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> Central banking is possibly the greatest human invention since sanitation. The greatest human invention since sanitation is that a tiny elite can control the

> Central banking is possibly the greatest human invention since sanitation. The greatest human invention since sanitation is that a tiny elite can control the value of money (and money over time)? Is that a joke? Are you joking? Edit: Really...? Really? You know the devaluation of currency over time and the resulting increase in the cost of goods disproportionately affects the poor and middle class, as well as retirement savers who's interest rates can't keep up, right? Is that also a feature?

hapless 13y ago
I am absolutely not joking, and the fact that the value of money can be controlled by a central authority is a feature not a bug.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    >>It is in fact a major bug that you effectively lose just by holding. Not taking sides here, but I think it could be argued that devaluation is good because it encourages economic activity (i.e. spending) instead of mindless hoarding. I mean, money is supposed to be a medium of transfer, not an investment/saving mechanism. We don't want people hoarding cash in a bank account. We want them to invest that cash in actual assets that can then be developed.
    - SilasX 13y ago
      >Not taking sides here, but I think it could be argued that devaluation is good because it encourages economic activity (i.e. spending) instead of mindless hoarding. So would threatening to execute anyone who spends less than n% of their take-home pay, but people don't advocate that, do they? Before you object to the comparison, I know: "That's different: the costs would vastly exceed the benefits!" Right, but there would be costs! There are costs any time you force people to spend (commit to purchases) earlier than they would like to -- whether you do it by inflation or the sword. One cannot simply say, "well, economic activity [that we measure] went up, so that must have been a good idea!" But anytime someone brings up the "encourages economic activity" argument for inflation, they rarely offer any way to model the cost of moving up purchases like this, nor do they even realize it's necessary to do so! (Edited to avoid excessive attribution of the argument.)
      - aidenn0 13y ago
        Inflation is a tax on assets held as dollars. That tends to make it highly progressive as savings tends to increase faster than income once you pass a certain inflection point. The government already taxes other things (both to generate income and to alter behavior), so looking at inflation that way makes it easier IMO to make sound policy decisions rather than comparing it to executions.
        SilasX 13y ago
        Yes, you can replay another standard argument for inflation. It's still not enough: the question is how to model the cost of making people spend sooner than they otherwise would, so you can compare to the benefit thereof. Mentioning executions was just to show what happens when you ignore costs and only talk about policy benefits. For those "taxes of other things", you still need to model its social cost to know whether it outweighs the benefit. You can't just dismiss the point as "this isn't execution". Edit: Important thing to note: in most discussion of taxation, the theme is "how to avoid the deadweight loss", i.e. how to write the tax in a way where it just transfers money without inducing changes in behavior. Advocating inflation as a behavior-changing tax is a sharp deviation from this, requiring a very different justification and model than traditional taxation.
        aidenn0 13y ago
        > in most discussion of taxation, the theme is "how to avoid the deadweight loss" This is certainly not true for e.g excise taxes. Inflation as a tax on dollars-held is similary intended to alter behavior by encouraging those with wealth to take riskier investments (alternatively stated, to discourage long-term holding dollars, similarly to how excise taxes are intended to discourage consumption of particular goods).
        SilasX 13y ago
        I think you mean Pigovian, not excise, taxes, and you'd still need a way to model the relative benefits vs costs of hoarding. With e.g. carbon taxes, one can estimate the harms of global warming (rising sea levels, lost biodiversity) and find the social cost of an emission, then levy a tax so that people only do those carbon emissions whose welfare gain exceeds the environment-driven welfare loss (which exist, despite the rhetoric from the fiercest advocates). When someone proposes n% inflation as a way of "taxing" hoarding, what's the corresponding model? What's the "rising sea level" there? In cases of a ~100% "inflation tax" (aka hyperinflation), we see the harms clearly: people have to spend money almost the second they get it. They have to move up purchases and otherwise arrange their lives in ways that are extremely welfare harming, and which probably outweigh the benefits of the greater economic activity it induces. (Contrary to a lot of talk on hyperinflation, I don't see the chief problem as being volatility; even with