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Oh, I thought you meant growing in real terms, not just inflation. If it only grows with inflation then it's not unsustainable.

And the monetary system doesn't depend on inflation per se, it's just that aiming for slight inflation is the easiest way to avoid deflation.



Its not quite that simple unfortunately. Inflation can't be measured or controlled in such accurate detail that we can keep them pegged without any "real" growth. Debt will need to increase faster than inflation to keep a level of buffer in the system.

The monetary system itself does actually depend on inflation. Inflation creates an incentive to spend and invest your money, and without both our system of money would collapse.

Fiat currency and fractional reserve banking mean that the money requires flow through the system. The velocity of money is a bit of a controversial measure, though personally I don't understand why. Ignoring the specific measure though, our money must have velocity at some level and the system would collapse if velocity fell too low or increased too high.


> Debt will need to increase faster than inflation to keep a level of buffer in the system.

Creating a buffer only needs to happen once. So if debt increased faster than inflation 30 years ago, and then on average kept pace since then, we'd still have the buffer. That kind of buffer is sustainable.


I think that still assumes that we can reliably and accurately keep inflation and debt on the same page. If I were in charge of something similar I'd absolutely want to see a small but steady increase in debt vs inflation just to be sure, entire economies aren't easy ships to right when things go wrong




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