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this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Question for the economists in this thread. Everyone seems to be saying that a lack of at least some inflation is bad but also that wages going up to meet it is bad. Isn't this a system automatically doomed to fail? Eventually in such a setup no one can afford anything and the economy collapses.
Inflation is fine as long as wages rise with it.
The issue is our economy is entirely built around low interest rates and low inflation. It's been that way for a generation. This benefit asset-holders like home owners and the wealthy. Hence why they are doing everything possible to avoid wage-growth. They don't care about inflation, what they are terrified of is wage growth and higher interest rates.
If wages rise together with inflation you get hyper inflation.
No, that's nonsense. Wages going up are not going to cause 1,000% inflation per year.
I hate to agree with the other guy, but we just saw massive inflation during pandemic because corps refuse to eat ANY loss in profit. It's all fucking greed.
A big part of that was greed, but not due to rising wages as the poster suggests. Real wages (which means inflation adjusted) did rise sharply in the immediate time after the pandemic recession, but stabilized by 2022.
There were legitimate bottleneck issues that caused some prices to rise. Companies then saw that they had a once in a century opportunity to raise them even more and blame bottlenecks. Despite what a lot of people think, companies can't raise prices arbitrarily in most circumstances. They'll just lose customers. This particular situation, though, meant that everyone could do it at once and customers would just have to bear it.
But it will and there's plenty of precedent, like Weimar Republic.
That's not how that works. That's not at all how that works.
Right... Well, enlighten us all! Maybe you'll get a prize or something for disproving economists!
Waving your hands around and saying "Wiemar Germany inflation" is the economic equivalent of "Rome fell because feminisim/immigration/too many homosexuals/not enough homosexuals/Christianity/didn't use Heron's steam engine/lack of Starbucks". It's brought out by people with an agenda and a willingness to twist any historical fact to make things fit that agenda.
No, that was because of high volumes of money printing to pay debts.
Yeah, debts to workers.
Are you just making up "facts" as the contradictions flow? Or did someone else make up these "facts" and you just parrot them?
Debts to other countries. Apparently, you don't know the first thing about how that happened.
Not an economist per se, but what my econ prof in college put on the test is, more or less, that workers' penury will eventually force them to take action to raise wages. This includes everything from strike actions to workers in general simply refusing to take the lowest-paid jobs anymore. The fact that employers will delay this process as long as possible and keep the raises as small as possible and workers will have to fight like hell to get even pitiful raises is also part of the theory. It's a story of gIvE aNd tAKe that ignores the government took massive action last year to prevent the labor market from responding to the new market conditions and routinely acts to prevent wages from rising "too fast." The price of everything can inflate to hell, but if the price of labor goes up in direct response just like every other commodity, whoa now, stop the presses, that's an economic problem.
Some inflation is necessary to prevent wealth hoarding. It's one reason we moved away from the gold standard.
Minimum wage needs to be tied to it though because we're still seeing a huge amount of wealth disparity which is exactly what inflation is meant to solve.
Inflation doesn't prevent wealth hoarding. In fact it benefits non-cash assets which the rich hoard plenty.
That's an issue with non-cash assets (like cash was when we moved away from the gold standard). And why Bernie suggested they be taxed heavily.
But the intention of inflation, was to prevent the hoarding caused by the gold standard.
How does reducing the value of cash prevent hoarding of gold (which would be worth more cash then)?
It's not to prevent hoarding gold, it's to prevent hoarding money. When tied to the gold standard when gold is worth more, money is worth more, and vice versa. By not selling my gold (or using my money), the gold (and cash) in circulation becomes artificially worth more, as the law of supply and demand dictates. This encourages the hoarding of cash because your money becomes more valuable the less money is in circulation.
The paper standard solves this through yearly inflation and decommodifying money. Commodities are subject to the law of supply and demand. Paper money isn't and shouldn't be. When both currency and the things we buy with currency are subject to the law of supply and demand, the system breaks down, essentially.
So, we no longer tie money to commodities. A lesson we learned the hard way, unfortunately.
But then they just hoard real estate.
