Economics Needs a Post-Crash Revolution
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1) No more need to buy a dedicated device for photography and video recording
2) No more need to buy a Speech Recognition specialized software
3) No more need to buy a specialized remote control
4) No more need to buy a flashlight
5) No more need to buy a landline wired phone
6) No more need to buy a sound recorder
7) No more need to buy a physical storage (CD, DVD, etc)
8) No more need to buy a ... you can continue
All this affects a lot of companies. Just think how many of them will either run out of business or will stay in a niche consumer mode.
There are only two smartphone operating systems controlled by basically two companies.
There are only few hardware for smartphones companies, like silicon fabs, and several fabless design companies.
Anyway, most of the needs of a typical consumer are satisfied with only one device: The Smartphone
Poor people have lots of flashy, brand-name merchandise. Wealthy people, on the other hand, own things that are hand-crafted out of natural materials, often bespoke to them. News for the masses is flashy, digital, and tailored to the individual; news for the elites, the top of the top, comes printed on real paper, just like they did in the old days.
It's not that the elites are Luddites, eschewing technology. Rather, it's a very subtle part of their lives, a hint of fennel as opposed to a tablespoon of cayenne.
I suspect this is not unlike where we are going.
Smartphones, tablets, and laptops have swallowed almost every other electronic device, and you don't really even need to upgrade that often. I pick up a new iPhone every four years or so, and mostly just for the camera upgrades (and a fresh battery).
I suspect the trend for desiring high-quality, locally-produced craft goods will accelerate. Raw materials may come from everywhere, but fast fashion is being replaced with sustainable clothing, and I don't see Generation Z being invested in the high-bling party lifestyle that my generation desired.
Interesting times, indeed.
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/
Wireless chargers, cables, battery backups, expensive phone cases, cheap phone cases, selfie sticks, phone lighting accessories, lenses. Plus smartphones create an entire economy of their own in terms of apps.
No more need to buy a specialized remote control
Return to the basics of trade and charity then focus on the flow of real goods and services as abstracted by the velocity of money from agent to agent.
Fundamentally, economic crashes are caused by dead money that represents concentrated, slow one-way trade patterns. Ideally, money flows across the people with perfect inclusion and closed-loops.
I don't think this is sustainable in a complex world. Maybe a long time ago on small scales this is what economic activity looked like, but today we have huge institutions that lend and borrow across the globe in obligations that span tens of years, and that is reasonable because the kind of things we're building are so complex that those large concentrations of capital and those obligations over time are necessary.
This introduces more risk because it creates asymmetries but it also enables projects of sorts that aren't possible in some 'closed-loop' environment.
The last crash happened because of systematic soft-fraud all the way through the housing chain from individual borrowers, to lenders, VPs, ratings agencies, bankers, fund managers not doing their jobs, excessive risk etc.. No single issue would have caused a problem but collectively it meant everything was vastly mis-priced.
The next break will happen because of the China slowdown when the world discovers more materially how much China numbers have been fudged for the last 30 years. We know it, but kind of ignore it. China won't crash but it'll slow down more quickly than anticipated which could cause some bubbles to pop where there was that dependency.
Markets can also over-correct.
If most market participants have really good information, ahead of time, and act rationally - there's no need for crashes.
The Canadian economy doesn't go into hard recession - almost all of Canadian 'swings' are due to American pull. Canada has always been focused on 'stability' more than anything else (i.e. freedom, growth, exceptionalism).
If I spend $100, I expect to get something back for that. If I spend it on a charity, then I'm supporting something I value -- helping homeless veterans, supporting national parks, promoting gun safety education, whatever it may be -- then I'm benefitting.
As long as I've got the rest taken care of -- food, shelter, internet, and the power bill for my gigantic neon sign of Freddie Mercury -- then practically speaking, that $100 was doing nothing in my pocket, and now, it's actively doing work on my behalf towards doing good in the world.
Importantly even if the goal is more environmental sustainability it isn't the enemy. Apply growth in productivity and less land is needed for production and more can be preserved. NYC has more value from Central Park than say the area as a gold mine now.
