No, the Great Depression had everything to do with the gold standard. It started as a run-of-the-mill business-cycle recession and was exacerbated by unfortunate international trade problems and then by stupid monetary policies.
And there's certainly not enough gold out there. The global GDP is 6*10^16 dollars and the amount of financial gold in the world is 165000 tons or 1.65*10^11 grams. At the current price of gold $50 per gram the total worth of gold is just 8.25*10^12 dollars - that's less than one 0.1% of the global GDP! For comparison, the total amount of currencies in the world is about half of the GDP.
So you'll have to appreciate gold value by about thousand times for it to replace the fiat currencies. This is totally impractical and impossible.
Also, the global GDP grows at about 3% each year while gold reserves grow less than 0.5% each year. So you'll automatically slow down economic growth by several times.
And finally, even using gold as an intermediary in the trade (so I can buy 1 kg of gold in Germany, give it to you, and then you immediately sell it in Japan) is not feasible. The total amount of gold is way too small even for in-flight transactions.
"No but the total volume doesn't decrease either, it is just used in products, stored as wealth or traded. Again read the last sentence."
So? Gold will just act as a drag, because its limited supply will make transactions more and more costly as their volume grows. USD (or any other fiat currency) is much better in that regard.
"Maybe you should read up on the actual causes of the great depression, a lot of the prevailing theories gloss over the application of easing of gold reserves and shifting to a "more modern" fractional reserve."
This is immaterial, quite a lot of factors had influenced the economy. But the Depression was caused (in the sense that it became the Depression with the capital letter) mainly by ineffective policies of the Federal Reserve. It had contracted the monetary supply and instituted austerity measures, essentially strangling the economy.
The validity of Keynesian economy during liquid traps has been validated multiple times by now and its validity is out of the question.
Nope. Economy is NOT a zero-sum game, so it's possible to have the amount of loans GREATER than the amount of total money. If you don't grasp it, you know NOTHING about the economy.
Dude, prices in Japan were _dropping_ during the 90-s and early 2000-s. They really were.
You're thinking: "Wow! Deflation would be so nice! If I earned $100 than the next year with deflation it would be like $110 without me doing anything else! Cool!"
While in reality, the next year you'd be making $90 and not $100. And $90 even after deflation would still be worth less than $100 last year. And that's NOT a conjecture, that's exactly what had happened in Japan during 90-s and France 30-s.
You fail to grasp Economy 101 - deflation happens because consumers do not have enough money to buy goods. So sellers are forced to reduce prices to sell at least something.
Gold-backed trade is stupid, just like Quadaffi. There's not enough gold in the world to back the currencies. Also, one can't increase gold supply if trade volume and economy increases.
The Great Depression showed it quite clearly - the longer you stay on gold standard, the longer you suffer.
"Tell me why I should buy a 10 year note at 3.4% per year in a currency that is shedding value like never before on foreign exchange markets and whose government is denying inflation while at the same time conducting policy that is leading to a very real risk of hyperinflation?"
There can be NO hyperinflation in the US in the next two years. Want to bet a $1000 (in gold or any other currency, if you want) on that? I'll gladly take this bet.
"Nonsense. Do you think man has evolved so much in so short a time that his development could not have been so complicated and nuanced only 2000 years ago? We might have less extant evidence to fully understand the details of classical history, but that merely indicates a challenge - it does not allow us to make any conclusions."
Yes, I think so. The slow accumulation of social and technological advancements allowed rapid social changes. It's not like ancient Greeks were not smart, but they were limited by their society. A steam engine was invented by Hero but it was only a curiosity back then.
"Well, "immediate" is vacuous here. As for "visible", it depends on whether you're worried about things like the precise drawing of borders or, say, the nature of Western mathematical thought. For the latter, if we look to but one place then we must look to ancient Greece."
Sure. But does the nature of Western thought depend on the date of birth of Alexander The Great? Or exact route of the Ten Thousand?
"What of the very existence of France?" Irrelevant, the shape of the ancient Gaul was quite a bit different from the modern France.
"The language it speaks?" Again, modern French has almost nothing to do with Gaulish (which was supplanted by Latin).
"The form of its legal system?" Which one? France had quite a few of them.
""No." The answers are either "yes", i.e. you took ten minutes to check your written work with one of many standard references, or "no"."
Uhm. It's possible that I might make a stupid mistake somewhere - it's not easy to check your own works, but if it was my entrance exam I wouldn't worry at all.
"Even English A levels have basic calculus and differential equations. Hell, my physics exam required it (Nuffield)."
