I've recently noticed on TikTok a big trend of food scientists, and chemists that basically just aggressively "debunk" anyone saying any sort of preservative or processed food ingredient is bad for you, and they always fall back on "proven safe for human consumption" which is just like circular reasoning that the FDA is perfect, righteous, and good.
There is of course a lot of kooky beliefs out there about food. But it seems like there is a very intentional social media campaign to associate ANY claim that the stuff in our food is not in our best interest with the kooks that believe the only safe thing to eat is raw goat balls or whatever.
For books anyway, I found The Hundred-Year Lie to be incredibly in depth, but there's a lot of chemistry so it's verrry dense.
That's not enough: you should also read the critics and opponents of what you think is true. That is, if you're truly trying to figure out reality and not just seeking psychological security.
Remember, the test of a true intellectual is that they can convincingly defend a position they find abhorrent.
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
Or you just read a scientific paper. It's called a review and it goes over several studies and uses statistics to determine probability of claims. For example,
Only because enough people believe that's true, and then only because there are aircraft carriers that convince people in other countries that it's in their best interest to use them.
Inflation is value confiscation. It's a tax. It reduces the burden of the greatest debtor (government) at the expense of everybody who holds dollars and produces value.
If you want to live in a society were the banks and wealthy individuals can make significant income by doing literally nothing, that is fine, but the rest of us would like to live in a world where goods and services are produced at a rate similar to how they are produced today.
You don't seem to understand what literally nothing means.
When there is deflation you do nothing. You don't even go to work. You don't even look at your bank account or the money. You don't think about it. You just wait and do nothing. It is the equivalent of taking a drug that makes you feel good. You won't find the need to actually accomplish anything.
If there is inflation, then banks actually have to do their bank related tasks to earn the money, people actually have to sit at their desks.
What you're describing is the exact way that large swatches of the population live. They were smart enough to make themselves be born earlier than other people and they can spend decades or even their whole life doing literally nothing, taking out another mortgage on their real estate as the value continues to increase.
This is not a tiny 1% of the population. I would wager that most people reading this thread has at least one person among their friends or family who live a good life without having contributed much to the economy, or even having never contributed anything at all. Riding the wave of inflation in real estate.
Tell me again why I and others should contribute to the economy to support these people's lifestyle?
No one is saying that we think you should support someone else's lifestyle. We are saying that if all currency went up in purchasing power all the time, that the problem of people doing nothing would be worse than it is today.
What you are talking about is something different, some sort of work police or something that forces everyone to work the same amount or something like that.
Function means that most people that want jobs have jobs and most people that want to purchase goods and services are able to purchase goods and services.
Imagine if you went to a grocery store and it was completely empty. That is the situation in Haiti currently. That is a nonfunctional economy.
Functional does not mean that everyone has everything they want at the price they want.
We have whole generations who are extremely productive in the economy, but are being denied the basic necessity of having their own home. That is a non-functioning economy. Well, of course it functions greatly for those who are in the position to exploit such an arrangement.
It's like a sheep farmer thinking he is successful because he decided to kill all lambs every spring instead of letting them grow to adults. Sure, the meat tastes nice now, but he has destroyed his future for short term gains.
> Functional does not mean that everyone has everything they want at the price they want.
Nobody is demanding anything close to that, people want the basic necessities and have no way of getting them. Or should they just keep working hard and be grateful that they're not in Haiti.
The absolute best thing a young, enterprising person from a Western country can do today is to move out of that hemisphere and establish themselves in another country. That step gives a massive increase in quality of life, as well as a much better prospects for the future.
It limits the rate of monetary inflation. It is much harder to dig a shiny metal out of the ground than adding more zeros in a computer.
If you're not worried about the long-term consequences of both the fiscal and monetary policy of the United States, I don't know what to say. M2 to the moon.
I don’t really think it does. They could just say this dollar is now worth less gold? Or they could put lengthy restrictions in place for exchanging dollars for gold until it nearly guarantees they’ll never need to produce most of the gold.
Shipping gold is expensive and risky, eventually they’ll start saying, “you own this amount of the gold we have stored safely”. The abstractions find a way…
That said, if the US were in a better financial situation, how would 1-2% inflation (as far as I can tell, this roughly the rate that gold is currently being extracted) lead to people starving in the US?
Obviously, reality is much more complicated, but I just want to understand the reasoning. Assume 0% inflation if you prefer.
2% is a healthy level, which is why it's the Fed's target.
The problem is that pegging a currency to gold does not peg inflation. Inflation will still move around based on other economic factors. You will have just eliminated your best tool for influencing it.
If you needed to adjust a currency pegged to gold, you'd have to get more people working in the mines. Which is either not possible, or a human rights violation.