stable, predictable hyperinflation you have the problem of losing the main benefit of money, which is that you don't have to know what you'll ultimately be buying in order to produce something for sale.) So likewise, to justify a Pigovian argument for inflation, you would likewise need a model, or otherwise gauge the magnitude, of the "costs of making people move up purchases [when they'd rather save and decide later]" -- the costs that become extreme in the case of hyperinflation. And yet virtually everyone enamored of the "we need to encourage economic activity" argument for activity has nothing in the way of this. Hence my frustration with it. (The analog of hyperinflation in carbon taxes would be a ban, or absurdly high tax, on burning of fossil fuels, and has the corresponding welfare harm that the avoided fuel usage -- or costs in evading the ban -- far exceed the welfare harm of the emissions themselves.)
    - lexcorvus 13y ago
      With phrases like "economic activity" and "mindless hoarding", you're using language that short-circuits critical thinking. You're on the right track, though, with your parenthetical note, so let's start by replacing "economic activity" with "spending". Then, instead of using the inflammatory phrase "mindless hoarding", let's use the word "saving". With this neutral terminology, we're now ready for some actual thought. We can recast the claim as follows: devaluation is good because it encourages spending and discourages saving. There's no doubt about the factual claim—devaluation does indeed encourage spending and discourage saving. But why is saving bad and spending good? This is an ethical judgment that depends on your particular set of values, but it is undeniable that devaluation (currency dilution) transfers purchasing power from savers to spenders. In particular, it's mathematically equivalent to combining a perfectly hard currency with forced confiscation (from savers) and transfer (to spenders), i.e., organized theft. Thus, from an ethical point of view, there is a strong reason not to give devaluation the benefit of the doubt. And yet, so far as I can tell, devaluation is always given the benefit of the doubt by the mainstream. Doesn't that seem odd?
      - enraged_camel 13y ago
        >>We can recast the claim as follows: devaluation is good because it encourages spending and discourages saving. No, you can't. In fact, it is interesting that you blamed me for attempting to short-circuit critical thinking, and then turned around and suggested something so asinine as this. The reason it is asinine is because not all forms of saving are equal. A grandma stashing cash under the mattress does not help anyone else but the grandma, which is why it makes sense to discourage it using devaluation mechanics built into the economy. But if she invested that cash into a value-generating asset (e.g. a company, a piece of real estate, a public project, etc.), both her and the asset developer/owner would benefit: it would be possible to develop and maintain the asset, and she would reap greater returns. And just so we're clear, it's not like we're forcing grandma to take insane risks. Government bonds have historically been incredibly safe. So devaluation exists as a mechanic to say to grandma, "instead of mindlessly hoarding your money under the mattress, buy bonds with it. As a result, we (the government) will be able to fund public projects and you will be shielded from devaluation." It is difficult to argue that this configuration is less optimal than one in which money never loses value.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    "Ultimately though, if money were represented directly by time or something I think that would be far more ideal as it would be guaranteed to be stable." I'm not sure what that means. Jokes about relativity aside, time doing what? If you mean individual's labor (which has been tried a few times, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours), then that seems unlikely to even be fungible, much less stable.
kungfooguru 13y ago
Inflation favors the debtors, meaning the poor and middle class.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  People who wouldn't be debtors if the game weren't rigged to destroy their savings.
  - kungfooguru 13y ago
    What savings?
    - dragontamer 13y ago
      Indeed. If you have a mortgage, it is likely that your net worth is negative. In such a case, inflation greatly helps your networth. Credit card debt, mortgages, student loans, payday loans... this is the reality of the lower and middle class. If you're making less than $45,000 / year, you're likely in debt in the US. At which point, inflation helps greatly, by reducing the value of your debt. A (former) student who has $100,000 in debt isn't "losing money" to inflation... the student is instead "losing debt" to inflation.
      - moron4hire 13y ago
        My point was that it's not written in stone anywhere that the middle class is a debtors class. People didn't used to have credit cards and car loans. Some would have mortgages, but nowhere near what we have today, and it wasn't about investing in the "value" of the home, given that there is no such thing, besides it being a roof over your head. This system in which the middle class is by default considered the debtor class is a result of decades of manipulation.
