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

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.