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The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#341

Post by XargonEnder »

tomp wrote: post #265
atq2119 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I agree with your thought process here. Proclamations of certainty around UBI are common, but the only intellectually honest position is that we simply do not have enough empirical data to tell with a useful level of confidence how a UBI would affect inflation. Also, I believe that the only way to collect that empirical data is to implement a UBI at a sufficiently large scale and see what happens.

There really is no reason why you wouldn’t be able to pair government intervention on the demand side (i.e. UBI) with government intervention on the supply side. Simply introduce quotas about supply (e.g. that shops cannot throw away more than 1% of the food they sell), and/or limits on non-productive assets (e.g. freeze rents & Netflix subscription). I’m sure there are many smarter interventions than I was able to c…

I've spent a lot of time in volunteering for the food bank in my area and the local grocery stores generally give food away right before it goes bad. They're already incentivized to do this because we give them tax write-offs.

Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#342

Post by mac01021 »

N1H1L wrote: post #340
maxsilver wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- A bunch are staying un-bought and remain empty. (The bottom of the market is closing in hours , the top of the market is sitting for months ) - A bunch are technically getting occupied, but buyers are having to go way beyond their means to get them. (2008-style, except it's not their fault, you have to live somewhere or die, and you can't manufacture used housing, so it's hard to fault them for taking on risky mort…

But isn't this creating a house of cards? Or are we heading towards China, where there are in many cases more apartments than people and yet prices have never fallen in the last three decades.

If a large fraction of the dwellings are truly unoccupied then it is a bubble plain and simple.

If it's just a matter of out-of-state money willing to pay a high price to own houses that they can then rent out for a high price after cornering the market, then it's less clear.

Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#343

Post by kbelder »

alex_smart wrote: post #333
yunohn wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indian market is much more price sensitive That’s an odd way to say India is way poorer, and there’s no way the avg Indian can afford to pay a US price for Netflix. People being price sensitive is only an additive effect on top of that. (India => any developing country)

It might sound an odd way to phrase things, but it was both more fine-grained and more meaningful than your rephrasing. The average Indian earns less than 4 dollars a day. The average Indian still buys their shampoo in little 5ml sachets that cost 2cents because they can't afford the full bottle even though buying the full bottle would be cheaper in the long run. So, the average Indian definitely can't afford to pay…

I wonder how that compares to the financial demographics of China? I had the impression they were bringing more citizens up into the lower-middle class, but I might have just uncritically accepted some spin.

Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#344

Post by bananabreakfast »

maxsilver wrote: post #301
treeman79 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Triple the housing supply. Prices will go down.

The Midwest US can assure you that they've definitely already tried this. We're literally mowing down every cornfield for housing here (I'm typing this from a neighborhood with thousands of units, 90% of all buildings here were built after 2012). It never works, prices are still at an all-time high, even for units on the market 6+ months or longer. "Just building more" alone isn't ever going to lower prices enough to…

You can't say it never works because your definition of "works" is completely off base.

The population is continuously growing. We must build housing as fast as it grows to just maintain parity, and even faster to reduce prices.

Saying building new houses doesn't work to lower prices is like being in a boat taking on water and after throwing a couple buckets of water overboard saying "bailing out water doesn't work" because there's still water in the boat.

Unless you ban immigration and babies, you have to build strictly faster than new people arrive. Wealthily people with multiple houses are not the driving problem behind housing shortages.

Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#345

Post by kryptozinc »

yunohn wrote: post #275
alex_smart wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The marginal cost for a new subscriber is practically zero, so there should be no price increase caused by a shortage. Yeah, I don't think that that argument works at all. The price does not increase due to "shortage", it increases due to an increase in consumers' willingness to pay. Going by the Netflix example, if Netflix realizes that not too many people will cancel their subscriptions if they were to increase th…

> Indian market is much more price sensitive That’s an odd way to say India is way poorer, and there’s no way the avg Indian can afford to pay a US price for Netflix. People being price sensitive is only an additive effect on top of that. (India => any developing country)

It is not just about being "poorer", people in developing countries are indeed more price sensitive about technology services. They do not perceive the "value" of the product same as the west does.

Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#346

Post by imaginenore »

tinyhouse wrote: post #304
nine_zeros wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto has provided an alternative to gold. The same printed dollars that would normally go to gold is flowing into crypto. The new generation of gold miners are not mining gold. That's why gold hasn't risen dramatically. Crypto is absorbing the inflation.

People who fear inflation not gonna put their dollars into crypto. Too speculative. They would buy land or silver etc.

I fear inflation and I put 99% of my savings in crypto years ago. It's been going insanely well, to put it mildly.

Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#347

Post by Gustomaximus »

127 wrote: post #249

Just throwing this in the air: in the 1970, getting off the gold standard made it possible to take much more debt in varied ways. This probably enabled the rich and the corporations to drain a much larger part of the economy for themselves. Also throwing this in the air: debt might not actually increase productivity unless it's explicitly only used for productive purposes. Even then it seems dubious. The whole argume…

> The whole argument of using debt to build a business smells funny.

I think this conflates generally running at a loss with debt, but there is also positive investment.

E.g. Many property developers run on ever increasing debt as they grow, and many of these business do really well. They are using debt to create something of value, sell it and then replay debt.

But if a company is using debt (or equity) to keep growing with overly hopeful future profitability plans, then yeah this is not good.

Both use debt, one is totally normal and common. The other 'smells funny', so I feel it more about the value creation the debt is used for to build the business than the actual debt.

Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#348

Post by InvertedRhodium »

syshum wrote: post #278
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I note that all your statistics are based on figures that only involve the number of people that successfully obtained healthcare which seems like it's ignoring the possibility that a significant percentage don't have access to those wait lists at all. If you only let half of your population on the list in the first place, I don't think it's overly shocking that metrics across the board would appear better. I'd be in…

Ok show me the stat that 50% of people that desire healthcare do not have access to it? Even the most aggressive numbers on uninsured in the use put it about 15% to 20% of the population, no where near the 50% you are claiming in your comment There was a time in my 20's where I did not have insurance, I still had (and got) care when I needed it. Sure it was expensive but I was never denied services. Yes you can find…

> Ok show me the stat that 50% of people that desire healthcare do not have access to it?

That was an example, simplified so as to make the impact more obvious. Take any country on the planet, and look at their healthcare figures - now exclude the poorest 50% of people from accessing the medical system in those countries. Bet the numbers look better now.

> There was a time in my 20's where I did not have insurance, I still had (and got) care when I needed it. Sure it was expensive but I was never denied services.

I'm not sure how relevant personal anecdotes are when you're talking about the healthcare of an entire population. But hey - good work mate.

Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#349

Post by cerved »

runeks wrote: post #218
cerved wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If she's not an economist, what is it that lends credence to her writing about economics and monetary policy?

The fact that it’s possible to acquire knowledge outside of university.

Right, so what is it about this particular individual that lends credibility?

If an economist was writing about computer science, everybody on HN would dismiss it.

Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation

#350

Post by inter_netuser »

woofie11 wrote: post #303
inter_netuser wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you ignore infant mortality, life expectancy was late 50s during Ancient Rome times. not too bad.

I don't believe your number. Citation required. And I'm serious about that. I'm sure it's possible to get that number somehow, but the devil is in the details. Do you factor in: - Famines? - Wars? - Being killed by bandits? - Are you talking about the city of Rome? Italy? Gaul? - Just rich people, or do you include folks like slaves? - Etc. If you're going to accuse me of giving bad information, you'll need to provid…

this is direct from wikipedia's article on ancient roman demographics. first result on google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire....

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