        dragontamer 13y ago
        And the middle class is free to live without credit cards, mortgages, and student loans. Its hard to call it "manipulation"... although I'd argue it is widespread ignorance that has caused this problem. It is clear to me that swaths of people do not understand the concept of debt until it is too late. There is clearly a problem in the education system. Too many people are getting too much into debt. Not on someone else's choice, but on their own choice.
sdegutis 13y ago
I've given up on being disillusioned with these kind of things anymore. It takes too much time and energy. You know what's an awesome substitute for it? Climbing a tree.
anigbrowl 13y ago
Damn right it's a feature. Otherwise there'd be no incentive to invest, people would just hoard assets instead of putting them to productive use. There's a reason countries abandoned the gold standard: deflation and bank runs are harder problems to manage than inflation.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  But for whom are they problems? People who are trying to get by in life or rich people looking to get richer? Regular people invest when investing makes sense, when the creation of a thing like a restaurant or a farm or what have you has significant value in and of itself. NOT because they value money, and the value of their money will decrease if they don't invest Having the power to control inflation to force people to invest is tantamount to setting their mattresses on fire to get them out of bed in the morning so they'll go to work. People will get out of bed--and invest--when it's right for them, and they don't need people like you to goad them into it.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    > But for whom are they problems? People who are trying to get by in life or rich people looking to get richer? The Great Depression was pretty bad for people trying to get by in life, no?
    - moron4hire 13y ago
      The Dust Bowl was what hurt people. The deflation of the Great Depression was not what hurt people.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Deflation hurts anyone who has a mortgage or any other kind of debt. Theoretically it rewards savers, but if prices are falling then wages then to do so as well, consumption and production go into a downward spiral. Anyone who thinks defaltion is a good idea is essentially thinking that their small cash pile will magically grow to be worth more without them doing anything, which seems enormously attractive because it's a) easy and b) there isn't any of that unpleasant risk that comes with investment, and which makes it so hard to decide what to invest in. So everyone who has money stuffs it under the metaphorical mattress, and people who don't have any can't get any because the supply of credit has vanished. Economic growth slows way down.
reqres 13y ago
It's still early days of allowing independent (i.e. apolitical) monetary policy committees from controlling money supply/interest rates, but we are and have been in a unprecedented period of relatively low inflation for the past couple of decades. This is despite the greatest financial crash since the great depression. I'd say there is good grounds for saying this is a great human invention - although probably not on a par with sanitation. No the system isn't perfect - it is structurally flawed like all other systems - but it has worked well and the negative side-effects can be managed
- glesica 13y ago
  > This is despite the greatest financial crash since the great depression. Inflation isn't necessarily a problem when you have a depression or recession (unless inflation is the cause of the pain). During the Great Depression we experienced deflation, IIRC, as the money supply contracted (a shrinking number of dollars chasing a more-slowly shrinking number of goods). So while I'm not saying you're right or wrong, the absence of inflation during an economic crisis really isn't evidence of anything in particular.
  - reqres 13y ago
    The rate of inflation is how modern central banks are graded on their performance. In countries like the UK or New Zealand, it is the primary benchmark and the main metric that is targeted. The story is a bit different in the US where the Fed is mandated to watch over prices AND output + employment. Although its not the same as economic output - having stable prices is important to support growth or a recovery. Deflation prolongs a depression - this was the major motivator for quantitative easing in the last financial crash. I should correct myself - I should have said "low + positive + stable" inflation and not just "low inflation"
glasz 13y ago
nate, don't even try. they've been bought and paid for by the creature of jekyll island. just look at how well they're doing. they say they are educated, have great intellect, are smart, bring the human race forward with whatever startup they're working for. greed, illusion and disinformatuon has sucked their common sense. one can't win against zombies. edit: 4 downvotes on this. point proven.

