How will we live if people aren't artificially pressured to consume their wealth as quickly as possible? And we know those 8,000 years of civilization using metallic money were not all "economically disastrous".

History gives us plenty of episodes of deflationary growth, such as America after the civil war during resumption of the metallic standard. Yes, a sudden collapse in a money supply is bad, but economies work fine under slow deflation.

Economists are the worst intellectuals. Their predictions are always wrong and their growth advice is ineffectual. I wouldn't take what you read from an economist in a newspaper op-ed page at face value.