We had rudiments of calculus and differential equations at school, but only as a general outline. And traditionally university entrance exams here do not require them (though you are free to use them). It makes sense, because calculus is studied in much greater depth at university during the first year, and everyone else probably doesn't care much about epsilon-delta symbolic and sequence limits.
And yes, it was a university in Russia.
"Every skill is mechanical from the point of view of a sufficiently complex machine. And mental arithmetic is not obsolete!"
Ha! Note that I wrote "complex arithmetic". Mental arithmetic is certainly useful, and I enjoy estimating various things mentally just for fun. However I just round numbers to nearest 'nice' conservative values to do this. There's no way I'd be taking cube roots to 5'th decimal by hand - I'll use a calculator for this.
"Ignoring that an essay in which your level of precision is "about 50-100 B.C." would be embarrassingly bad (and, for your example, technically wrong), do you understand that the length of events may be as important as their order?"
For most practical purposes 50-100 B.C. is OK (/me checks Wiki... ha! and almost correct). What would have changed if someone seized the throne of the Roman Empire 25 years later or sooner? And of course, I know the approximate lengths of events as well.
"Modern history is often ancient history repeated. Modern history must thus be even more boring."
Modern history is much more complicated and nuanced. And with much more visible immediate consequences. And since there's far _less_ of it (almost everything interesting happened in the last 600 years) it's easier to remember precise dates and details. I can name all Russian emperors and tzars starting from Ivan the Terrible and the dates of their reign to +-5 years, for example. The consequences of their reigns are still there, in the shape of national borders and relations between countries.
And antic history is mostly a curiosity, as an example, nobody in 1869 cared how large Gaul was, but the ownership of Alsace-Lorraine caused a war just several years later.
"Are you sure your answers are sound and complete? Are you happy with the list of assumptions you made?"
Pretty sure.
"Did it have more cognitively challenging problems, or problems requiring more knowledge? In England, a modern mathematics A-level certainly requires more mathematical knowledge, but almost no cognitive ability. I understand that certain northern mainland European countries still have better expectations of their candidates."
The exam was fiendishly complex. It didn't require anything outside of the high school knowledge (no calculus or differential equations) but was cognitively exhausting. For one thing, it was not a test - there were only 6 problems to solve (5 required to get the top mark) and 5 hours of time. Each problem required at least one non-standard creative step.
"Web browsing requires very little precision by comparison. There's no equivalent for, say, accidentally 7*8=54 or 10*1000=100000. Yes, it's easy to see the mistake isolated, but trivial errors happen when someone's doing lots of little calculations at speed as part of some larger work - the latter example being the sort which occasionally causes health practitioners to kill patients."
So? Complex arithmetic is still a mechanical skill, which even illiterate people can do (not a conjecture, in the past illiterate people were employed as computers sometimes). By now, it's an obsolete skill.
"And this is a mistake made by every neophyte. All you need is a vague, fuzzy recollection of how and why, right? The details don't matter, just the conclusion, right?"
Nope. I remember historical facts, the driving forces beyond the changes. I can write an essay about the causes beyond the Renaissance or the Revolution in the USA right away. Ask me about the date of Caesar ascension to the throne and I won't be able to say more than "about 50-100 B.C.". For me dates are more important to establish the order of events.
As for maths, I can solve all the problems in the geometry section right away - and I haven't studied planar geometry since the high school. The rest of maths section looks easy as well. My entrance exam had waaaaay more complex problems.
I can do arithmetic fairly quickly (we haven't used calculators at school), but that's just a skill to learn. It requires some practice, that's all. Today you can compare it to web browsing.
As for geography: I happen to know where Danube, Volga and Amazon are. But who cares where Mont Blanc is? Right now it's much more important to know HOW mountains form, why earthquakes happen, etc.
History: the same. I can describe driving forces beyond the collapse of the Roman empire, why it had collapsed, how the Renaissance happened, industrial revolution, etc. Specific dates and events? Not so much. I could tell about the transition of Rome from Republic to monarchy, but not the specific events.
Well, I already knew this after my school: algebra, geometry (including trigonometry - why is it always considered separate?), calculus, history (in depth), geography (where just one crucial bit of knowledge about the continent drift had changed everything), physics (classical physics was essentially complete in 1869) including the basics of the special relativity theory, biology (including germ theory, basic bits of molecular biology, evolution), chemistry (including basics of organic chemistry), some economics.
I knew a bit of Latin - it's wonderfully easy to learn for anyone with a knowledge of Russian and English. But that was not typical - I got lucky to land in a school with deep emphasis on languages.