There's no reason for that. As production improves in efficiency it is natural for things and services to become cheaper. That also means you get more for your money, instead of getting more money. That concept is not too strange for the population to accept.
For a few items in your CPI basket, that's fine. If you have significant deflation across your economy on average, people will start losing their jobs en masse, and zero dollars doesn't buy anything.
Likewise, business revenues will be going down but the investments in capital have already been allocated. Businesses start laying off employees to try to balance the books. Those newly unemployed workers, in turn, now have less money to spend. More businesses find themselves in the red, and it leads to more layoffs.
This is called a deflationary spiral. Basically every period of significant deflation in the past has led to dire economic consequences. You really do not want people to stop spending money.
This sounds like a myth. If the value of your currency is increasing, staying at 0 means you're actually turning a profit, just as making a 10% profit when the inflation is 50% means you're losing money. Inflation is a tax and redistribution of wealth, it's really not more complicated.
Zero isn’t bad. I was explicitly talking about deflation above. The effects of deflation I explained above is not a myth, it is introductory macroeconomics.
Deflationary spirals have happened in the past, but they have stopped since we moved away from the gold standard and we can now intentionally inflate our currency to prevent deflation.
If you have a real business, you're still increasing value in the equation or breaking even. Deflation means you might have to lower wages, but your employees are still getting the same value paid. It means you might have to lower prices, but you're still getting the same value sold. It also means your costs are lowering, so as long as you have a value-adding business you will beat deflation. If not, then you shouldn't be in business.
In today's inflation economy, there are tons of tons of businesses that on paper make a profit, but in reality don't create value because that profit is worth less than the numbers tell. And what's worse: Individuals are becoming poorer and poorer without realizing it, because the nominal value of their pay check might be higher, though the value of the money is probably half of what it was 10 years ago.
And as individuals adapt their lifestyle and spending to circumstances we arrive at the ridiculous situation of today, where most young people after maybe a decade of working and advancing their careers still don't own a home, still don't have any children, and don't dream of splurging on luxurious hobbies.
Thank God there is a huge trend right now with workers of all "collars" saying "fuck it" and doing what they can to change companies, change careers, change cities and change countries to get as much as possible for themselves instead of continuing to be exploited.
This is not something economists disagree upon. All periods of any significant deflation anywhere and at any time were accompanied by economic recession or depression.
If it were just so simple that a “real business” could merely adjust everyone’s wage to balance the books when revenue drop, you would be the world’s most coveted CEO that could save any company.
It ain’t that simple. Businesses make capital expenditures. There’s also often a time gap between incurring costs and incurring revenue.
It makes more sense to me that money should have intrinsic value in and of itself rather than exist as some nebulous digit in a computer that represents nothing but a unit of debt, which is easily and inevitably abused by those with the power to create it from thin air. I don't know if precious metals are the best answer, but money as a commodity makes more sense to me than money as an infinitely dupe-able fiat token with no intrinsic value
You are using a basic understanding of economics then.
You need to understand economics as the metabolism of a larger organism.
This isn't just a hypothetical argument, it is reality. Let's take the digital device you're reading this with as an example. It's not created by any single craftsman. It is the result of millions of people's work. It is a "metabolite" of a larger organism.
You are a node or cell in a larger thing. Everything you know and can do is largely tailored to this system you're currently in.
Consider you are time-teleported back 10,000 years and come across a tribe of humans. Who would be more valuable to whom? Is your understanding of any of the technologies you presently enjoy sufficient enough to reproduce from scratch? Maybe a couple things, but they would most likely have a lot more to teach you than you'd be able to teach them.
I realize the above is very abstract from monetary policy, but the correct premise needs to be set before digging down.
Once you model economics as the metabolism of a larger entity, money reveals its true nature: to control what activities are performed by / within the organism.
There's no such thing as "intrinsic value" -- there is only a medium of exchange or signaling. This signal should not be tied to any physical thing, as that is inefficient to the state of an economy. There are better ways. Imaginary units are a more powerful tool, as they are not constrained by any physical limits.
You may be upset at how these IU's are currently handled, and rightfully so. The current methodology we have is very primitive. Our experts themselves (head of the Fed, treasury) readily admit this. When they take actions they "think" or "expect" it will have this or that effect. And the levers they pull are also very blunt.
When CBDCs come online, then we will start to realize a better economy. They will allow more granular control of things.
Money is a convenient means of exchange and valuation, I don't see the reason why my membership in society (node or cell in larger organism) should require that means of exchange to be imaginary- and I disagree that intrinsic value does not exist, though it may vary in the eye of the beholder. If I approach this stone-age tribe from your example and attempt to trade with them they will not accept my dollars for their goods- to them my dollars are kindling at best. Very little intrinsic value. But a physical commodity perhaps they would accept because it has some actual real-world use to them. Why should one party trade actual useful goods and services in exchange for imaginary numbers? Wouldn't it make more sense for trade real goods for real goods, provided one party's goods are viable for monetary use and can be reliably used as a means of valuation?