hapless 13y ago

I am absolutely not joking, and the fact that the value of money can be controlled by a central authority is a feature not a bug.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  >>It is in fact a major bug that you effectively lose just by holding. Not taking sides here, but I think it could be argued that devaluation is good because it encourages economic activity (i.e. spending) instead of mindless hoarding. I mean, money is supposed to be a medium of transfer, not an investment/saving mechanism. We don't want people hoarding cash in a bank account. We want them to invest that cash in actual assets that can then be developed.
  - SilasX 13y ago
    >Not taking sides here, but I think it could be argued that devaluation is good because it encourages economic activity (i.e. spending) instead of mindless hoarding. So would threatening to execute anyone who spends less than n% of their take-home pay, but people don't advocate that, do they? Before you object to the comparison, I know: "That's different: the costs would vastly exceed the benefits!" Right, but there would be costs! There are costs any time you force people to spend (commit to purchases) earlier than they would like to -- whether you do it by inflation or the sword. One cannot simply say, "well, economic activity [that we measure] went up, so that must have been a good idea!" But anytime someone brings up the "encourages economic activity" argument for inflation, they rarely offer any way to model the cost of moving up purchases like this, nor do they even realize it's necessary to do so! (Edited to avoid excessive attribution of the argument.)
    - aidenn0 13y ago
      Inflation is a tax on assets held as dollars. That tends to make it highly progressive as savings tends to increase faster than income once you pass a certain inflection point. The government already taxes other things (both to generate income and to alter behavior), so looking at inflation that way makes it easier IMO to make sound policy decisions rather than comparing it to executions.
      - SilasX 13y ago
        Yes, you can replay another standard argument for inflation. It's still not enough: the question is how to model the cost of making people spend sooner than they otherwise would, so you can compare to the benefit thereof. Mentioning executions was just to show what happens when you ignore costs and only talk about policy benefits. For those "taxes of other things", you still need to model its social cost to know whether it outweighs the benefit. You can't just dismiss the point as "this isn't execution". Edit: Important thing to note: in most discussion of taxation, the theme is "how to avoid the deadweight loss", i.e. how to write the tax in a way where it just transfers money without inducing changes in behavior. Advocating inflation as a behavior-changing tax is a sharp deviation from this, requiring a very different justification and model than traditional taxation.
        aidenn0 13y ago
        > in most discussion of taxation, the theme is "how to avoid the deadweight loss" This is certainly not true for e.g excise taxes. Inflation as a tax on dollars-held is similary intended to alter behavior by encouraging those with wealth to take riskier investments (alternatively stated, to discourage long-term holding dollars, similarly to how excise taxes are intended to discourage consumption of particular goods).
        SilasX 13y ago
        I think you mean Pigovian, not excise, taxes, and you'd still need a way to model the relative benefits vs costs of hoarding. With e.g. carbon taxes, one can estimate the harms of global warming (rising sea levels, lost biodiversity) and find the social cost of an emission, then levy a tax so that people only do those carbon emissions whose welfare gain exceeds the environment-driven welfare loss (which exist, despite the rhetoric from the fiercest advocates). When someone proposes n% inflation as a way of "taxing" hoarding, what's the corresponding model? What's the "rising sea level" there? In cases of a ~100% "inflation tax" (aka hyperinflation), we see the harms clearly: people have to spend money almost the second they get it. They have to move up purchases and otherwise arrange their lives in ways that are extremely welfare harming, and which probably outweigh the benefits of the greater economic activity it induces. (Contrary to a lot of talk on hyperinflation, I don't see the chief problem as being volatility; even with stable, predictable hyperinflation you have the problem of losing the main benefit of money, which is that you don't have to know what you'll ultimately be buying in order to produce something for sale.) So likewise, to justify a Pigovian argument for inflation, you would likewise need a model, or otherwise gauge the magnitude, of the "costs of making people move up purchases [when they'd rather save and decide later]" -- the costs that become extreme in the case of hyperinflation. And yet virtually everyone enamored of the "we need to encourage economic activity" argument for activity has nothing in the way of this. Hence my frustration with it. (The analog of hyperinflation in carbon taxes would be a ban, or absurdly high tax, on burning of fossil fuels, and has the corresponding welfare harm that the avoided fuel usage -- or costs in evading the ban -- far exceed the welfare harm of the emissions themselves.)
  - lexcorvus 13y ago
    With phrases like "economic activity" and "mindless hoarding", you're using language that short-circuits critical thinking. You're on the right track, though, with your parenthetical note, so let's start by replacing "economic activity" with "spending". Then, instead of using the inflammatory phrase "mindless hoarding", let's use the word "saving". With this neutral terminology, we're now ready for some actual thought. We can recast the claim as follows: devaluation is good because it encourages spending and discourages saving. There's no doubt about the factual claim—devaluation does indeed encourage spending and discourage saving. But why is saving bad and spending good? This is an ethical judgment that depends on your particular set of values, but it is undeniable that devaluation (currency dilution) transfers purchasing power from savers to spenders. In particular, it's mathematically equivalent to combining a perfectly hard currency with forced confiscation (from savers) and transfer (to spenders), i.e., organized theft. Thus, from an ethical point of view, there is a strong reason not to give devaluation the benefit of the doubt. And yet, so far as I can tell, devaluation is always given the benefit of the doubt by the mainstream. Doesn't that seem odd?
    - enraged_camel 13y ago
      >>We can recast the claim as follows: devaluation is good because it encourages spending and discourages saving. No, you can't. In fact, it is interesting that you blamed me for attempting to short-circuit critical thinking, and then turned around and suggested something so asinine as this. The reason it is asinine is because not all forms of saving are equal. A grandma stashing cash under the mattress does not help anyone else but the grandma, which is why it makes sense to discourage it using devaluation mechanics built into the economy. But if she invested that cash into a value-generating asset (e.g. a company, a piece of real estate, a public project, etc.), both her and the asset developer/owner would benefit: it would be possible to develop and maintain the asset, and she would reap greater returns. And just so we're clear, it's not like we're forcing grandma to take insane risks. Government bonds have historically been incredibly safe. So devaluation exists as a mechanic to say to grandma, "instead of mindlessly hoarding your money under the mattress, buy bonds with it. As a result, we (the government) will be able to fund public projects and you will be shielded from devaluation." It is difficult to argue that this configuration is less optimal than one in which money never loses value.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  "Ultimately though, if money were represented directly by time or something I think that would be far more ideal as it would be guaranteed to be stable." I'm not sure what that means. Jokes about relativity aside, time doing what? If you mean individual's labor (which has been tried a few times, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours), then that seems unlikely to even be fungible, much less stable.