So, all in all, back in 1869 education was still considered a luxury - it was not meant to be practical or useful in the real life. Right now education is ESSENTIAL for our society, we depend on advanced scientific knowledge.
Also, I don't understand why you bemoan lack of history in modern education. Consider that the people like the ones educated in Harvard shortly after 1969 had started several bloody revolutions and the World War I which largely created conditions for the WWII.
"GP is talking about Federal budget. State governments don't suddenly disappear into thin air, and can perfectly well run law enforcement, healthcare etc on their own"
No, they can not. Federalism in the US where each state is a separate State is long dead, because the US has become too integrated.
For example, the population of seniors vary by about about 100% between states. So it'd be inevitable that without federal aid some states won't be able to finance healthcare and social security. That already happens with Medicaid which is _partially_ funded by the states (and that's why it has provisions for the federal funding).
"Also, lasers don't bounce back at the attacker they way they do in fiction. A mirror is essentially armour against lasers, but unless you can aim the beam back in the time it takes for the mirror to melt, it isn't a weapon reflector."
There are two schools of thought, one considers 1 to be a prime (since its divisors are "1" and itself) the other school of thought doesn't. Some proofs work nicer if 1 is considered to be a prime, some proofs don't.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the Great Depression had everything to do with the gold standard. It started as a run-of-the-mill business-cycle recession and was exacerbated by unfortunate international trade problems and then by stupid monetary policies.
And there's certainly not enough gold out there. The global GDP is 6*10^16 dollars and the amount of financial gold in the world is 165000 tons or 1.65*10^11 grams. At the current price of gold $50 per gram the total worth of gold is just 8.25*10^12 dollars - that's less than one 0.1% of the global GDP! For comparison, the total amount of currencies in the world is about half of the GDP.
So you'll have to appreciate gold value by about thousand times for it to replace the fiat currencies. This is totally impractical and impossible.
Also, the global GDP grows at about 3% each year while gold reserves grow less than 0.5% each year. So you'll automatically slow down economic growth by several times.
And finally, even using gold as an intermediary in the trade (so I can buy 1 kg of gold in Germany, give it to you, and then you immediately sell it in Japan) is not feasible. The total amount of gold is way too small even for in-flight transactions.
"No but the total volume doesn't decrease either, it is just used in products, stored as wealth or traded. Again read the last sentence."
So? Gold will just act as a drag, because its limited supply will make transactions more and more costly as their volume grows. USD (or any other fiat currency) is much better in that regard.
"Maybe you should read up on the actual causes of the great depression, a lot of the prevailing theories gloss over the application of easing of gold reserves and shifting to a "more modern" fractional reserve."
This is immaterial, quite a lot of factors had influenced the economy. But the Depression was caused (in the sense that it became the Depression with the capital letter) mainly by ineffective policies of the Federal Reserve. It had contracted the monetary supply and instituted austerity measures, essentially strangling the economy.
The validity of Keynesian economy during liquid traps has been validated multiple times by now and its validity is out of the question.
"It seems more than a little illogical to state that sea levels rise higher in one Atlantic coast state than the others."
Nothing illogical. 'Sea level' is an averaged value, which depends on currents and winds.
"And the primary sea level rise occurred well before the evil auto culture."
Coal was used in large quantities even before automobiles.
"But then I'm just an ignoramus according to the above post."
And here we both agree.
Nope. Economy is NOT a zero-sum game, so it's possible to have the amount of loans GREATER than the amount of total money. If you don't grasp it, you know NOTHING about the economy.
Dude, prices in Japan were _dropping_ during the 90-s and early 2000-s. They really were.
You're thinking: "Wow! Deflation would be so nice! If I earned $100 than the next year with deflation it would be like $110 without me doing anything else! Cool!"
While in reality, the next year you'd be making $90 and not $100. And $90 even after deflation would still be worth less than $100 last year. And that's NOT a conjecture, that's exactly what had happened in Japan during 90-s and France 30-s.
You fail to grasp Economy 101 - deflation happens because consumers do not have enough money to buy goods. So sellers are forced to reduce prices to sell at least something.
Iceland does NOT have austerity measures. They've had a currency expansion and refused to back the failing banks.
You're confusing Iceland with Ireland, which DOES have austerity measures and whose economy is going down the crapper.
Japan - during 90-s. France during 30-s.
I've named two.
"Japan should have deflation."
Dude. Wake up. Japan HAS deflation, their prices ARE dropping. Their currency is appreciating, even compared to other currencies.
