Alan Greenspan has died

I've endeavored to completely read your messages. I would appreciate if you returned the courtesy to avoid needless repetition when our messages are already somewhat lengthy owing to the large number of simultaneous topics. And also please cite your numbers - you're now pulling a bunch of numbers/facts out of nowhere that seem largely hallucinated. Citations would go a long way here and take like 3 seconds. So here are the apples to apples base data for the most recent branch of discussion:

Percent of all housing units 'owned' by their occupants = 53% in 1950, 58% in 2025 [1].

Percent of 'owned' housing units without a mortgage = 56% in 1950, 39.4% in 2025. [2]

Approximate (max) rate of 'real ownership' (multiplying the two values) = 29.7% in 1950, 22.9% in 2025.

The first link also goes into detail on the demographic collapse I mentioned showing 'ownership' in people under 35 is at 36.8% and continuing to trend downwards. The local max is being driven by the elderly in non-urban low-income states, as already mentioned. I also have specifically focused on issues above and beyond inflation. Inflation is an effect, not a cause. The cause of these problems (of which inflation is but one) is money printing and the transition to becoming a debt driven society.

I 100% agree that things were awful in 1930. It was the worst economic event in 150 years of deflationary systems in the US that also came on the tail end a number of catastrophes setting up a perfect storm. But focusing on this time is like me arguing that the past was better than 2008. Well yeah, I'd certainly hope so! But in that case it'd say a whole lot less about the past than it would about 2008. I do agree 1950 isn't ideal in a perfect world but it's probably about as good as we can get on balance of the difference in the systems + reliable/impartial data we can obtain and it being a fairly 'normal' era during a time of world war and catastrophic plagues.

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The latter part of your post turned into an unhinged and incoherent jumble of ad hominem and strawmen. That, I will admit, I am skimming over. If you want to phrase things like an adult, and argue against what I'm actually saying, then I'll happily read it again.

[1] - https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

[2] - https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2026/01/mortgage-free...

I've already mentioned that the contemporary data are also restrictive. The (of total) maximum possible free and clear owned housing stock is 30% [1] since it's only 45 million units out of a total housing stock of 147. And it'd be even lower because we're only considering owner occupied, and corporations own about 10% of houses in modern times - yet another 'yay' for funny money driven inflation evasion and speculation. So the max would be in the 20s at the absolute most, yet we get 39.4% of homes being owned free and clear. How? By removing a lot of the housing stock from consideration. In any case, much of the stock removed in the 1950s data works against me. For instance farm units had even more favorable ownership rates than general housing stock. There is no 'trick' in the data here.

I've also already said I fully agree that the data we're using isn't ideal in terms of inflation. It was right after WW2 and so there was some serious localized inflation, as well as some early funny money stuff. But 1950 is pretty a pretty reasonable inflection point between 'the good ole days' and the inflation squeeze of modern times. If your argument is that inflation/money printing from the 40s was causing the positive outcomes, you end up with a logical contradiction because we engage in orders of magnitude greater inflation/money printing today, yet have worse outcomes by endless metrics. Furthermore, 1950 wasn't some local max. Most data there was significantly worse than the era prior to the wars, spanish flu, and so on.

As for investment, expected value [2] is a term you do not seem familiar with. It is a risk adjusted value of expected return on something. In modern times any potential venture needs an expected value greater than inflation to break even. That immediately leads to the scenario where you need infinite exponential growth or this economic system collapses. That infinite exponential growth briefly looked possible. Now the digital explosion is plateauing, there's a fertility collapse (which again is very possibly caused, at least in part, by this system's failures) and more. If LLMs or space don't restart the game of kick the can, this system will die. The only question is whether it will go out with a boom or a whimper.

[1] - https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2023.B25081

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

> I've also already said I fully agree that the data we're using isn't ideal in terms of inflation.

It's not a case of it being not ideal. It's the case of it being an example of literally the opposite phenomenon from the one you're arguing for. Arguing that the 1950s are a good example of how deflation helps people is like arguing that Barack Obama is a good example of how Republican candidates make good presidents.

> As for investment, expected value [2] is a term you do not seem familiar with. It is a risk adjusted value of expected return on something.

hahahahahahaha

Again, it's a basic definitional thing that EV isn't adjusted for the investor's risk tolerance (it's a probability weighted average, as your link and many better introductory economics and finance texts you should probably read will tell you.)

Not only am I familiar with what expected value actually means and its use as a synonym for risk-neutral return in investment parlance, I'm also apparently the only participant in the discussion aware that 0.1% expected return isn't likely to leave enough of a risk premium[1] and (ii) investors also have to consider opportunity cost, so even in a world filled with insane risk-neutral investors who'd in principle be comfortable betting their house on a fair coin flip, they still wouldn't touch an investment at a nominal 0.1% return in a gold standard world, because the opportunity cost would be giving up much higher returns on lending the money elsewhere. Because unlike you I know that market and base interest rates are a thing and why they're relevant to the argument. And also they're not the same thing as inflation and are in fact generally inversely related[2].