kungfooguru 13y ago

Inflation favors the debtors, meaning the poor and middle class.

moron4hire 13y ago
People who wouldn't be debtors if the game weren't rigged to destroy their savings.
- kungfooguru 13y ago
  What savings?
  - dragontamer 13y ago
    Indeed. If you have a mortgage, it is likely that your net worth is negative. In such a case, inflation greatly helps your networth. Credit card debt, mortgages, student loans, payday loans... this is the reality of the lower and middle class. If you're making less than $45,000 / year, you're likely in debt in the US. At which point, inflation helps greatly, by reducing the value of your debt. A (former) student who has $100,000 in debt isn't "losing money" to inflation... the student is instead "losing debt" to inflation.
    - moron4hire 13y ago
      My point was that it's not written in stone anywhere that the middle class is a debtors class. People didn't used to have credit cards and car loans. Some would have mortgages, but nowhere near what we have today, and it wasn't about investing in the "value" of the home, given that there is no such thing, besides it being a roof over your head. This system in which the middle class is by default considered the debtor class is a result of decades of manipulation.
      - dragontamer 13y ago
        And the middle class is free to live without credit cards, mortgages, and student loans. Its hard to call it "manipulation"... although I'd argue it is widespread ignorance that has caused this problem. It is clear to me that swaths of people do not understand the concept of debt until it is too late. There is clearly a problem in the education system. Too many people are getting too much into debt. Not on someone else's choice, but on their own choice.