Stop being such a moron. By now you're just inventing a fantasy world which has nothing to do with reality.
"Must add to the previous comment: however in a healthy economy deflation is an indicator of strength and of health of economy."
LOL!
The last time we've argued, as far as I remember, you couldn't give AT LEAST ONE EXAMPLE of success of austerity policies.
NOT EVEN ONE FUCKING EXAMPLE!!!!
You have NO credibility, absolutely none at all.
That's why you don't SAVE money. You get a LOAN in a bank and start your business RIGHT NOW instead of waiting for years to save enough money.
Gold-backed trade is stupid, just like Quadaffi. There's not enough gold in the world to back the currencies. Also, one can't increase gold supply if trade volume and economy increases.
The Great Depression showed it quite clearly - the longer you stay on gold standard, the longer you suffer.
Nope. You're just stupid. US measures inflation just like the rest of the world, using core inflation and headline inflation.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/inflation-here-and-there-wonkish/
"Tell me why I should buy a 10 year note at 3.4% per year in a currency that is shedding value like never before on foreign exchange markets and whose government is denying inflation while at the same time conducting policy that is leading to a very real risk of hyperinflation?"
There can be NO hyperinflation in the US in the next two years. Want to bet a $1000 (in gold or any other currency, if you want) on that? I'll gladly take this bet.
First, global economy is NOT a zero-sum game. Second, you're a dumb sheep.
Not true. Orthodox Church existed just fine during the USSR. It even had official state support, even during Stalin's reign.
"Nonsense. Do you think man has evolved so much in so short a time that his development could not have been so complicated and nuanced only 2000 years ago? We might have less extant evidence to fully understand the details of classical history, but that merely indicates a challenge - it does not allow us to make any conclusions."
Yes, I think so. The slow accumulation of social and technological advancements allowed rapid social changes. It's not like ancient Greeks were not smart, but they were limited by their society. A steam engine was invented by Hero but it was only a curiosity back then.
"Well, "immediate" is vacuous here. As for "visible", it depends on whether you're worried about things like the precise drawing of borders or, say, the nature of Western mathematical thought. For the latter, if we look to but one place then we must look to ancient Greece."
Sure. But does the nature of Western thought depend on the date of birth of Alexander The Great? Or exact route of the Ten Thousand?
"What of the very existence of France?"
Irrelevant, the shape of the ancient Gaul was quite a bit different from the modern France.
"The language it speaks?"
Again, modern French has almost nothing to do with Gaulish (which was supplanted by Latin).
"The form of its legal system?"
Which one? France had quite a few of them.
""No." The answers are either "yes", i.e. you took ten minutes to check your written work with one of many standard references, or "no"."
Uhm. It's possible that I might make a stupid mistake somewhere - it's not easy to check your own works, but if it was my entrance exam I wouldn't worry at all.
"Even English A levels have basic calculus and differential equations. Hell, my physics exam required it (Nuffield)."
We had rudiments of calculus and differential equations at school, but only as a general outline. And traditionally university entrance exams here do not require them (though you are free to use them). It makes sense, because calculus is studied in much greater depth at university during the first year, and everyone else probably doesn't care much about epsilon-delta symbolic and sequence limits.
And yes, it was a university in Russia.
"Every skill is mechanical from the point of view of a sufficiently complex machine. And mental arithmetic is not obsolete!"
Ha! Note that I wrote "complex arithmetic". Mental arithmetic is certainly useful, and I enjoy estimating various things mentally just for fun. However I just round numbers to nearest 'nice' conservative values to do this. There's no way I'd be taking cube roots to 5'th decimal by hand - I'll use a calculator for this.
"Ignoring that an essay in which your level of precision is "about 50-100 B.C." would be embarrassingly bad (and, for your example, technically wrong), do you understand that the length of events may be as important as their order?"
For most practical purposes 50-100 B.C. is OK (/me checks Wiki... ha! and almost correct). What would have changed if someone seized the throne of the Roman Empire 25 years later or sooner? And of course, I know the approximate lengths of events as well.
"Modern history is often ancient history repeated. Modern history must thus be even more boring."
Modern history is much more complicated and nuanced. And with much more visible immediate consequences. And since there's far _less_ of it (almost everything interesting happened in the last 600 years) it's easier to remember precise dates and details. I can name all Russian emperors and tzars starting from Ivan the Terrible and the dates of their reign to +-5 years, for example. The consequences of their reigns are still there, in the shape of national borders and relations between countries.
And antic history is mostly a curiosity, as an example, nobody in 1869 cared how large Gaul was, but the ownership of Alsace-Lorraine caused a war just several years later.
