Hacker News Reader

Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

“ The power of technological deflation is important not to overstate, though. In everyday use, the rise of the smart phone displaced a lot of house phones, cameras, video recorders, film, CD players, iPods, beepers, radios, scanners, roadmaps, and many ATMs. They also displaced a big percentage of physical newspapers, calendars, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and books. In more niche areas they displaced some mobile game devices, pocket translators when traveling, compasses, voice recorders, and photo scrapbooks. We folded many of our devices and consumables into one powerful device with dozens of software applications.”

This, and we haven’t even discussed the amazing tech in food production that is getting better daily. (Satellites telling tractors in iowa what to do based on hyper spectral drone flyovers).

I remember our family taking a few years monthly payments to get me encyclopedias, and now we have wiki.

View on HN

This is true but it is imperative that citizens have a reliable currency to use to do transactions. This is why I think it is imperative that we transition over to cryptocurrencies that are based on strong fundamentals that make money reliable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money

Every economy in the world has and will continue to operate with some inflation, taking away an inflationary currency is dangerous and will serve to further entrench the wealth inequality we have seen grow over the past century. Sure crypto is nice because you don't have to trust a central government, but you already are trusting that government with the other 99% parts of life, rendering this sort of moot. In addition, monetary policies in times of crisis would not work in the world of crypto. Sometimes to prevent a total collapse, the fed needs to print some money. Sure it's not the best/most perfect tool, and should be used very sparingly, but to discredit it as unnecessary is a gross misunderstanding of modern monetary theories.

Monetary inflation increases inequality because the well-connected interests (banks, large corporations, governments) have access to the new money first. They have better financing terms. They have special arrangements. They can spend the new money into the economy before general price levels rise.

Asset prices rise as people flee from cash, so those with assets see their wealth outpace those without assets.

Inflationary economies based on debt are inherently levered relative to underlying assets, thus are prone to collapse and require more bailouts.

General price inflation hurts those at the bottom of the economic ladder, since it makes their cost of living rise and prevents them from saving to accumulate capital.

"But wages rise to keep track of inflation."

No, they don't: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

This depends on how the money is distributed - if we have stimulus checks (and eventually everyone has an account at the FED), for example, it's not true that well-connected interests get access to that money first.

I'm honestly tired of waiting for the government to decide to do fiscal stimulus. The US is lucky that they got a competent president. In the EU you're never going to see stimulus checks.

> Every economy in the world has and will continue to operate with some inflation, taking away an inflationary currency is dangerous and will serve to further entrench the wealth inequality...

Patently false statement. The us has had decadal deflationary periods of its history during which it made great technological strides

> Sometimes to prevent a total collapse, the fed needs to print some money.

Endless bailouts paid for by population can't possibly be a sound long-term solution. Maybe it's better to just let it collapse.

Actually, it's the long term solution. The short term solution is to stop all trade deficits and let your country suffer over the long term.

Krugman would be proud.

And right.

Sorry, but mercantilism has been debunked. Not even all that recently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com