was "only" worth about 1.5 million years of median wages. Beyond the excesses of inequality this system creates, do you not see this as, at least possibly, being the mother of all bubbles that we're pumping up? What happens when the funny money is no longer enough to keep everything from blowing up at the seams? That's going to have a catastrophic impact on the wealth and power of every single billionaire. And I think those that can see the forest through all those trees would certainly be looking to move away from this system before an event that may well end up making 1929 look like the 'good ole days.' I would also add on this point that it's also not just the issue of the super-bubble, but also social responses to such. The DNC is getting overrun by literal socialist candidates starting to accumulate seats and influence everywhere. I assume you're the sort to realize that their thinking of socialism is much more sickle and hammer than it is Norway, which isn't socialist in the least. And that's again largely a consequence of our current system which is drowning the lower classes and taking the upper to unprecedented highs. ------- One final note. I quite like Our World in Data. I think they generally provide some good info. But in their food graph they literally start it at 1929. I'm going to assume that was accidental, because it's complete misinformation. I'd be quite curious to see what it was prior, but saying that we spend less on food now than we did during the Great Depression is rather less than informative. [1] - https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html

notahacker 4mo ago
> If you want to play No True Scotsman with the overwhelming majority of this time period and insist that this wasn't 'real deflation', awesome! Feel free to. Because it's exactly these eras that I believe we ought endeavor to return to. I'm not appealing to some past that did not exist, but the rather real one that we had. It's hardly "no true Scotsman" to point out that a period where inflation was at current target levels is not an example of the benefits of deflation. "No true Scotsman" would be arguing that the Great Depression didn't count as an example of deflation under the gold standard, despite it being the US's last sustained deflation, the last period in which ordinary people and banks could redeem dollars for gold, and also a Depression which is widely agreed by people (with otherwise widely divergent views) to have been caused primarily by attempts to preserve the gold standard. The fact that it was so bad the US gave up on the standard isn't a reason for it not to be a true example of stuff that can happen under gold standards. But great, you've moved away from arguing deflation's a good thing and that goods prices going down each year makes investment more attractive to merely advocating metallic standards. Let's talk about how great living under gold standards was socioeconomically during periods the US wasn't giving away their gold reserves to try to maintain them: > As for the socioeconomic side of things, again I'd just appeal to the data. > I'm going to assume that was accidental, because it's complete misinformation. Imagine insisting you wanted to argue about data and then crying "complete misinformation" because the data shows the opposite of what you want it to show; a pretty consistent downward trend in relative expenditure of food bar the WWII spike. If you're curious about what it was like prior there are lots of graphs and data points here showing things like food prices being as high as 40% of household budgets at the beginning of the 20th century! For related reasons - even though house prices were low - 81% of families rented! Some nice steep downslopes on those graphs showing proportions of budget spent on necessities too. https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending.... . Honestly, I'm a bit surprised you didn't already know that: "ordinary people used to spend most of their money on basics" feels like something I first learned in primary school history classes rather than undergrad, and there are plenty of reasons why this trend exists. But what's more surprising is that you're making these very, very confident claims about how much easier it was to afford basics in that era than this era, making very strong causal claims about the form of money being the root of all economic ills and the need to revert to the monetary systems of a status quo ante bellum, and yet you don't even seem to think that it might be relevant to check what people were spending all their money on (80% on necessities earlier in the century...) > I would also add on this point that it's also not just the issue of the super-bubble, but also social responses to such. The DNC is getting overrun by literal socialist candidates starting to accumulate seats and influence everywhere. I assume you're the sort to realize that their thinking of socialism is much more sickle and hammer than it is Norway, which isn't socialist in the least. And that's again largely a consequence of our current system which is drowning the lower classes and taking the upper to unprecedented highs. History has always had radicals. In the 1890s the DNC got fully taken over by a populist whose entire mission was to abolish the gold standard[1], to the enthusiasm of the rural poor who blamed it for their poverty and disdain of the wealthy. By contrast the last significant politician to campaign for a return to the gold standard was an entirely different form of radical in Herman "Don't Blame Wall Street! Blame Yourself" Cain... And today... well the hammer and sickle types aren't really to my taste either, but they've still got a better idea of cause and effect than the people whose proposed answer to inequality comes straight out of billionaire funded think tanks recommending reductions in regulations, taxes on corporations, investors and the rich, dismantling of the welfare state and the reintroduction of the gold standard. As for the European socialist types, well several of them have successfully reduced inequality to much lower levels than existed in their countries during the early 20th century. None of them have done so by bringing back a gold standard. [1]admittedly he wasn't sophisticated enough to imagine a monetary system linked to credit rather than metal, but the whole point of populist arguments for bimetallism was that the standard was "crucifying us on a cross of gold" by causing acute shortages of money P.S. a linear trend which at turns into an exponential growth curve absolutely does have an inflection point, as do rising logistic curves more commonly found in economic data.(the second derivative of an exponential growth phase of a curve is an increasing function and the second derivative of a linear trend is 0). Graphs which smooth into a simple decreasing concave function do not, however, which is why I found it amusing why you were so determined to find one around the point the gold bugs tell you it should exist.