Once we've got past the basic definitional stuff and the "why doesn't this hypothetical gold standard economy where you're considering investing in a productive venture for a 0.1% return have anyone else that wants to borrow your money?", I could question what sort of venture would get a 0.1% nominal return when prices of stuff it might make are going down, and only get a 0.1% nominal return in an inflationary environment where the prices of stuff it might make are going up[3]. It's easier to make more than 0.1% making stuff to sell next year when prices of everything are going to be 2% higher, and harder when prices of everything are going to be 2% lower.

Again, if you don't have the basic grasp of the relevant terms you're quoting (some of them more high school than undergrad) never mind sufficient grasp to understand even an argument as simple as "risking money to earn 0.1% is not attractive when money is in short supply" have the decency to the possibility that you might not be in a position to know best about how the economy works. Also, if you don't like billionaire capital owners having too much money, maybe don't pin your hopes on the only policy prescription that hasn't trended towards the CATO institute, von Mises and Ayn Rand's[4] arguments in favour of letting billionaires keep more of their money since the 1950s...

[1]in any economy except, ironically, an economy with lots of money printing (seriously, go learn about QE. Hint: it's printing lots of money because printing lots of money is a way to get people interested in investing when interest rates are very low)

[2]and also why, and covering the relevant transmission mechanisms might take half a semester of undergrad macro, but even understanding that money isn't cheap to borrow when its in short supply would get you there.

[3]I mean, when I say wonder, I actually know that the most likely way of achieving that with actual goods and services is if it's an inferior good with negative income elasticity. I'm just not sure why anybody would want to base economic policy on incentivising the production of inferior goods with negative income elasticities, even if such a policy were feasible.

[4]weird how it's all these extremely rabidly pro-billionaire personalities and organizations and none of the pro-worker organizations that want the gold standard back, considering your conviction that it will be good for workers and bad for billionaires.

> In investing, you seem to be trying to derive variance from expected value, which is impossible. And risk is not the same thing as variance.

It's funny, because two posts ago you wrote the words "expected value is a term you do not seem familiar with. It is a risk adjusted value of expected return on something". So you're really only arguing against yourself here

But variance is, in fact a way for investors to assess risk (again, if you had an adult-level of understanding of the subject matter or even a modicum of self awareness you wouldn't keep contesting definitions for no reason). And since investors care about risk adjusted returns, they do not think an expected 0.1% nominal return on productive activity is attractive, least of all in a deflationary environment. (Sure, you can't directly derive variance from expected return, but you don't need to do that to rule out ludicrous scenarios like a sub 10 basis point risk premium on investing in productive activity whilst prices fall, which means you don't invest at 0.1%)

> It's entirely possible for an investment with a 0.1% EV to have a lower variance than one with a 15% EV.

Sure. It is however entirely impossible for a productive venture with a 0.1% EV to have an attractive risk adjusted return under deflation. Nobody with an adult level understanding of finance would make this argument, let alone still be trying to defend it by arguing against their own attempted gotcha multiple posts later. Because they understand basics like "deflation causes debt to be more expensive" (remember a week ago when you wrote that, apparently without understanding what it means), and 0.1% is not a high return on risky activity when debt is expensive. And also, they understand that the risk-adjusted return will be negative, particularly as risks to commercial activity increase under deflation caused by monetary policy intentionally starving the economy of capital).

> Because the point is that anything with a real expected return of "x" in an inflationary system has a real return of e.g. "x+5" (or whatever the exact delta happens to be) in a non-inflationary system

Again, this is just an assertion that only somebody with no understanding of basic stuff like how inflation/deflation affects sales prices and interest rates would make. It is very easy to argue that the price somebody has to pay a wealthier person to borrow money being x+5 rather than x is a bad thing, if you believe that it is better for economies to reward people that make stuff rather than people that have stuff.

The actual point was that it's harder to make a positive money return producing stuff to sell when next year's price is y-2 rather than y+2, and in those circumstances also easy to make a small real return doing nothing or a big real return lending to cover short term debts instead.

Again, I'm sorry you don't understand this, but it's really, really not possible to contest the fact that deflation does not incentivise investment if you understand supply and demand to high school level (never mind the actual nuances of interest rates and transmission mechanisms). I guess I can look forward to you eventually accepting that it doesn't whilst attempting to attribute your current position to me in five days time.

If only you could trade some of your unmatched reserves of persistence for a little actual knowledge... (you could, for example,read a book instead of doubling down on being wrong by Googling more economic terms to insinuate I'm missing whilst not even being able to define them without making mistakes)

> But the really interesting thing? Go open their graphs and look where the inflection point is. It's, again, the funny money

The really interesting thing is that you've actually managed to find an economic chart without an inflection point to make argument about inflection points, which is quite an achievement! The trend line over the period displayed appears to be a noisy concave function with the noise attributable to economic cycles.

Although if you put a gun to my head any asked me to point to what looks most like an inflection point in this graph without an actual inflection point, I'd probably point to the steepening of the downslope of the curve around the millennium which doesn't seem to have much to do with leaving the gold standard or inflation being high....

Watching you pretend to understand the subject matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WZLJpMOxS4

> 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