this could be one of those bell curve memes where the low end and high end are the moron/jedi guys saying “just print more money” and the middle of curve has a freshman Econ student trying to explain macroeconomics.
I came here to say this. I thought humans made the rules!
The world is run by middle-of-the-curve people.
As someone two standard deviations above the mean height, the tyranny of the average is real
Yeah it's not as simple as just printing more money and not changing anything else, but she's right
Very good observation. On the high end of that bell curve, there's Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory
Yeah, exactly what I was thinking. Like, it isn't quite as simple as "print $1m for everyone and they can all go out and buy Ferraris." But, there are plenty of situations where the government can just print the money and it won't cause inflation or any other harmful effects.
Printing more money and using it for public works or giving it directly to the poor could be a valid form of wealth redistribution that doesn't require collecting taxes. The problem of course is capital, it's immune to this kind of inflation, though rich people who have their wealth in debt would be hurt.
To be fair, Economics is half imagination and magic. It’s why something like bitcoin could even become a thing.
One of the main things I learned during my economics degree is that money is fake.
To quote Brian Brushwood, "It's just pieces of paper that we believe in."
Money is made up, but it's definitely real. Magic is made up and fake. If it actually exists and does something, it's real. You can bring something from non-existence and make it real. It has no intrinsic value.
Money is an intersubjective reality, like nations, religions, and ghosts.
Dave Ramsey is a Jesus freak but he did have some fun truisms, one of which is if you want to know where value comes from, try taking dollar bills and bottled water into an area devastated by a hurricane and see which one has more value.
All government spending is done by "printing money", at least in monetary sovereign countries like the US, UK, and other countries issuing their own cureencies. The government is the monopoly issuer of the currency and cannot run out of it, just like the scorekeeper of a baseball match cannot run out of points. Taxes are also not for funding the government, but for removing momey from circulation, precisely to curb inflation. (Also to drive the value of the currency by making people demand it to be able to pay their taxes). Thus "printing money" isn't in itself inflationary, as long as the newly created money is spent on something where there is excess production capacity. The question for the government is never "can we afford it", but rather "are the real resources there to achieve it".
Thus “printing money” isn’t in itself inflationary
Your conclusion doesn't follow from what you said.
Inflation is merely the change in subjective value of a currency over time. Inflation goes up when people want more money for the same stuff.
If the government creates money to fund something, that pulls resources (employees, production, etc) from other parts of the economy, increasing the costs of the remaining resources since there's less available. That's inflation.
The Covid stimulus packages are a fantastic example of this, because it directly resulted in more money chasing fewer goods (less production). There would've been inflation anyway since net production decreased, but the stimulus package exacerbated it. A significant amount of the inflation we saw recently was a mix of COVID supply chain disruption and Trump and Biden's stimulus bills.
Excess production is deflationary, but that doesn't mean printing money to cover isn't inflationary, it just means you can counter deflation from one source with inflation from another.
The question for the government is never “can we afford it”, but rather “are the real resources there to achieve it”.
Sure. But at that point we're not talking about inflation anymore. If the government really wants something, it can get it, but that will have consequences. The question is whether it's a net benefit, and how to fund it:
Each option has consequences, and generally speaking, you get less of whatever you tax, if the tax is high enough.
This is such a fantastic summary of the theory of money. Holy shit.
She's not totally wrong
If we gave every American 1 billion dollars the current billionaires would lose massive amounts of power and it would help fix wealth inequality.
That wouldn't work because the bilionaires don't have money, they have assets, AKA capital.
If they had their money scrooge mcduck style. But the assets they own will explode in value almost proportionally to the value of the dollar
Do that and get ready for 100,000 dollars for a dozen eggs cause the market will charge what it knows the customer can pay.
The funny irony is that because money is mostly made up bullshit anyway, we kinda could just decide to print more money and keep its value. Granted, it would take the unanimous agreement of basically everyone on this silly little planet, so the chances of this ever occurring are effectively absolute zero, but still, there is no actual rule that says we cant except for the ones we ourselves created
I mean...
We could just... Eat. The. Rich.
I think the problem isn’t that there is a lack of money which could be solved by printing more, but that there is a lack of money because like 6 guys have stolen most of it and piled it up under their mattresses with no intention of actually using it at any point.
Prices should be set by the king tho, the only acceptable rate of inflation is zero.
The problem here is that a government does not in fact have the ability to decide how much their currency is valued, they can only indirectly influence it. When they try to pretend like it's just a "rule" they can set like "here is the mandated exchange rate, we'll put you in jail if you make trades at any other price" is when things get real stupid.
The US has such a huge pool of people using the dollar that when they do seigniorage they're essentially taxing the world instead of only their citizens. It's kind of obscene and why the imperialists are very hostile to BRICs.
Have you peeps never heard of modern monetary theory (mmt)? Macroeconomics is not so simple! Most people talking about have the knowledge of a minor in business econ though
So let me ask you this. If the U.S. "printed" 20T dollars (really just say it exists in an account). Then they start investing that in the market... The value of the money in theory would decay by 14% (rough math) but the market would thrive from the increase in buying.
