work on the problems we haven't solved yet. do what they are interested in. leisure time is an advancement! encourage ppl to use it towards continuing to advance knowledge, and we're on our way to utopia.
"we can just make a million of these coins, lower all taxes to zero, and use those coins to back a near infinite amount of borrowing (essentially financing the government for the next 100,000 years or so"
Yes, as long as we use the money to keep innovation increasing, because it is the advance of knowledge and technology that raises standard of living.
Best would be for govt to provide a basic income (as Tom Paine proposed in 1795, and which Milton Friedman also advocated), and encourage individuals to unleash their native born creativity and curiosity and creativity with challenges (which biz could hold too, like Netflix, Google, bug bounties, etc...).
Hyperinflation is psychological. Weimar republic's hyperinflation ended in a day. Bolivia's in a similarly short period. Also factor into your predictions the great knowledge-producing and technical innovation capacity of the US. We still have the best guns - could Germany after losing WWI (to US!) say that? Could Zimbabwe say they produced a large percentage of the world's advances in knowledge?
Actually, if you look at a graph of the money supply in the US over the last few decades (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Components_of_US_Money_supply.svg ), we see that the amount of money created by the private sector is something on the order of 10 times what the govt prints.
If you look at a graph of the money supply in the US over the past few decades, you will observe that the vast majority of it was created by private sources such as banks. And yet inflation was nothing near hyperinflation. Why is that? Is it possible that economists predictions were wrong, because they can't factor in externalities? Remember Malthus's predictions (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malthus_PL_en.svg ), that there would be massive starvation because food production increased linearly while population increased geometrically? What he didn't take into account was the innovation that has increased agricultural yields, which was helped significantly by govt spending?
From wikipedia:
The introduction and broad adoption of scientific agriculture since the mid nineteenth century has made a large improvement in the USA's economic growth. This development was facilitated by the Morrill Act and the Hatch Act of 1887 which established in each state a land-grant university (with a mission to teach and study agriculture) and a federally funded system of agricultural experiment stations and cooperative extension networks which place extension agents in each state.
Let's write a computer simulation then. Create an economy with some widgets and some agents that sell those widgets to other agents. Start with X amount of money in the system. Then make it 2X. What code would we have to write to make the agents selling the widgets raise their prices?
My hypothesis is those rules would by psychological in nature. They would not be an automatic consequence of increasing the money supply. There would have to be a separate rule that said something like, "If Joe has X dollars one day and 2X dollars the next day, I should raise my prices." That rule is pure psychology based on greed...
A lot of those examples used the US Dollar as the currency they wanted to exchange their country's money for, why? Because innovation is the true focus. The advancement of knowledge raises survival fitness by better allowing us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change. The true business of mankind is knowledge, not economics. Thus if in these times when biz is sitting on trillions govt prints money and uses it to encourage innovation and the advance of knowledge and technology, the currency will remain strong.
We are not the Weimar republic, why? Because we won the war that they had to pay reparations because of. We are not Zimbabwe, why? Because we have the knowledge to deal with the drought conditions that caused such a shock to them. If we don't have sufficient knowledge to predict environmental catastrophes then govt should spend now to develop that knowledge!
Pscyhology actually causes inflation, it is not any kind of natural law. An individual decides to raise prices, why should he do that just because there's more money in existence? If there's more knowledge does that make each individual peice of knowledge worth less? If we learn how to make processed food, does that make the knowledge of how to grow organic food worth less?
Wasn't there a slashdot story the other day about how the Fed created $16 trillion in two years to bail out banks, and there was no inflation to speak of?
Didn't the govt buy the toxic assets that include the mortgages for the houses the banks are now foreclosing on, so 19 million houses sit empty while ppl go homeless? Why do we let this happen? We have an oversupply of housing, why don't we use it? Instead rent goes up while banks keep the lights on in unoccupied houses...
Jeffrey Sachs writes about his experience taking on the IMF, telling Bolivia to stop paying off its debt. Along with other measures, he succeeded in halting Bolivia's hyperinflation in a very short time, without implementing austerity measures as the IMF wanted Bolivia to do. And the IMF, despite the default, is still around rapin' ppl today!