The automation job losses are themselves a sign of it - keeping the same number of employees and adding even more capacity would be wasteful.
To go without growth is to surrender entirely and doom oneself to decline. If everyone is working towards something and not experiencing growth by definition something is wrong - that level of effort should lead to improvement over time even if they are just a chain of masters, journeymen, and apprentices.
The cycles are a result of phantom growth from phantom values - even if the production is real returns may diminish more than expected.
Growth is the consequence of population growth and technological progress and the process of specialization (comparative advantages). All three are in pretty much full force, so it's not just growth because greed.
(sorry for double posting :| )
A cycle is predictable, a chaotic system is not.
Sure it's chaotic and it probably has scale-free (self-similar or fractional-dimensional) properties at certain regimes, but on the large scale it's pretty well approximated by dynamic systems. (See the micro founded macro models used by central banks.)
Of course, we're getting better at modeling both micro and macro behavior of economies. (The caveat is that the economy also evolves so old models usually get less and less accurate, so job security for econometricians.)
Also if we're globally maxed out, I think an economy is 'temporal zero sum', if that makes sense: you grow now by borrowing but pay back in the next recession?
Totally not an economist though.
Do resource zero-sum, free markets still reliably experience growth from the perspective of someone who doesn't view price as a good measurement of value?
If so that would potentially be useful because it could allow more progressive leaning and more libertarian leaning people to find some common ground.
- Do you believe wealth and income should be distributed equitably around the world?
- Do you want to live on more than USD 17.3k per annum?
If you answered "yes" to both of these questions, then congratulations! You're in favor of economic growth. The average global income per capita is USD 17.3k per annum. If that number goes up, we call that "growth". That is the definition of growth.
Of course you can get into population control, but if the alternative to growth is China-style population control -- necessarily more severe than just handing out birth control -- then bring on the economic crises, I say.
This argument refers to developed nations, not Somalia. You could achieve 1,000% growth by stopping war crimes.
Once you restrict you analysis to functioning countries, for example OEDC, you are probably looking at $40k+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_GDP_...
The more precisely you want to model the distribution, the more you can come up with all sorts of little technicalities. For example, if the rest of the world catches up to the developed countries without significant efficiency gains in many technologies, the environment is extremely screwed. We could go back and forth for days.
The question as posed was: does the world need to grow? The answer is a resounding yes.
A developed economy should be stable, not collapse in on itself, if there is a period of no growth. It is disingenuous to try and prove your point by averaging out your income and economic issues with starving kids in Somalia!
Environment is already screwed. It's impossible to counterbalance consumption damage with increase in efficiency because you obviously can't have 300% efficiency.
Electric motor and generator are >90% efficient, most relevant technologies are ~50% and having diminishing returns.
By itself this is meaningless. What does it buy where you are? Most places that’s more than enough to live comfortably.
Anyway, money is only useful to decide who starves.
“Comfortably” is certainly a matter of opinion. But that 17.3k is a purchasing-power parity average, targeted at HN’s largely rich-country leadership. The nominal average income per person in the world is 11.4k.
http://m.statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-gdp-capita...
So we have taken the usual cost of living adjustments into account, and the question is, do you want to live on the equivalent of 17.3k per capita US relative to the cost of living in most of the US — somewhere like, say, Pittsburgh?
It might make more sense to think in terms of a carbon budget if we are thinking about sustainability.
Growth doesn’t matter if it doesn’t reach the people.
The original comment point is that there is that growth is needed (but not sufficient) if one wants both conditions he pointed out to happen - which is most people.
The problem, of course, is when we talk about things that cannot be produced, like land.
No, that's also growth. A lower "cost" of living requires some reconfiguration of "stuff" in the world so that it provides more utility, i.e., more "value", than it does currently, which we understand to be an increase because it is not currently providing that amount of utility -- i.e., providing for living. That would mean that the total amount of "value" has grown, even if we refer to it using smaller amounts of currency.
I think some people interpret "growth" to mean growth in physical things, like energy consumption or the amount of railroads, but growth also includes psychological variables like satisfaction and physiological variables like health. The world absolutely needs growth. You can't get around that by rewording the question.