"Are you sure your answers are sound and complete? Are you happy with the list of assumptions you made?"
Pretty sure.
"Did it have more cognitively challenging problems, or problems requiring more knowledge? In England, a modern mathematics A-level certainly requires more mathematical knowledge, but almost no cognitive ability. I understand that certain northern mainland European countries still have better expectations of their candidates."
The exam was fiendishly complex. It didn't require anything outside of the high school knowledge (no calculus or differential equations) but was cognitively exhausting. For one thing, it was not a test - there were only 6 problems to solve (5 required to get the top mark) and 5 hours of time. Each problem required at least one non-standard creative step.
"Web browsing requires very little precision by comparison. There's no equivalent for, say, accidentally 7*8=54 or 10*1000=100000. Yes, it's easy to see the mistake isolated, but trivial errors happen when someone's doing lots of little calculations at speed as part of some larger work - the latter example being the sort which occasionally causes health practitioners to kill patients."
So? Complex arithmetic is still a mechanical skill, which even illiterate people can do (not a conjecture, in the past illiterate people were employed as computers sometimes). By now, it's an obsolete skill.
"And this is a mistake made by every neophyte. All you need is a vague, fuzzy recollection of how and why, right? The details don't matter, just the conclusion, right?"
Nope. I remember historical facts, the driving forces beyond the changes. I can write an essay about the causes beyond the Renaissance or the Revolution in the USA right away. Ask me about the date of Caesar ascension to the throne and I won't be able to say more than "about 50-100 B.C.". For me dates are more important to establish the order of events.
Besides, ancient history is boring.
As for maths, I can solve all the problems in the geometry section right away - and I haven't studied planar geometry since the high school. The rest of maths section looks easy as well. My entrance exam had waaaaay more complex problems.
I can do arithmetic fairly quickly (we haven't used calculators at school), but that's just a skill to learn. It requires some practice, that's all. Today you can compare it to web browsing.
As for geography: I happen to know where Danube, Volga and Amazon are. But who cares where Mont Blanc is? Right now it's much more important to know HOW mountains form, why earthquakes happen, etc.
History: the same. I can describe driving forces beyond the collapse of the Roman empire, why it had collapsed, how the Renaissance happened, industrial revolution, etc. Specific dates and events? Not so much. I could tell about the transition of Rome from Republic to monarchy, but not the specific events.
Well, I already knew this after my school: algebra, geometry (including trigonometry - why is it always considered separate?), calculus, history (in depth), geography (where just one crucial bit of knowledge about the continent drift had changed everything), physics (classical physics was essentially complete in 1869) including the basics of the special relativity theory, biology (including germ theory, basic bits of molecular biology, evolution), chemistry (including basics of organic chemistry), some economics.
I knew a bit of Latin - it's wonderfully easy to learn for anyone with a knowledge of Russian and English. But that was not typical - I got lucky to land in a school with deep emphasis on languages.
So, all in all, back in 1869 education was still considered a luxury - it was not meant to be practical or useful in the real life. Right now education is ESSENTIAL for our society, we depend on advanced scientific knowledge.
Also, I don't understand why you bemoan lack of history in modern education. Consider that the people like the ones educated in Harvard shortly after 1969 had started several bloody revolutions and the World War I which largely created conditions for the WWII.
"GP is talking about Federal budget. State governments don't suddenly disappear into thin air, and can perfectly well run law enforcement, healthcare etc on their own"
No, they can not. Federalism in the US where each state is a separate State is long dead, because the US has become too integrated.
For example, the population of seniors vary by about about 100% between states. So it'd be inevitable that without federal aid some states won't be able to finance healthcare and social security. That already happens with Medicaid which is _partially_ funded by the states (and that's why it has provisions for the federal funding).
"Also, lasers don't bounce back at the attacker they way they do in fiction. A mirror is essentially armour against lasers, but unless you can aim the beam back in the time it takes for the mirror to melt, it isn't a weapon reflector."
Not a problem. Just use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector
You forget part #4: "Defending against roving bands of marauders"
And part #5: "Disposal of bodies of dead seniors"
There are two schools of thought, one considers 1 to be a prime (since its divisors are "1" and itself) the other school of thought doesn't. Some proofs work nicer if 1 is considered to be a prime, some proofs don't.
So it's just a matter of opinion.
I've done this personally. Other potassium-containing distances are equally "terrifying".
Get a Geiger counter and a banana. Watch it start clicking like crazy.
Bananas even sometimes trigger radioactive detectors in seaports.