sdegutis 13y ago

I've given up on being disillusioned with these kind of things anymore. It takes too much time and energy. You know what's an awesome substitute for it? Climbing a tree.

anigbrowl 13y ago

Damn right it's a feature. Otherwise there'd be no incentive to invest, people would just hoard assets instead of putting them to productive use. There's a reason countries abandoned the gold standard: deflation and bank runs are harder problems to manage than inflation.

moron4hire 13y ago
But for whom are they problems? People who are trying to get by in life or rich people looking to get richer? Regular people invest when investing makes sense, when the creation of a thing like a restaurant or a farm or what have you has significant value in and of itself. NOT because they value money, and the value of their money will decrease if they don't invest Having the power to control inflation to force people to invest is tantamount to setting their mattresses on fire to get them out of bed in the morning so they'll go to work. People will get out of bed--and invest--when it's right for them, and they don't need people like you to goad them into it.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  > But for whom are they problems? People who are trying to get by in life or rich people looking to get richer? The Great Depression was pretty bad for people trying to get by in life, no?
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    The Dust Bowl was what hurt people. The deflation of the Great Depression was not what hurt people.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Deflation hurts anyone who has a mortgage or any other kind of debt. Theoretically it rewards savers, but if prices are falling then wages then to do so as well, consumption and production go into a downward spiral. Anyone who thinks defaltion is a good idea is essentially thinking that their small cash pile will magically grow to be worth more without them doing anything, which seems enormously attractive because it's a) easy and b) there isn't any of that unpleasant risk that comes with investment, and which makes it so hard to decide what to invest in. So everyone who has money stuffs it under the metaphorical mattress, and people who don't have any can't get any because the supply of credit has vanished. Economic growth slows way down.

reqres 13y ago

It's still early days of allowing independent (i.e. apolitical) monetary policy committees from controlling money supply/interest rates, but we are and have been in a unprecedented period of relatively low inflation for the past couple of decades. This is despite the greatest financial crash since the great depression. I'd say there is good grounds for saying this is a great human invention - although probably not on a par with sanitation. No the system isn't perfect - it is structurally flawed like all other systems - but it has worked well and the negative side-effects can be managed

glesica 13y ago
> This is despite the greatest financial crash since the great depression. Inflation isn't necessarily a problem when you have a depression or recession (unless inflation is the cause of the pain). During the Great Depression we experienced deflation, IIRC, as the money supply contracted (a shrinking number of dollars chasing a more-slowly shrinking number of goods). So while I'm not saying you're right or wrong, the absence of inflation during an economic crisis really isn't evidence of anything in particular.
- reqres 13y ago
  The rate of inflation is how modern central banks are graded on their performance. In countries like the UK or New Zealand, it is the primary benchmark and the main metric that is targeted. The story is a bit different in the US where the Fed is mandated to watch over prices AND output + employment. Although its not the same as economic output - having stable prices is important to support growth or a recovery. Deflation prolongs a depression - this was the major motivator for quantitative easing in the last financial crash. I should correct myself - I should have said "low + positive + stable" inflation and not just "low inflation"

glasz 13y ago

nate, don't even try. they've been bought and paid for by the creature of jekyll island. just look at how well they're doing. they say they are educated, have great intellect, are smart, bring the human race forward with whatever startup they're working for. greed, illusion and disinformatuon has sucked their common sense. one can't win against zombies. edit: 4 downvotes on this. point proven.