> I'm not the one arguing about definitions. You chose to take us down that path, adding a bunch of ad hominem while simultaneously misusing the terminology you were trying to be patronizing with. I 100% agree that it's completely inconsequential

Technically I suppose it is me that keeps insisting you can't just redefine terms to make them mean the opposite of what they mean because that would be convenient to your argument. I didn't realise you considered making up new definitions of words "completely inconsequential", but it explains a lot.

But one of the things about posting complete nonsense like "expected value [2] is a term you do not seem familiar with. It is a risk adjusted value of expected return on something" is that I'm going to patronise you for responding by posting incorrect definitions in a ill-advised attempt to patronise the person who knows what the words actually mean.

> I'm also trying to, within reason, respond to each thing you're stating

And yet your latest response to me continues to ignores all my points about risk, base interest rates, opportunity costs and the relative unprofitability of investing in productive ventures when average prices are falling and instead links to a trend line for Campbell's soup prices. I realise it's easier for you to triumphantly assert that inflation is correlated with the price of Campbell's soup to rise (well done, you managed to not get a basic economic relation the wrong way round for once!) than to learn why interest rates have an inverse relationship with money supply and why that might be relevant to the return on productive ventures, but it's a whole lot less relevant to anything I've said. Because, funnily enough, I never expected anything other than Campbell's soup increasing their prices in the last 50 years. Still, the proportion of budget spent on food, which matters a lot more, has gone down a lot since the gold standard era[1][2] and it's not like that's because Americans are getting skinnier!

> One major thing I'd emphasize here is that you're acting like the consequences of non-inflationary systems are speculative. The entire point of this discussion is we have a wealth of data to draw from, from both systems. With a non-inflationary system we have a system that was, more or less, stable over nearly 200 years through numerous catastrophic events. With the modern inflationary system we have something that already not only seems unsustainable, but is causing major societal issues after just 50 years of relative super-utopia. I say super-utopia because not only have we avoided anything on the scale of e.g. WW2, but it kicked off alongside the once-in-a-civilization super-economic boom of mass digitization that is now plateauing.

If we want to talk about stability verus "catastrophic events", the most notable periods of of sustained deflation (the thing you kicked off this exchange by praising) were called the Great Depression, Panic of 1893, Panic of 1873, the Panic of 1837 and the 1818-21 depression. So yeah, economists' alarm about deflationary spirals are not speculation but backed by a lot of data. If we're doing a natural experiment between deflation and steady 2% inflation even the names are a hint that the former state of affairs might be more problematic.

It's funny that you think there was a single monetary system over that 200 year period (again, you're disputing a universally agreed historical fact rather than making a defensible theoretical argument about causation here) and perhaps funnier still that you believe there were no societal issues over that period and that "mass digitization" has been more transformational than the Industrial Revolution was. Disruptions like the Civil War and WWII were dealt with by completely disregarding convertibility to gold and the growth of 1950-1970 was sustained by the US giving away quarter of the entire world's gold supply, a luxury it can no longer afford. The Bretton Woods trade arrangement that made everyone need dollars largely worked for the US; the attempt to link it to gold was what killed it. And it would have died much earlier if FDR hadn't already suspended the ability of anybody that wasn't a foreign central bank to demand gold in exchange for dollars...

> So on the data issue - the way you determine an inflection point on a noisy graph is just to look at the midpoints of the noise and graph them.

The way you determine an inflection point is to determine the breakpoint between upward and downward trends or concavity or convexity. Neither of the graphs of labour share of income you have linked to have that functional form, irrespective of what averaging method you use to remove the economic cycles.

I laughed mostly because it's actually really easy to find similar time series that do appear to have an inflection point some time around 1971, or at least between 1965 and 1990[3]. Here's one[4]. The trouble for you is that although it shows a fall in employee compensation as a proportion of GDI in the last 50 years, it also shows that it was lower still in the gold standard era's heyday back in 1929 (the 1920s were also the peak of post-industrial wealth concentration)... and that wage growth happened when the Fed inflated its way out of that mess...

It's almost like those billionaire funded think tanks promising that a return to the monetary economics of 1931 (but keeping the tax cuts of the 1980s and other policy and technology shifts you're furiously pretending didn't affect anything) would make ordinary people get paid a higher share of income aren't telling the truth.

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa...

[2]fun aside: there probably is an inflection point in this time series at 1932, the last full year in which people could redeem their USD for gold with food becoming relatively more affordable afterwards. Although you'd probably want to see the trend for the 1920s and earlier to be sure, and since I'm not as monomanically currency obsessed as you I would never make the mistake of arguing that decoupling from gold is the only reason why food is much more affordable to the average person today than it was at any point during the gold standard era...

[3]I mean, the silly website on that theme manages to find a graph to blame the end of Bretton Woods for divorce rates...