You're right, and it's basically a loophole in the system. It should be fixed.
Inflation is easier to handle and not as bad for the economy as deflation, so that's where we are always at.
2% inflation and 2.5%-3% wage gains where the difference is made up by productivity gains would be the ideal.
The thing people are scared of is a wage-price spiral where inflation is 10% so wages have to rise 10% which increases employer costs so they raise prices 10% so wages have to rise 10% etc. High inflation that becomes self-perpetuating.
Wages rising faster than inflation is good, but the risk of a wage-price spiral is what people are afraid of with rising wages.
The problem is credit. People and government buying things not with money but credit. Basically IOUs from a parent to a child. In this metaphor it's like our shitty fucking parents paying home security bills amd groceries with credit cards and using cash for the casinos.
I honestly don't get it. Why do prices have to go up even if wages don't? It seems like some people say that some kind of inflation is absolutely necessary no matter what.
Because profit.
They don't HAVE to go up, but inflation is helpful to the economy and deflation is harmful. With deflation everyone stops spending because their dollar will buy more tomorrow, and that lack of activity hurts the economy.
With a little bit of steady inflation it encourages spending, but wages tend to keep up so it doesn't actually hurt people.
Also those times when inflation outpaces wage growth are theoretically helpful (in a market that doesn't have other failures) because if wage growth has stalled that means the value of that labor to the employer has decreased, and inflation helps reset that value calculation without making it a normal thing for companies to reduce your wage at an annual review, think of how hard that would be to budget for.
I really want to know where people got the idea that people would stop spending because their money is supposedly worth 2% more after a year. The only examples I see given are things like economic downturns (i.e. credit freezes and layoffs), where there is deflation because people are spending less for reasons other than deflation. To give an example of deflation not being harmful, just look at technology. Technology gets better and cheaper all the time, but it's not like nobody is buying technology, quite the opposite in fact.
I've read that it's a debt problem more than anything else. The world runs on credit, and inflation decreases the debt burden. When dollar value goes down thanks to the inflation, the value of the debt also goes down so it becomes easier to pay off (at least for those who do get inflation raises...). So essentially the rich get richer thanks to inflation.
That's factored into the interest rate of loans. Inflation only decreases the debt burden when inflation increases higher than the average rate AND the one who needs to pay is actually getting more money. What's the difference between a loan with a 6% interest rate when there's 2% inflation and a loan with a 2% interest rate when there's 2% deflation?
It's nearly impossible for us to maintain the value of money. More is printed every day, much is destroyed at a rate that can't be tracked, and the economy is fucking complex. Because of all that it will either be in an inflationary or deflationary state at any given moment
Generally speaking inflation is better overall than deflation, so we try to keep a low inflation rate going so it's not out of control and doesn't enter deflation
Not an economist at all. I can't say anything about refusing to raise wages, I don't know for sure that wages increasing to match inflation is bad for anyone except the capitalist class.
Inflation being more desirable than deflation is simple enough though. If prices are constantly, slowly, going up, it means that your purchasing power with an amount of money is always highest right now as opposed to in the future. This encourages spending - why wait to buy this thing in going to buy anyway, if it'll be 3% more expensive next year? The one thing we absolutely don't want is people just hoarding money, sitting on it because prices will go DOWN tomorrow. This leads to a stagnant economy, where there's no money moving, and that's bad for everyone.
And yet we have a whole class of people who hoard the most money.
I've heard this argument in economics videos, but if you think critically, you can't wait to buy necessities no matter what way the dollar is moving. And even in an inflationary environment things that you can wait for will go down in price over time. They'll age, newer versions will come out, a used market starts up for it, etc. So waiting for prices to come down doesn't seem to be related to inflation at all.
And to give a more concrete example, think of the speed of inflation (assuming 2%/year). Well if we had a year of deflation at 2%, why would I wait an entire year for my $1000 product to be $980. The savings is a pittance.
Most of economics assumes perfectly rational actors capable of making these delayed purchases. It's a bit reductive for sure, and hard to say how much the real world maps to the theory, but the logic works assuming those caveats.