That violates the spirit of the idea. Let's go back and implement the idea the way it was originally expressed. Better yet, don't even force private banks to do it; just have the govt do it. Let the govt create money and give it to ppl, and encourage them to create and increase the pace of the advance of knowledge and technological progress with the bully pulpit and by holding challenges (which biz can hold too, i.e. Netflix, Google...).
The resulting innovation will increase our standard of living and keep the currency strong, because we will be producing more of what others want.
What if i create a bunch of dupe accounts and spread the idea that way? Are ppl really that easily fooled? Shouldn't there be something more important than mere popularity to spread ideas, something intrinsic to the idea itself, its internal consistency, reasoning, evidence, etc.?
Is Ireland really ruined? Does the sun not shine there anymore? Have the farms been destroyed by drought? Why can't you use the empty buildings to house the homeless? The real groupthink is that money can only be created by bankers, who must keep it artificially scarce so that wealth is defined in terms of the necessary existence of the poor. The radical idea (which I'm going to present without regard to whether it has 10% following or not) is that innovation should be the focus, that money games are based on psychology, and that the economic problem is not the central problem of mankind - knowledge acquisition is.
And what's the analog to the money stolen here? "Oh no my feelings got hurt by some anonymous poster on teh internets!"/me makes gesture indicating the smallest record player in the world playing "My Heart Bleeds For You"
The answer is not to throttle technology; the answer is to understand that money creation is a technology in itself, and should be democratically controlled instead of the exclusive right of private individuals. The recent story about the Fed creating $16 trillion shows that govt could easily create enough money to provide a basic income to everyone, so that we can each explore the natural wonder and creativity that we are born with, using tools such as AI to expand knowledge ever-greater bounds...
The lesson is: the so-called debt crisis is completely manufactured, there's plenty of money because the Fed can create it, and talk of hyperinflation is hyperbolic.
Slashdot Mirror
work on the problems we haven't solved yet. do what they are interested in. leisure time is an advancement! encourage ppl to use it towards continuing to advance knowledge, and we're on our way to utopia.
Translation: China is anti-human rights while America is full of constitutionalists who protect self-evident unalienable rights.
Why haven't those interest rates hit Japan which was downgraded years ago? Why isn't Japan's 200% debt-to-gdp ratio causing hyperinflation?
"we can just make a million of these coins, lower all taxes to zero, and use those coins to back a near infinite amount of borrowing (essentially financing the government for the next 100,000 years or so"
Yes, as long as we use the money to keep innovation increasing, because it is the advance of knowledge and technology that raises standard of living.
Best would be for govt to provide a basic income (as Tom Paine proposed in 1795, and which Milton Friedman also advocated), and encourage individuals to unleash their native born creativity and curiosity and creativity with challenges (which biz could hold too, like Netflix, Google, bug bounties, etc...).
Hyperinflation is psychological. Weimar republic's hyperinflation ended in a day. Bolivia's in a similarly short period. Also factor into your predictions the great knowledge-producing and technical innovation capacity of the US. We still have the best guns - could Germany after losing WWI (to US!) say that? Could Zimbabwe say they produced a large percentage of the world's advances in knowledge?
Actually, if you look at a graph of the money supply in the US over the last few decades (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Components_of_US_Money_supply.svg ), we see that the amount of money created by the private sector is something on the order of 10 times what the govt prints.
On the aorta of bankers?
If you look at a graph of the money supply in the US over the past few decades, you will observe that the vast majority of it was created by private sources such as banks. And yet inflation was nothing near hyperinflation. Why is that? Is it possible that economists predictions were wrong, because they can't factor in externalities? Remember Malthus's predictions (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malthus_PL_en.svg ), that there would be massive starvation because food production increased linearly while population increased geometrically? What he didn't take into account was the innovation that has increased agricultural yields, which was helped significantly by govt spending?
From wikipedia:
Let's write a computer simulation then. Create an economy with some widgets and some agents that sell those widgets to other agents. Start with X amount of money in the system. Then make it 2X. What code would we have to write to make the agents selling the widgets raise their prices?