[4]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A4002E1A156NBEA

From the founding of this country until 1971, with a handful of brief pauses during genuine emergencies, government spending was constrained by the USD being backed by various metals. You are right that this does not guarantee deflation for a variety of reasons. That's a part of the reason I swapped my terminology away from deflationary to non-inflationary. When I speak of non-inflationary systems I am speaking of ones where the government's ability to 'print' money is externally constrained. If you want to play No True Scotsman with the overwhelming majority of this time period and insist that this wasn't 'real deflation', awesome! Feel free to. Because it's exactly these eras that I believe we ought endeavor to return to. I'm not appealing to some past that did not exist, but the rather real one that we had.

I have not ignored your claims of interest and such. I have responded to them with real data repeatedly. If you want to argue that landing on the Moon is impossible because of the Van Allen Belts, why bothering digging into the issues with such a claim instead of simply pointing out the numerous times that we have successfully traversed such, repeatedly? This is what I was talking about when I said that you are largely ignoring data in favor of hypothetical arguments.

And again you are being goofy with terminology, literally right after complaining about such. The mathematical definition of inflection point is useless outside of mathematics, and even specific subdomains within such. With the mathematical definition of inflection point a system that goes from linear to hyper-exponential would have no inflection point, which would be wholly nonsensical for our discussion. This is yet another argument you've made in bad faith.

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As for the socioeconomic side of things, again I'd just appeal to the data. The current system is driving inequality that completely dwarfs times past. Elon is worth more than Carnegie and Rockefeller combined, inflation adjusted. US median wage is about $43k [1] so Elon's worth about 22 million years of median wages. Rockefeller was worth about $900 million in 1913 when the median income was around $600, so he was "only" worth about 1.5 million years of median wages.

Beyond the excesses of inequality this system creates, do you not see this as, at least possibly, being the mother of all bubbles that we're pumping up? What happens when the funny money is no longer enough to keep everything from blowing up at the seams? That's going to have a catastrophic impact on the wealth and power of every single billionaire. And I think those that can see the forest through all those trees would certainly be looking to move away from this system before an event that may well end up making 1929 look like the 'good ole days.'

I would also add on this point that it's also not just the issue of the super-bubble, but also social responses to such. The DNC is getting overrun by literal socialist candidates starting to accumulate seats and influence everywhere. I assume you're the sort to realize that their thinking of socialism is much more sickle and hammer than it is Norway, which isn't socialist in the least. And that's again largely a consequence of our current system which is drowning the lower classes and taking the upper to unprecedented highs.

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One final note. I quite like Our World in Data. I think they generally provide some good info. But in their food graph they literally start it at 1929. I'm going to assume that was accidental, because it's complete misinformation. I'd be quite curious to see what it was prior, but saying that we spend less on food now than we did during the Great Depression is rather less than informative.

[1] - https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html

> If you want to play No True Scotsman with the overwhelming majority of this time period and insist that this wasn't 'real deflation', awesome! Feel free to. Because it's exactly these eras that I believe we ought endeavor to return to. I'm not appealing to some past that did not exist, but the rather real one that we had.

It's hardly "no true Scotsman" to point out that a period where inflation was at current target levels is not an example of the benefits of deflation. "No true Scotsman" would be arguing that the Great Depression didn't count as an example of deflation under the gold standard, despite it being the US's last sustained deflation, the last period in which ordinary people and banks could redeem dollars for gold, and also a Depression which is widely agreed by people (with otherwise widely divergent views) to have been caused primarily by attempts to preserve the gold standard. The fact that it was so bad the US gave up on the standard isn't a reason for it not to be a true example of stuff that can happen under gold standards.

But great, you've moved away from arguing deflation's a good thing and that goods prices going down each year makes investment more attractive to merely advocating metallic standards. Let's talk about how great living under gold standards was socioeconomically during periods the US wasn't giving away their gold reserves to try to maintain them:

> As for the socioeconomic side of things, again I'd just appeal to the data.

> I'm going to assume that was accidental, because it's complete misinformation.

Imagine insisting you wanted to argue about data and then crying "complete misinformation" because the data shows the opposite of what you want it to show; a pretty consistent downward trend in relative expenditure of food bar the WWII spike.

If you're curious about what it was like prior there are lots of graphs and data points here showing things like food prices being as high as 40% of household budgets at the beginning of the 20th century! For related reasons - even though house prices were low - 81% of families rented! Some nice steep downslopes on those graphs showing proportions of budget spent on necessities too. https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending.... .

Honestly, I'm a bit surprised you didn't already know that: "ordinary people used to spend most of their money on basics" feels like something I first learned in primary school history classes rather than undergrad, and there are plenty of reasons why this trend exists. But what's more surprising is that you're making these very, very confident claims about how much easier it was to afford basics in that era than this era, making very strong causal claims about the form of money being the root of all economic ills and the need to revert to the monetary systems of a status quo ante bellum, and yet you don't even seem to think that it might be relevant to check what people were spending all their money on (80% on necessities earlier in the century...)

