Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

i think this would only work with fixed rate debt which narrows it down to home and, maybe, auto loans. However, there are variable loans for everything (including homes) and they're pushed heavily since there's more profit on a variable rate loan.

Fiat money (or anything that increases the supply of money, like gold rushes) is the common factor with all instances of inflation. There are thousands of years of examples of this.

You're right on one point, the Law of Supply & Demand. It is an emergent property of many individual actions, though each might be completely ignorant of the big picture.

The Econ 101 is the complete opposite. Bonds usually have fixed rates, whereas stock prices are in principal tied to revenues, and nominal revenues should increase with inflation--companies increasing prices is literally how most people experience inflation. But Econ 101 also suggests that in the short term things will be more complex than all that because price adjustments won't be instantaneous. Fear and volatility will create demand for bonds, which could offset to some extent the clearly diminishing nominal value of fixed-rate bonds.

Note that a key factor here isn't inflation, per se, but the rate of change in inflation. From an Econ 101 perspective 2% inflation is no different than 20% inflation if things are otherwise steady-state. Stocks are the better bet because in principal they should respond more quickly to changes in the inflation rate. If inflation is steady, bonds in principal are the simpler, cheaper instrument.

> This is just absurd. Not only is this a period so different than a modern economy that it's not useful for comparison,

I hear that a lot. Nobody is ever able to explain what law of economics changed in 1914. The Law of Supply & Demand was just the same as it always was.

> but during that period it was a roller coaster of inflation and deflation, both of which are terrible for people. Those curious can see the volatility here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Historical_Inflat...

All of the spikes were the result of the US government meddling with the economy (such as bimetalism and other nonsense, see Friedman's "Monetary History of the United States"). Except for the big one, coincidentally coincident with the California gold rush. Or is that a coincidence? Tons of gold flooding into the economy, what would the consequence of that be? Hmmm.

Heating and light, yes.

You can, and people have throughout the last century and a half, both for heat and light. In terms of winter, the fact that kerosene lanterns provide "a bit of light and a lot of heat" is useful - though the light coming off a good cold blast lantern is just wonderful, year round. A nice continuous spectrum, cooler than candles, but still a very nice yellow-orange, with more than enough to read by.

I've been experimenting with them for a while now, and as far as I can tell, a properly burning kerosene lantern doesn't put any measurable particulate in the air, at least as far as PM2.5 or PM10. Run them too high, they'll certainly smoke, but run properly, I can't measure any real difference with the meters I have. They should be burning cleanly.

The same goes for the wick type kerosene heaters - either convection or radiant. They should be burning clean, and if you get any smoke off them, you've got a problem that needs fixing (the good news is that it's almost always either just burning them dry to remove tars from the wick, or at worst replacing the wick).

You shouldn't be getting any carbon monoxide off them either. That's from incomplete combustion, which, again, shouldn't be happening. A properly designed and operating lantern or heater will be feeding a strong draft into the burner. A window slightly open should provide enough venting for a typical unit burning - though I'd have a CO meter around any combustion heat as a normal habit anymore.

If you're burning 1K, you'll get some kerosene odor on startup and shutdown, but it shouldn't be much during operation. However, if you're in the US (perhaps other places too), you can get Klean Heat, which is a kerosene substitute that's somewhat more expensive (~$15/gal vs about $10 for 1K out here), but burns significantly cleaner. It behaves the same, so can burn in the same lanterns, but just burns cleaner all around - less odor, less wick fouling (though that's not usually a big issue with 1K, just the red dyed stuff), etc.

But, yes, I very much do refer to kerosene as a backup for heating. I prefer it over propane - it smells better (propane has a bit of a metallic tang, kerosene is a far warmer smell), and I don't have a pressurized bottle of flammable gas in the house. Kerosene is combustible - not flammable. The flash point of the stuff you should be using is around 140F, which means below that temperature, it doesn't emit enough vapor to ignite in regular air. Gasoline's flash point is -40, give or take, so it will happily generate vapors in regular air looking for a thing to light them of. Especially in the winter, at 40-50F, kerosene is quite safe compared to other heating solutions.

Anyway, it's something to look into. Our energy systems are not in good shape globally, and being able to stay warm with the power grid down and the natural gas empty seems like the sort of thing one might want to consider more lately.