That said. It would "hurt" the lower classes purchasing power at first. But the interest made off that 20T is enough to build every person in the U.S. a new house every 30 years assuming the average household is 2.5 people. At first you would be building new ones and repurposing old ones. But after 15 years or so, you would have the country all sans rent/mortgage payments, which frees up their money to be spent on things like resteraunts, movies, plays, sports, whatever it is people do. So the economy would be growing, while homelessness would be gone foreve and everyone would have a $250,000 equivalent house built/renovated every 30 years. Which because of the mass building projects and it all being purchased from one group.. would likely be like getting a $400,000 in todays market. This doesn't mean people can't save and invest money to have a larger dwelling and size up, just that everyone would have the base $400,000 equivalent house in a restabilized economy where everyone is less stressed and free-er to spend money at ease not worrying about becoming homeless if something goes wrong.
Does this mean some people will choose to work less, maybe. But with automation growing the way it is, we really have less work and more people already. It would also give us the opportunity to build some new cities/towns built around more walking and less car dependency, which would promote public health and people not being as reclusive if they don't want.
Idk, it would never happen, but I'm just saying it could probably happen and we choose not to because people think helping everyone is bad.
Edit: the number of stress based mental issues alleviated by this would be huge. Less reasons to murder and rob people as well, so crime would likely drop
You laugh, but this actually kinda worked for 1980s Brazil.
Interesting story but it's also talking about how inflation was at 80% in Brazil in the 1980s, because they were printing money. What they did in 1993 with the URVs is a fascinating psychological experiment, but I'm not sure if it was the critical factor in stopping inflation. As per the article
It wasn't the only trick, obviously. While they put URVs in place, the group of economists made the government balance its budget and slow down on money creation.
So I feel like it was basic economic policy that mostly worked, rather than printing money and trying to dictate its value.
I mean. Yeah honestly, lol
We can, and we do, for virtually everything.
That’s precisely why the DOGE takeover of the payment system is so scary. Government money isn’t being transferred from some limited pool of taxpayer funds, it’s spent into existence out of thin air.
We also borrow, in the form of bonds, but that’s mostly to tame inflation by taking currency temporarily out of circulation with the promise of a later profit for the bond holder. (And also to encourage long-term investment in domestic currency.)
Humans do make the rules, unfortunately only some of them get the chance to so they made the rules favor themselves.
I do sometimes wonder if you could technically still run a working government off printing money, just recognizing that doing so didnt create more value, but instead acted as a form of taxation. Imagine a government that currently holds no significant fraction of its currency. It then prints an amount equal to what is currently in circulation, doubling the money supply and in doing so presumably halving the value of a given unit of that currency. Once it has done so, no new value is created, but that government has gone from having no significant fraction of the money in circulation, to having half of it, which it can now spend.
Suppose you did this predictably, you let everyone know that you will be increasing the money supply by x percent every year, and will be re-denominating it to avoid difficult to work with numbers at set intervals. Wouldnt you technically have a functioning system for extracting value from the economy to pay for government functions?
It might not be a very good system, since all it would effectively tax is people's savings of currency and not stuff like property, and you would have to set up things like employment contracts or debts to compensate for constant high inflation rates, but Im not sure I see a reason why it technically couldn't be done.
This is literally how monet works though. It's made up.
these don't prove that printing money always leads to currency devaluation. that's a post hoc ergo propter hoc explanation.
Given we have multiple examples of printing money leading to inflation and eventually hyperinflation, and we have 0 examples of printing money not leading to that, it's reasonable to conclude there is a causative link.
Well, who ever created money can just uncreate it and we end capitalism, eat the rich and have a better planet
Price of gold goes Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrtrtrtttrtrtttrrtrrtrtrttrr
Imagine there's a new issue of a famous comic book being printed (the series doesn't matter; take your pick). But the caveat is that there's only going to be ONE copy printed. Only one in existence. That single issue could potentially be worth millions, because it's so desirable for comic book nerds and they all want to get their hands on it. Only the wealthiest of collectors will be able to throw enough money at it to win an auction, which raises its value significantly.
Now imagine the publisher decides to make 100 copies instead. The value of that issue is now much cheaper; maybe worth several thousand dollars per comic, because there are a handful of them floating around now. Still, only wealthy collectors will be able to afford bidding on a copy, but at least the top 100 bids will win a copy. Raising the value, but not as much as if they are all bidding on a single product.
Now imagine 100,000 copies are made. Now it's mostly a standard printing, and it's only worth the cover price for a comic nowadays (what, like $3.99 or so?)
The more copies that are out there, the easier it is to find and acquire, and thus the cheaper its value is. Same goes for money; the more printed bills that are out there, the less value each bill has, and you'll need more of them to afford basic products. Which is why inflation is a thing, because we're constantly printing more money each year.
In reference to my point about comic book values, there are only about 100 copies left in existence of the first Superman comic (Action Comic #1). A single copy sold last year for $6 million, and its condition was only rated 8.5/10, which means it's a little rough around the edges from wear and tear. Not even a pristine comic book, and it still cost millions to buy!
That same issue sold for 10 cents when it was first made in 1938, but the fact that comics were made to be read and then discarded back then means most people never held on to their comic books and their numbers have dwindled over the years. Now Superman is a huge deal - one of the best-selling comics of all time - and his first appearance in a comic book is so rare, people will spend millions just to have an original copy.
Then, imagine if the comic printing company had a guy with a gun going around demanding everyone give him an amount of comic books each year. Now suddenly everyone is looking to get the comic books, driving their values up.
This is how taxes are driving the value of modern money.
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