> I would also add on this point that it's also not just the issue of the super-bubble, but also social responses to such. The DNC is getting overrun by literal socialist candidates starting to accumulate seats and influence everywhere. I assume you're the sort to realize that their thinking of socialism is much more sickle and hammer than it is Norway, which isn't socialist in the least. And that's again largely a consequence of our current system which is drowning the lower classes and taking the upper to unprecedented highs.

History has always had radicals. In the 1890s the DNC got fully taken over by a populist whose entire mission was to abolish the gold standard[1], to the enthusiasm of the rural poor who blamed it for their poverty and disdain of the wealthy. By contrast the last significant politician to campaign for a return to the gold standard was an entirely different form of radical in Herman "Don't Blame Wall Street! Blame Yourself" Cain...

And today... well the hammer and sickle types aren't really to my taste either, but they've still got a better idea of cause and effect than the people whose proposed answer to inequality comes straight out of billionaire funded think tanks recommending reductions in regulations, taxes on corporations, investors and the rich, dismantling of the welfare state and the reintroduction of the gold standard.

As for the European socialist types, well several of them have successfully reduced inequality to much lower levels than existed in their countries during the early 20th century. None of them have done so by bringing back a gold standard.

[1]admittedly he wasn't sophisticated enough to imagine a monetary system linked to credit rather than metal, but the whole point of populist arguments for bimetallism was that the standard was "crucifying us on a cross of gold" by causing acute shortages of money

P.S. a linear trend which at turns into an exponential growth curve absolutely does have an inflection point, as do rising logistic curves more commonly found in economic data.(the second derivative of an exponential growth phase of a curve is an increasing function and the second derivative of a linear trend is 0). Graphs which smooth into a simple decreasing concave function do not, however, which is why I found it amusing why you were so determined to find one around the point the gold bugs tell you it should exist.

I haven't moved my argument at all. What I have said, from the very beginning, is that the excessive printing of money distorts the economy and causes perverse incentives. So that printing needs to be hard constrained. I've indulged tangents outside of this because I think the topic is fascinating and I always learn a bit during these sort of discussions, so why not?

The food argument is weak. Thinking about it more - household sizes were larger, household labor distribution was very different (far more single income families), agricultural and other advances have driven down prices independent of economic systems, and so on. Using your baseline value as the start of the Great Depression is just the start of problems there. Reasonably controlled data would look quite different.

You are also repeating a fallacy that you seem to believe. The US did not drop the gold standard after the Great Depression. We remained on it until 1971. The reason we dropped it in 1971 is because we defaulted. As the government began increasingly reckless money printing in the 60s, we began unable to keep up the facade of the dollar being based on anything. The French made a large gold call, and we chose to default on our obligations.

In the 150 years from 1800 to 1950 (if you want to claim the inflationary trend had already began then) there was a total inflation of 44%. In the 75 years since 1950, there's been total inflation of 1347%. It looks a bit better if we use 1971 as the date, but not dramatically so. In general I could not care less about what causes the constraints, but the government themselves getting to decide how much they print is increasingly obviously unsustainable.

If you didn't get the point in my previous message regarding the socioeconomic issues - I am saying that all of these things are going to be entirely evident to billionaires as well. They'll get rich in either system since capitalism itself will always have a tendency towards the rich getting richer. But the big question is what happens to the other 90% (and in particular the ~70%) which, in turn, plays a large role in what happens to the 0.01%.

And in there, inflation is most certainly not working the overwhelming majority's favor. The invisible wage depression alone is going to result in the end of capitalism if it's not fixed, which is going to leave everybody way worse off. And requiring wages be adjusted to inflation is just going to trend towards hyper-inflation. There's only one solution, so far as I can see - money printing needs to be restrained.

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Jennings did not want to abolish the gold standard. What started the entire issue was funny money printing during the Civil War which heavily distorted the economy. This eventually led to the government returning to the gold standard for that funny money, which turned it immediately into real money. But the teasing of unlimited money struck up a debate as to whether the monetary supply should be further expanded and, if so, then how. And there was already a faction of 'greenbackers' that wanted it expanded with unbacked greenbacks - funny money. Jennings wanted controlled expansion with silver. That's mostly just kicking the can, but still much more reasonable than funny money.

And no, a linear function that becomes exponential does not have a mathematical inflection point. I don't know if you understand what you're saying because you are actually saying completely correct things and then contradicting yourself. As you already said, a mathematical inflection point is when a system changes from concave to convex or vice versa. Going from linear growth to exponential is a purely convex system in the context that we're discussing - there is no mathematical inflection point, but a rather obvious inflection point in the colloquial speak that we were obviously using.