notahacker 4mo ago

> If you want to play No True Scotsman with the overwhelming majority of this time period and insist that this wasn't 'real deflation', awesome! Feel free to. Because it's exactly these eras that I believe we ought endeavor to return to. I'm not appealing to some past that did not exist, but the rather real one that we had. It's hardly "no true Scotsman" to point out that a period where inflation was at current target levels is not an example of the benefits of deflation. "No true Scotsman" would be arguing that the Great Depression didn't count as an example of deflation under the gold standard, despite it being the US's last sustained deflation, the last period in which ordinary people and banks could redeem dollars for gold, and also a Depression which is widely agreed by people (with otherwise widely divergent views) to have been caused primarily by attempts to preserve the gold standard. The fact that it was so bad the US gave up on the standard isn't a reason for it not to be a true example of stuff that can happen under gold standards. But great, you've moved away from arguing deflation's a good thing and that goods prices going down each year makes investment more attractive to merely advocating metallic standards. Let's talk about how great living under gold standards was socioeconomically during periods the US wasn't giving away their gold reserves to try to maintain them: > As for the socioeconomic side of things, again I'd just appeal to the data. > I'm going to assume that was accidental, because it's complete misinformation. Imagine insisting you wanted to argue about data and then crying "complete misinformation" because the data shows the opposite of what you want it to show; a pretty consistent downward trend in relative expenditure of food bar the WWII spike. If you're curious about what it was like prior there are lots of graphs and data points here showing things like food prices being as high as 40% of household budgets at the beginning of the 20th century! For related reasons - even though house prices were low - 81% of families rented! Some nice steep downslopes on those graphs showing proportions of budget spent on necessities too. https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending.... . Honestly, I'm a bit surprised you didn't already know that: "ordinary people used to spend most of their money on basics" feels like something I first learned in primary school history classes rather than undergrad, and there are plenty of reasons why this trend exists. But what's more surprising is that you're making these very, very confident claims about how much easier it was to afford basics in that era than this era, making very strong causal claims about the form of money being the root of all economic ills and the need to revert to the monetary systems of a status quo ante bellum, and yet you don't even seem to think that it might be relevant to check what people were spending all their money on (80% on necessities earlier in the century...) > I would also add on this point that it's also not just the issue of the super-bubble, but also social responses to such. The DNC is getting overrun by literal socialist candidates starting to accumulate seats and influence everywhere. I assume you're the sort to realize that their thinking of socialism is much more sickle and hammer than it is Norway, which isn't socialist in the least. And that's again largely a consequence of our current system which is drowning the lower classes and taking the upper to unprecedented highs. History has always had radicals. In the 1890s the DNC got fully taken over by a populist whose entire mission was to abolish the gold standard[1], to the enthusiasm of the rural poor who blamed it for their poverty and disdain of the wealthy. By contrast the last significant politician to campaign for a return to the gold standard was an entirely different form of radical in Herman "Don't Blame Wall Street! Blame Yourself" Cain... And today... well the hammer and sickle types aren't really to my taste either, but they've still got a better idea of cause and effect than the people whose proposed answer to inequality comes straight out of billionaire funded think tanks recommending reductions in regulations, taxes on corporations, investors and the rich, dismantling of the welfare state and the reintroduction of the gold standard. As for the European socialist types, well several of them have successfully reduced inequality to much lower levels than existed in their countries during the early 20th century. None of them have done so by bringing back a gold standard. [1]admittedly he wasn't sophisticated enough to imagine a monetary system linked to credit rather than metal, but the whole point of populist arguments for bimetallism was that the standard was "crucifying us on a cross of gold" by causing acute shortages of money P.S. a linear trend which at turns into an exponential growth curve absolutely does have an inflection point, as do rising logistic curves more commonly found in economic data.(the second derivative of an exponential growth phase of a curve is an increasing function and the second derivative of a linear trend is 0). Graphs which smooth into a simple decreasing concave function do not, however, which is why I found it amusing why you were so determined to find one around the point the gold bugs tell you it should exist.