My hypothesis is those rules would by psychological in nature. They would not be an automatic consequence of increasing the money supply. There would have to be a separate rule that said something like, "If Joe has X dollars one day and 2X dollars the next day, I should raise my prices." That rule is pure psychology based on greed...
A lot of those examples used the US Dollar as the currency they wanted to exchange their country's money for, why? Because innovation is the true focus. The advancement of knowledge raises survival fitness by better allowing us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change. The true business of mankind is knowledge, not economics. Thus if in these times when biz is sitting on trillions govt prints money and uses it to encourage innovation and the advance of knowledge and technology, the currency will remain strong.
We are not the Weimar republic, why? Because we won the war that they had to pay reparations because of. We are not Zimbabwe, why? Because we have the knowledge to deal with the drought conditions that caused such a shock to them. If we don't have sufficient knowledge to predict environmental catastrophes then govt should spend now to develop that knowledge!
s/pscyhology/psychology
Pscyhology actually causes inflation, it is not any kind of natural law. An individual decides to raise prices, why should he do that just because there's more money in existence? If there's more knowledge does that make each individual peice of knowledge worth less? If we learn how to make processed food, does that make the knowledge of how to grow organic food worth less?
So if I have 100 facts, and replicate them, that devalues their factworthiness?
Wasn't there a slashdot story the other day about how the Fed created $16 trillion in two years to bail out banks, and there was no inflation to speak of?
I wonder how much the traders paid for their algorithms that had much less than 50% chance rate of predicting future housing prices?
Didn't the govt buy the toxic assets that include the mortgages for the houses the banks are now foreclosing on, so 19 million houses sit empty while ppl go homeless? Why do we let this happen? We have an oversupply of housing, why don't we use it? Instead rent goes up while banks keep the lights on in unoccupied houses...
Jeffrey Sachs writes about his experience taking on the IMF, telling Bolivia to stop paying off its debt. Along with other measures, he succeeded in halting Bolivia's hyperinflation in a very short time, without implementing austerity measures as the IMF wanted Bolivia to do. And the IMF, despite the default, is still around rapin' ppl today!
That violates the spirit of the idea. Let's go back and implement the idea the way it was originally expressed. Better yet, don't even force private banks to do it; just have the govt do it. Let the govt create money and give it to ppl, and encourage them to create and increase the pace of the advance of knowledge and technological progress with the bully pulpit and by holding challenges (which biz can hold too, i.e. Netflix, Google...).
The resulting innovation will increase our standard of living and keep the currency strong, because we will be producing more of what others want.
How about that banks can't charge interest on loans?
What if i create a bunch of dupe accounts and spread the idea that way? Are ppl really that easily fooled? Shouldn't there be something more important than mere popularity to spread ideas, something intrinsic to the idea itself, its internal consistency, reasoning, evidence, etc.?
Is Ireland really ruined? Does the sun not shine there anymore? Have the farms been destroyed by drought? Why can't you use the empty buildings to house the homeless? The real groupthink is that money can only be created by bankers, who must keep it artificially scarce so that wealth is defined in terms of the necessary existence of the poor. The radical idea (which I'm going to present without regard to whether it has 10% following or not) is that innovation should be the focus, that money games are based on psychology, and that the economic problem is not the central problem of mankind - knowledge acquisition is.
Maybe the average person can learn to evaluate ideas based on more reasonable grounds than popularity.
But the group has smaller sub-populations within it...
So if I start with an audience of nine, my ideas will surely spread?
And what's the analog to the money stolen here? "Oh no my feelings got hurt by some anonymous poster on teh internets!" /me makes gesture indicating the smallest record player in the world playing "My Heart Bleeds For You"
The answer is not to throttle technology; the answer is to understand that money creation is a technology in itself, and should be democratically controlled instead of the exclusive right of private individuals. The recent story about the Fed creating $16 trillion shows that govt could easily create enough money to provide a basic income to everyone, so that we can each explore the natural wonder and creativity that we are born with, using tools such as AI to expand knowledge ever-greater bounds...
The lesson is: the so-called debt crisis is completely manufactured, there's plenty of money because the Fed can create it, and talk of hyperinflation is hyperbolic.