It’s becoming really annoying.
American’s will do anything to avoid using the metric system.
Oh you euros all just mad because your country is heating up faster than others. https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/06/1137867
Of course it’s heating up faster. Celsius is a shorter scale.
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.
There is no standardized unit of account which is not loosing or gaining value over time. However there are/were systems with more stable inflation rates than ours, like the gold standard in the US.
But the gold standard encourages hoarding money, rather than spending it, which could create even bigger wealth divides and less motivation to invest in new technologies.
Hoarding isn’t even a gold based economy’s biggest failing. There isn’t enough gold in the world for it. The world economy would essentially be fixed to the physical amount of gold that is in the possession of human beings. Monetary policy would essentially be nonexistent and we’re ride the unguided roller coaster of pure unchecked speculation. We used to do this in the USA, and the result helped lead to the worst economic catastrophe our country ever saw: the Great Depression.
For a practical experience, imagine we’re on the gold standard wanting to buy a home. You go to the bank and ask for a loan. You get told the few people with spare money (because the amount of money is fixed to how much gold the USA has) want 75% interest on the money you’re asking for to buy the house. There’s no “prime” interest rate because a federal centralized banking policy doesn’t exist. Maybe you can go to another bank and they only want 65% interest, but only have half the money you need to borrow. This is just one example.
For a business owner, if they can’t get a loan to expand, they can’t hire the 10 new people they want to create more widgets. With cash on hand they can hire 1 person, and then the business will have to grow much slower before they can hire the second or third person, rinse, repeat. Business growth is very very slow.
Thanks for elaborating, I didn’t wanna go that deep :D
I get it, and I wish there was a more stable way to measure value internationally. Not for trade or anything, just a baseline. Something along the line of total global money value / total supply.
I’ve only thought about it casually, but everything I’ve come up with makes the concept more complicated. It spirals pretty quickly. Value in what? Gold? (no). Watt-hours? Who’s energy?
I’m sure someone with an economics degree has gone absolutely nuts trying to figure something out. I’d be very interested to learn more.
I get it, and I wish there was a more stable way to measure value internationally. Not for trade or anything, just a baseline. Something along the line of total global money value / total supply.
I’m not understanding where you’re going with this. What problem are you trying to solve? Lets say for a moment you did find this magical objective and fair international measurement method. What then? How would you use apply it?
Honestly? Sometimes my brain just runs with stuff like this. Having travelled enough, it gets really fascinating, what’s expensive where and why. A universal value metric would be about as useful to me as the Kelvin scale is. It’s nice to have it as a thought tool, but it’s not particularly useful day-to-day.
Gotcha, so more of a solution looking for a problem at this point? I thought you were advocating for a policy path I wasn’t understanding. Nothing wrong with simply ideating for the sake of exploration. I do the same myself.
We’re trying to describe the scarcity of something in units of something becoming less scarce every year. ftfy
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We’ll stop deflating the value of currency the minute we stop generating new commodities to trade.
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