I won't argue that imaginary units of money are a powerful tool, they certainly are. So powerful in fact that there is no human on this earth who can be trusted to administer it without rampant abuse. The history of centralized planned economies speaks for itself, and I don't think further consolidation under CBDCs with more 'granular control' is going to improve its track record. The physical limits that constrain the use of commodities as money are what make it a viable as currency, it's a feature not a bug
Monetary policy is one of the biggest reasons for the success of the world economy over the last century. Without fiat currency it would be impossible and loans would immediately get much more expensive, instantly destroying tech investment for starters.
A century is not a very long time, all things considered- we're all still high on the rush from this constant infusion of free cash, these are the good times. But I wouldn't base my entire outlook on how nice the good times are, there are massive risks involved with setting up a house of cards like this. There's a reason the constitution grants congress the sole authority to coin money, and implies quite clearly that money is to be silver/gold or backed by such. Nobody can be trusted with the authority to expand the money supply at will, unrestrained by the physical constraints of a commodity-based currency, free to print trillions upon trillions with no real oversight. That's how you end up with these ungodly banking cartels with disgusting amounts of political power (and all the corruption and cronyism that entails) while the middle class bears the burden of the feds inflationary practices, which is basically just an insidious form of hidden taxation. I'm not so sure that free money for tech startups is worth all that in the long run.
You're not wrong, and of course there are many more factors than just monetary policy alone that affect the lot of the middle class- But I'll point out that the middle class was much better off 50-60 years ago than it is now, back when fiat wasn't abused to the degree it has been for the past couple decades
In the US perhaps, but every other country also uses fiat and the global middle class has never been stronger. That suggests to me that there is a different, US specific reason for widening inequality.
Money having intrinsic value is nonsense. Money is like a spread sheet. It's net worth is zero.
The value you derive from the spread sheet is that it lets you organize your business or economy.
Yes, society will "adapt", by exacerbating inequality. Massive amounts of resources will be wasted on ideas like "add 2 feet of gravel and pave it again" to allow the super rich to keep their properties for a few years longer, and the only actual workable solution (building new sustainable homes and allowing people to relocate to them for free) will be ignored.
Wouldn't society focusing on construction jobs for blue collar workers over global recycling and carbon trading schemes be less unequal.
I say if the finance bros want their skyscrapers to remain above water they need to hire construction workers rather than make consumer goods in the developing world more expensive through regulation.
There's the authoritarian collectivist power differential take! I knew you were coming, you little rascal!
Massive amounts of resources are being wasted on bad climate ideas now. Poor people have bigger problems. That certain patches of land might be squishier in 100 years isn't in their top 10.
Yep. Been reading variations of the same article for decades. Captain Planet up there says building bridges and moving dirt around causes inequity, though, so I guess we have to live with it.
> says building bridges and moving dirt around causes inequity
Infrastructure is one of the most expensive things people interact with on a regular basis. Choices in how we build infrastructure redirects society's resources on a massive scale. So yes, I do think it's plausible that huge investments in water-resistant infrastructure and wasteful attempts to build Dubai-style island suburbs will redirect resources away from more important issues, like the pressing need in the US to fix existing bridges and roads, build 1.5 million more houses, earthquake-proof the infrastructure in the pacific northwest, and figure out how to get 4800 GW more on the electrical grid cleanly.
When solutions really are that simple, yes, go for the solution that is simple. Of course. Society in general doesn't put enough weight on simple low-tech solutions.
But before prescribing solutions for the general case (the general idea of houses being cut off from the main land), assume that you will face the worst case scenario of complexity and tons of sub-problems -- for example, I'm sure some of the cases examined by this research will also have the problem of underground gas lines, plumbing, electrical, communications services -- and maybe a road that has been damaged beyond trivial repair. It's best to treat those scenarios as losses, especially if additional erosion is predicted in the next 20 or so years and the fix requires much more expensive engineering. Otherwise we will get trapped into a pattern that wastes the best resources of the entire system, for the sake of a few homeowners.
OK: I believe authoritarians should be laughed at early and often. If anybody happens construe the people I mistakenly described as authoritarians as fucking authoritarian, please mock the motherfuckers.
It's interesting that the collectivist power differential never extends to the state vs. the individual, no the state is always grand and good, except when it's run by other collectivists.
Definitely, these anti-elite luddites think they can just put gravel on roads til it's above water without proper expertise and oversight. We definitely need a global authority to issue permits for people to put extra gravel, or move dirt from the above water part of the hill to the below water part.
Identify people you trust on a subject, filter their claims through your own ideas about what is reasonable, and hope for the best.
You might still get it wrong. Such is life.