Despite all good intentions, the hedonic treadmill is real.
You may like the work of Kate Raworth at Oxford though.
The big applied questions is how to manage the cyclicality - that arises in any dynamic system anyhow.
When we looked at the most empty spot we could find with the best camera ever built, we saw more universe than we could even have imagined.
Earth, ok, that's somewhat finite. Yet we're literally barely scratching its surface.
This is maybe a similar point, but it also seems to me that the without growth we would need to come up with some alternative to 401ks in order to allow people to build wealth.
The goal of Supermarket(SM) is to provide products to customers and a stable occupation for those working in the system, not to maximize profit. SM will only sell to subscribed members.
Whenever someone buys something, they pay only the cost of the product, and the purchase is recorded. At the end of each month, SM has to balance its finances: costs have to be equalized with income. We will charge our members an additional % over whatever they bought for this month, just as much as it's needed to balance the books. The more customers we have and the more volume we moved, the less % everyone has to pay.
This way, instead of customers paying a predetermined % margin for each product, they pay as little as it's needed to keep things going. They don't pay for anyone's profit.
The real equalization problem involves everyone.
I wonder if a government could make this work at the national level, in multiple industries.
If we're missing any one of the five, we have insecurity and chaos usually ensues.
That environment appears to be the soup du jour that allows lobbyist and others to do their bidding and force/sneak in their agendas.
I think it was mentioned, but cycling thru calamity (the business cycle) with F,W,E,E and S until they hit their metrics is becoming a predictable sh!t show.
https://www.moneycrashers.com/food-coop-costs-benefits-drawb...
- Coop (that's the name) has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Switzerland)
- Migros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migros
There has been quite a history of interventionist policies.
Or ask the hundreds of millions or more who are no longer poor thanks to capitalism.
Edit: typo
Growth is the consequence of population growth and technological progress and the process of specialization (comparative advantages). All three are in pretty much full force, so it's not just growth because greed.
The theory says that the central bank should help speed up the economy when it's too slow, and apply the brakes when it's getting too hot.
The problem is that when a recession (inevitably) hits, it'd be good if people had savings, social security, etc. If there were structured ways to unravel over-leveraged investments, and so on, without hurting the people.
There are a lot of people working on solving the fiscal policy issue. And apparently just as many trying to stick to their guns and boneheaded over-simplistic arguments.
Fiat money (central banking) is the cause of endemic inflation, not the cure. There was no net inflation in the US money from 1800-1914, and pretty much continual inflation since.
The whole point of central banking is to inflate the currency to provide money for the government to spend without needing to raise taxes.
Since the interest rate is increased to account for inflation, it doesn't benefit debtors who can't just print more money to cover it (like the government does).
Is it? I'm not so sure.
Bullshit.
The whole point of central banking is to provide price stability (which is predictable, stable, low ~2% inflation), that is to manage the money supply to follow the growth (or shrinking) of the economy.
https://www.bridgewater.com/big-debt-crises/Principles-For-N...
Milton Friedman writes about this in "Monetary History of the United States". He shows with graphs that the monetary stability was greater before the Fed was established (in 1914) than after. The Fed was simply unable to react as quickly as free banking did.
Borrowing/growing debt is a negative balance after spending & earning are added up.
It could indicate that households wealth (capital) is too low.
http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/jonathan-kirshner-w...
What I think the author was getting at is that generally speaking, when you borrow money the "good" thing to do with it is to use it toward economically productive means. You borrow money for a car so you can use the car to drive to work to make more money to spend on things you need. Businesses borrow money from a bank or equity firm so they can build a new factory to produce more things to sell to customers. The problem is when borrowing becomes divorced from economically productive spending. In the housing bubble this took the form of consumers borrowing huge amounts of money they could never afford to pay back not so they could be more productive and spend it on useful things, but rather so they could play at being housing speculators.
