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this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Short answer: Inflation encourages spending, because if you don't spend it, it will be worth less in the days, weeks, years ahead as inflation eats away at the value. If your money is worth more by saving (deflation), then you wait to spend because the thing you want to buy will be cheaper tomorrow, and cheaper yet the next day. If people stopped spending the economy grinds to a halt. Everyone loses their jobs.
Yes, not all demand is the same, but the idea isn't to increase the demand of bread, it's to increase investment. If sitting on cash gets you more interest from the bank you're going to let it sit more. If it loses value you're going to spend or invest it more. And yeah, this does happen, among other things because inflation affects everybody, not just consumers, although this also influences how likely individual people are to buy things on credit. Companies and governments also care about this.
As always with economics things aren't straightforward, and you get lots of weird paradoxical behaviors, but the big lines of this one are easy to see. If you have some inflation and low interest rates you're gonna be more likely to make big purchases or investments on credit. And the real problem is once you have those and are paying them back if inflation flips and suddenly the 100 bucks you pay each month for that credit go up in value to 110 you may find yourself losing money on that investment or being unable to afford it, which is a big problem when that happens to literally everybody who owes money (including the government) all at once.
And since the people you owe money to are mostly just a handful of banks.... well, that's not a great wealth redistribution technique, is it?
Yes, multiple times we've seen this play out in real life. The most recent big one would be Japan 1990s. Look up "The Lost Decade". The biggest one in the USA was the Great Depression in the 1930s.
You stop buying all but the absolute basics (bulk beans and rice and nothing else?), so all the food that isn't a "basic" goes un-bought and the people producing that food/product lose their jobs. Then you stop buying food when you're out of money, which is what can happen in an extreme deflationary environment because you have no income, because you lost your job, because no one buys whatever your work produces.
And if you stop paying rent, you're going to get evicted. If you stop paying your mortgage, the bank will take your home. This played out exactly this way during the Great Depression.
Its much more than just those sectors, but just imagine how many jobs are in the gambling and entertainment business. Now all of THOSE people are out of work competing with you for whatever jobs remain. That, too, happened during the Great Depression.
It's funny that people always talk about inflation vs deflation and never mention what would happen with a fixed price for everything... No urge to spend but no urge to save for later either, spend money if you want, don't if you don't, doesn't matter, you'll be able to purchase the same thing for the same amount months from now.
Its mentioned pretty early when learning economic theory, and its disastrous, which is why it isn't suggested as a policy to put into place, though from time to time some governments do, and its, as expected, disastrous.
Lets imagine you're a livestock farmer and there is a fixed price for two types of meat you produce: Beef and Frogs. In our theoretical country of FakeLand, we use the SuperCoin (SC) currency I just made up.
Now, you (and most people) like eating beef and very few people like frog. So the start of the Year 1 opens and your beef sales are VERY busy, and you're selling just a tiny tiny big of frog. If this keeps up, you're going to be out of beef very quickly, and you're going have LOTS of spoiled frog meat. In a normal economy, you would reduce the cost of frog from 8 SC, to possibly 5 SC making it half the cost of beef, so you could clear out your inventory of frog before it goes bad, BUT YOU CAN'T IN FAKELAND, because the prices are fixed! So for Year 1, nearly all your frog meat goes unsold and spoils and you lose 4 SC for every unit of frog you didn't sell. You sold all your beef, but with your losses on frog meat, you're near poverty because you essentially only earned 1 SC when you sold a unit of beef because you had to cover the losts of 4 SC for a unit of unsold frog meat.
So next year, you learn your lesson, right! Less frog meat, and more beef!
Year 2
You still can't do anything with the prices you sell for, because Fakeland sets the fixed prices.
So you're all ready to make tons of SC on beef, except there is a disease that wipes out 90% of everyone's herds before it goes to market. In a normal economy supply and demand would make the cost of beef rise to maybe 20 SC or 30 SC to recognize the scarcity of beef, but here in Fakeland the prices are fixed.
In the first month of Year 2 selling, you sell out of beef lightning quick because beef is still relatively cheap at only 10SC! Because of the shortage of beef, people also willing to buy your frog meat. Since you only made 1/10th of that this year, you don't have that much of it either. In a normal economy supply and demand would let you raise prices on frog too way above 8SC to maybe 10 SC or 12 SC to help you cover your beef losses, but in Fakeland prices are fixed, so you can't. You sell out of frog in the first month too.
So, you now have another 10 months or so with nothing to sell. Further, you have money, but there's no food to buy from anyone because it all sold cheaply from fixed prices.
This is how government setting fixed prices on things that the cost and popularity vary on can play out. If you want to see real life recent examples. Here's where the Venezuelan government in 2020 fixed prices on foods and how disastrous it was.
Isn't price fixing different from 0 inflation though?
I suppose looking through some very narrow lenses perhaps, but practically speaking I don't think they're different in their effect on consumer behavior. Inflation occurs when sellers control their prices. Price fixing technically doesn't allow inflation. I say technically because nearly all systems where strict monetary policy occurs, economics is still active and buyers and sellers resort to black markets or the barter system. So in those places inflation can still run rampant even if official prices are fixed.
Do you have a different take?
Just to complement this whole idea. The economic crisis in Venezuela was setup when the currency got their prices fixed. Essentially making exchanging currencies illegal without government approval. This threw our economy into disarray and made us 100% dependent on oil sales, as it was the only consistent influx of dollars. When the global prices of oil crashed in 2014, they pulled the currency exchange prices with them, we got the highest inflation in history ever and our economy collapsed. In response, the government fixed prices of everything, specially food, not just the currency. The result was an even worse crisis, death and hunger.
The whole thing has been somewhat stabilized by now by, as you would guess, liberating the prices and letting the economy behave normally again.
Mostly because that's impossible. Ideally you want small inflation so it's a bad idea to just leave money around, but either way 0% inflation is about as impossible as 0.4999% inflation.
No wonder the degrowth movement exists. It's because of this bullshit that we harm everything around us.
Economists and those that made political theory have been looking for better alternatives since the formation of civilization.
What is your suggestion for a better system?
incoherent screaming and whining
Degrowth
From your source:
"For world economic equality to be achieved with the currently available resources, proponents say rich countries would have to reduce their standard of living through degrowth. "
Can I ask what measures you've taken in your life to reduce your standard of living to match the degrowth goal?
Buy local products, buy conflict-free, slave-free, or fair trade products whenever possible, most of my belongings are second hand or have been in my possession for a long time (the oldest piece of clothing I was gifted is about 40 years old, the oldest I bought about 20), don't own a car and public transport is taken whenever possible, short distances are by bike or foot, food waste is nearly 0, etc.
How about you?
First, I'm not bound by your measurements because I'm not advocating your Degrowth position. You, however, are.
I'm taking a slightly different path to sustainability. I live closer to the food which drastically reduces the carbon consumption needed to bring it to me. That does require owning a car. However, my house and my car are powered by sunlight from the panels on my roof collecting it. I work from home so that also means I'm not commuting, reducing my car usage significantly. My hobby is electronics repair, so I get non-working TVs etc, from the waste stream, repair them and return them to service reducing the need for new units to be produced.