41–50 of 191 posts
Who would this hurt, anyway? Rich people keep their “money” in the form of socks, bonds and properties anyway.
Poor people “failing” the Marshmallow Test is taken as not having impulse control — but I’d argue studies fail to account for different life experience in people taking your “marshmallow” away, no matter what they promise.
This is stealing marshmallows on an industrial scale.
That is the digital economy of the future. Tagged credits, some with expirations and other constraints (perhaps geospatial). It's the only reasonable way to implement something like UBI: give everyone X "food credits" and Y "housing credits" each week. There would still be fraud and "credit laundering" to get around the expirations, but the overall waste would be tiny compared to the legacy finance system.
We don't want that
What you could do though (i'm not an economist) is to periodically introduce Monetary and Fiscal Policies that reset/adjust the economy (outside a government's influence e.g. Central Bank + Supreme Court).
Even normal money expires via something other than inflation. I have a bunch of CHF that can only be exchanged at the Swiss national bank now. No idea if I’ll ever be able to do that.
This might not help you if you’re outside the country, but I believe the railway ticket office and the post office will also accept them. An anecdote: few months ago, my partner actually exchanged a 100 CHF note in the big SNB building on Bürkliplatz, and it’s essentially a Jason Bourne scene (although that wasn’t really Zurich in the movie). You walk in, a guy speaking with a stereotypical Bünzli accent takes your n…
At a numismatics fair, I saw a 10 CHF note in a stack priced at 4 USD, and thought "Woo! Free money!"
However, it was a 5th series note, which were fully demonetized in 2000.
Complete insanity. Don’t plan for the future. Don’t delay gratification. Never save up enough money that you’re allowed to have a taste of true freedom. Always be precarious, always be dependent on your boss for the next handout, lest your food and shelter be in jeopardy. Don’t step out of line, lest that handout be jeopardized. Keep your hands off my bank account.
Roughly, state backed currencies seem to inflate by about an order of magnitude each generation, a nickle 40 years ago will buy what $.50 buys today. When I was a kid, soda was $0.25, now $2.50 for a bottle of pop is not uncommon, state money does expire and whats in your bank account can be taken away anytime.
Thank god we've had a solution to this problem for over a decade now but it might take another decade still for normal average people to catch on, I'm still surprised the HN crowd is so far behind in this regard :(
Even his percentage of cost to hoarding money is in the ballpark of current inflation.
This was written in a time before inflation, where hoarding cash was not stupid. Today it is. We don't need the incentive to increase the velocity of money.
Well, I say that, but too many people just have their savings in a cash account. Sometimes not even a saving account, but an account with no interest at all.
But then again that just means that the bank invests it in one way or another.
Short of physical cash, there's not really any way to keep money being "unused".
To be fair, we tried it when people had money on insert any crypto exchange name The results weren’t great.
If money expires/inflates, people use it to buy something to hedge it, which creates a bubble in that asset. The real estate bubble created by low interest rates is exactly what happens to everything else in an inflationary environment. Hedges include gold and metals, land, art and alternative assets, or like Wiemar [0], people just spend devalued money on gambling and prostitution. If history is any indicator of what happens when you debase a currency, I'd say the best hedges are a second passport and ammo.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture#Berlin's_reputa...