Today's big issue is that businesses are borrowing large amounts of money just to do share buybacks [1]. They do this because borrowing money is so cheap right now (interest rates have been absurdly low for the better part of a decade) and they don't actually have good capital investment things to spend their money on any more. So the result is boosted share prices via borrowing, without any corresponding economically productive spending to go along with it. Student loans are another form of this on the consumer side - millions of American students rack up tens of thousands of dollars in debt (they're borrowing money from student loan providers) and then their jobs at graduation suck so they can't afford to actually spend money on productive things - too much of their income goes to paying the interest.
Related concepts you might be interested in: Velocity of money [2], Debt to GDP [3], Debt to equity [4]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasin...
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V#targetText=The%20velo....
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-to-GDP_ratio
[4] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/debtequityratio.asp#tar...(,evaluate%20a%20company's%20financial%20leverage.
Also, what? Net assets = assets - liabilities. That's it. Profit has nothing to do with it unless you're trying to say that after you account for profits and don't spend them on anything else your assets will be increased. Maybe you're referring to something related to Return on Net Assets?
What needs to happen after the coming recession is the total abandonment of the notion that centrally planning the price and quantity of money to induce inflation is somehow a necessary policy to ensure that the economic machine functions, and with that the complete abolishment of central banking and a return to either a gold standard or, with recent developments in mind, the adoption of a crypto-backed money supply that cannot be manipulated by governments.
Inflationary monetary policy is the root cause of many of the issues we see today (widespread inequalities, political tension, erosion of purchasing power and, yes, ridiculous startup valuations) we see today, and it is about time that we abandon it.
Austrian economics hasn't been totally ignored. However, the school of thought's aversion to econometrics makes their policy advice self-limiting compared to mainstream/mainline economic theory. This means Austrian methods can occasionally diagnose a potential cause to a given economic malaise, but the methods can't quantify impact nor fully assess hypotheses regarding causal factors.
The second issue with the Austrian school is in the quest for ideological purity, extreme workarounds substitute for what the mainline has already worked through in the decades or centuries prior (e.g. Rothbard vs. utility). I recommend reading over Bryan Caplan's piece on why he is not an Austrian despite working in the famous US Austrian-supporting school, George Mason University.[0]
As for your specific points, that the large central financial institutions are, according to Austrian theory, causing recessions, even Austrian RBC doesn't completely agree.[1] Economic busts will happen with or without central banks -- being able to bail out key financial platforms is a good thing if it prevents the unnecessary misery of millions or billions. As every economics student should learn in the second half of economics 101, the free market does not always perfectly allocate resources, either immediately or over time (see discussions on externalities).
[0] https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm
[1] https://mises.org/wire/economic-busts-can-happen-free-market...
You misunderstand the reasoning behind the "rejection" of empiricism by Mises and those that followed him.
Austrian theory as formulated by Mises is based on a priori truths about human nature and cannot be falsifiable by evidence. This may sound outlandish when you first hear it especially when one comes from an engineering or natural science background, but there is a very well developed epistemological reasoning for this position that is often overlooked by critics.
The economy is composed of humans who act towards their own personal goals, whether that is to provide for their family, or become a billionare tech founder. This is a highly complex system with an incredible amount of variables (in the case of individual humans, the ordinal scale of preferences is quite literally infinite!). As such, there are no constants that can be inferred with the same level of reliability that we may have in physics like the rate of gravity on planet Earth.
Thus, empirical economic models have a much, much greater margin of error than what we have in the natural sciences, and it is therefore untenable to formulate economic theory based on inherently unreliable foundations.
Instead, as the economy is composed of humans acting and not objects acting, the Austrians look inwards and through a Kantian-esque process of introspection formulate the a priori action axiom ("Human action is purposeful behaviour.") and build their theory using logic based on that axiom - thereby creating a system of knowledge that is unfalsifiable through evidence and is always true.
But still, the rest of us prefer to test our theories by looking at evidence.
Weird, Marxist-Leninists say the same thing (which is why I'm not an ML).
To give an example, let's assume that central bankers can make everyone better off by picking the right inflation rate. Therefore it is good to centrally plan the price and quantity of money. The grandparent's comment "let's assume"-based theory concluded that it is bad to centrally plan the price and quantity of money. Which advice should we follow?
