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> 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. B

> 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.

somenameforme 3mo ago
I haven't moved my argument at all. What I have said, from the very beginning, is that the excessive printing of money distorts the economy and causes perverse incentives. So that printing needs to be hard constrained. I've indulged tangents outside of this because I think the topic is fascinating and I always learn a bit during these sort of discussions, so why not? The food argument is weak. Thinking about it more - household sizes were larger, household labor distribution was very different (far more single income families), agricultural and other advances have driven down prices independent of economic systems, and so on. Using your baseline value as the start of the Great Depression is just the start of problems there. Reasonably controlled data would look quite different. You are also repeating a fallacy that you seem to believe. The US did not drop the gold standard after the Great Depression. We remained on it until 1971. The reason we dropped it in 1971 is because we defaulted. As the government began increasingly reckless money printing in the 60s, we began unable to keep up the facade of the dollar being based on anything. The French made a large gold call, and we chose to default on our obligations. In the 150 years from 1800 to 1950 (if you want to claim the inflationary trend had already began then) there was a total inflation of 44%. In the 75 years since 1950, there's been total inflation of 1347%. It looks a bit better if we use 1971 as the date, but not dramatically so. In general I could not care less about what causes the constraints, but the government themselves getting to decide how much they print is increasingly obviously unsustainable. If you didn't get the point in my previous message regarding the socioeconomic issues - I am saying that all of these things are going to be entirely evident to billionaires as well. They'll get rich in either system since capitalism itself will always have a tendency towards the rich getting richer. But the big question is what happens to the other 90% (and in particular the ~70%) which, in turn, plays a large role in what happens to the 0.01%. And in there, inflation is most certainly not working the overwhelming majority's favor. The invisible wage depression alone is going to result in the end of capitalism if it's not fixed, which is going to leave everybody way worse off. And requiring wages be adjusted to inflation is just going to trend towards hyper-inflation. There's only one solution, so far as I can see - money printing needs to be restrained. ---- Jennings did not want to abolish the gold standard. What started the entire issue was funny money printing during the Civil War which heavily distorted the economy. This eventually led to the government returning to the gold standard for that funny money, which turned it immediately into real money. But the teasing of unlimited money struck up a debate as to whether the monetary supply should be further expanded and, if so, then how. And there was already a faction of 'greenbackers' that wanted it expanded with unbacked greenbacks - funny money. Jennings wanted controlled expansion with silver. That's mostly just kicking the can, but still much more reasonable than funny money. And no, a linear function that becomes exponential does not have a mathematical inflection point. I don't know if you understand what you're saying because you are actually saying completely correct things and then contradicting yourself. As you already said, a mathematical inflection point is when a system changes from concave to convex or vice versa. Going from linear growth to exponential is a purely convex system in the context that we're discussing - there is no mathematical inflection point, but a rather obvious inflection point in the colloquial speak that we were obviously using.

somenameforme 3mo ago

I haven't moved my argument at all. What I have said, from the very beginning, is that the excessive printing of money distorts the economy and causes perverse incentives. So that printing needs to be hard constrained. I've indulged tangents outside of this because I think the topic is fascinating and I always learn a bit during these sort of discussions, so why not? The food argument is weak. Thinking about it more - household sizes were larger, household labor distribution was very different (far more single income families), agricultural and other advances have driven down prices independent of economic systems, and so on. Using your baseline value as the start of the Great Depression is just the start of problems there. Reasonably controlled data would look quite different. You are also repeating a fallacy that you seem to believe. The US did not drop the gold standard after the Great Depression. We remained on it until 1971. The reason we dropped it in 1971 is because we defaulted. As the government began increasingly reckless money printing in the 60s, we began unable to keep up the facade of the dollar being based on anything. The French made a large gold call, and we chose to default on our obligations. In the 150 years from 1800 to 1950 (if you want to claim the inflationary trend had already began then) there was a total inflation of 44%. In the 75 years since 1950, there's been total inflation of 1347%. It looks a bit better if we use 1971 as the date, but not dramatically so. In general I could not care less about what causes the constraints, but the government themselves getting to decide how much they print is increasingly obviously unsustainable. If you didn't get the point in my previous message regarding the socioeconomic issues - I am saying that all of these things are going to be entirely evident to billionaires as well. They'll get rich in either system since capitalism itself will always have a tendency towards the rich getting richer. But the big question is what happens to the other 90% (and in particular the ~70%) which, in turn, plays a large role in what happens to the 0.01%. And in there, inflation is most certainly not working the overwhelming majority's favor. The invisible wage depression alone is going to result in the end of capitalism if it's not fixed, which is going to leave everybody way worse off. And requiring wages be adjusted to inflation is just going to trend towards hyper-inflation. There's only one solution, so far as I can see - money printing needs to be restrained. ---- Jennings did not want to abolish the gold standard. What started the entire issue was funny money printing during the Civil War which heavily distorted the economy. This eventually led to the government returning to the gold standard for that funny money, which turned it immediately into real money. But the teasing of unlimited money struck up a debate as to whether the monetary supply should be further expanded and, if so, then how. And there was already a faction of 'greenbackers' that wanted it expanded with unbacked greenbacks - funny money. Jennings wanted controlled expansion with silver. That's mostly just kicking the can, but still much more reasonable than funny money. And no, a linear function that becomes exponential does not have a mathematical inflection point. I don't know if you understand what you're saying because you are actually saying completely correct things and then contradicting yourself. As you already said, a mathematical inflection point is when a system changes from concave to convex or vice versa. Going from linear growth to exponential is a purely convex system in the context that we're discussing - there is no mathematical inflection point, but a rather obvious inflection point in the colloquial speak that we were obviously using.