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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

I don't feel too bad about it. If economic growth stays even slightly positive it won't take too many generations for our descendants to be unimaginably more wealthy than we are. They can put up with our brain banks and dry their tears with their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars.

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That's not how inflation works - in the future, the value of the dollar will be less, not more.

Not universally: The value of $1 (nominal) worth of computing resources and information storage in 2018 is surely thousands of times the value of $1 (nominal) worth of the same in 1958.

EDIT: Some quick math on deflation in storage costs. The IBM 305 RAMAC[1] was introduced in 1956, provided 5MB of magnetic storage and cost $3,200/month in 1956 dollars. To pick a random modern storage provider with a similar pricing model, in 2018 Dropbox offers 1TB for $10/month. Putting aside all the other advantages Dropbox gives you over a 305, the pure storage value of $1 (nominal) has gone from 1.6KB/month to 100GB/month, a multiple of over 50 million.

[1] https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html

Focusing on the exceptions doesn't help the rule. You could get an average US house for $20k and a brand new car for $2k in 1956, and a $4k annual income was a comfortable middle class living. Commercial flight wasn't just prohibitively expensive by modern standards in 1856, it was impossible, but you could live on $100 a year at the time.

If you want to pay 2118 people to resuscitate you (in the unlikely event the technology is feasible and people are willing and able and developed) you're going to need to invest that money well.

It is how investments and productivity gains work, however.

We are incredibly more wealthy than people of a hundred years ago, in almost every respect.

Yeah, one way I like to think about is if you could trade your current life for being a billionaire 100, 200, etc years ago, would you?

>their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars.

The fed would never allow this to happen. That would be deflation.

What we should pray for is $0.25 loaves of bread, $10 rent, and a $1000 minimum wage.

We want a future where human time is valued and basic resources are plentiful enough to be cheap for everyone.

That is still deflation. Deflation is any decrease in the general price level of goods and services. It does not matter if it is due to increased production by advanced AI robots, etc. After all, if you knew you can get something cheaper tomorrow, why spend at all? Like you said, the Fed will run against this.

because you need food to live. no amount of tightness on spending can delay the necessity of food.

it always boggles me why people scoff at deflationary economics with this line of reasoning - i see little evidence that the average person is so wise with spending money today.

It always boggles me that people scoff at the notion of people deferring many purchases and not investing at all in a deflationary economy because the relatively small fraction of spending which is necessary for survival is likely to be unaffected.

I wasn't trying to be pedantic, but if you want to go there, feel free to consult the chart[1]. There's plenty that's become more expensive in real dollars, and there exists a strange cohort of people that believe real wage gains are a form of inflation. My worry is that these same people frequently sit at the helm of our monetary system.

My point remains:

> We want a future where human time is valued and basic resources are plentiful enough to be cheap for everyone.

1. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-chart-shows-the-moder...

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