This I agree with, I do think there is tremendous value in using statistics as a way of analysing trends and reinforcing theoretical arguments with empirical data. I'd disagree strongly on the point that Austrian theory is not ignored by mainstream economists though as it seems like many of the underlying assumptions that justifies the Federal Reserve are rather flimsy when examined critically from an a priori Austrian perspective.
>As for your specific points, that the large central financial institutions are, according to Austrian theory, causing recessions, even Austrian RBC doesn't completely agree.[1] Economic busts will happen with or without central banks -- being able to bail out key financial platforms is a good thing if it prevents the unnecessary misery of millions or billions. As every economics student should learn in the second half of economics 101, the free market does not always perfectly allocate resources, either immediately or over time (see discussions on externalities).
Thanks for pointing this out, maybe I wasn't too clear in my post. I elaborate a bit more on this in a comment below, but didn't touch on the neccessity of having an institution able to bail out financial platforms during economic downturns.
I do think that this boils down to the question if we can ethically and legally justify fractional-reserve banking, as bailouts would not be necessary if banks were mandated to keep a 100% reserve on demand deposits. I'm personally a bit split on this issue and so are many other Austrians, with purists adhereing to the Rothbardian view that only full-reserve banking is ethically defensible while others prefer leaving it to the free market to decide. I believe that in the latter case private insurance companies would be more than suitable to provide services to bail out banks who overextend credit, and would also serve as a natural check on said overextension as an insurance company would not be willing to take the risk to insure an irresponsible bank with a tendency to not make careful judgements.
If anything, having a central institution that will bail out banks regardless of what happens is far more dangerous as it introduces a significant moral hazard whereby banks can take significant amount of risk (within applicable regulations, Basel III made it a bit more difficult after 2008) and know that they will be bailed out regardless of what happens. I can't say that this leads to a more stable economy than it would were we to have a full-reserve banking regime, or even a free market where banks choose their own reserve ratios.
Having worked in banking for the better part of the last decade, I agree with your points here. Basel III, CECL, CCAR have forced banks to be extremely conservative their lending, with a de facto scaling the conservativeness in the retail lending standard to their relative size. This being said, the banks that are designated as GSIB at least presently keep an awareness in mind of their sizes. (I worry that won't translate to bank executives over the next decade as those standards relax / roll back).
I can definitely see a situation where standards get relaxed or GSIBs opportunistically find loopholes and get us back to an overleveraged situation like 2008. While the repeal of Glass-Steagall opened up wonderful innovations in finance it also exposes retail clients to substantial risk -- and I don't think that has been substantially remediated.
This ignores the empirical, historical evidence of the inflationary/deflationary boom/bust whipsaw of the gold standard eras (19th century in particular) which were hugely destructive and ruinous.
More distressingly it also ignores the fact that money is a signaling mechanism and when the amount in circulation is out of relation to economic activity the economy breaks down. Yes, humans have a hard time figuring out what the level of economic activity is, but I am quite sure that gold strikes are not correlated with the production costs of iPhones and t shirts.
Meanwhile, did all of that sophisticated math improve the economy or predict the recession or help us out during recovery? It's nice to have hidden mathematical knowledge but is it actually providing benefits or is it just arcana?
This has two purposes:
- we would like to know which of our models are true, or at least good enough, and which ones are not.
- we would like to know the actual magnitude of things. For instance, if we increase tax rate by 1%, how large will the taxable income reaction be? Decrease by 0%? .25%? 1%? 10%? That's useful information for policy making.
And the reason economics doesn't always help the economy is because politicians almost never listen or shills are paid to advance policy that's detrimental to the economy.
It depends on the context. Plenty of areas of econometrics have substantial mathurbation, as do all quantitative fields. But the toolkit is not without use.
(1) One common critique (which you leverage here) says that econometrics isn't useful because it doesn't predict business cycles. Macroeconomics divorced from microeconomic foundations[0] is a difficult domain to apply reasonable econometrics -- insufficient data to describe the system completely.
(2) Individuals often present as irrational but populations tend to behave rationally -- meaning that descriptive information or predictive information can be ascertained.[1] This is the central point of ML/predictive analytics applied to human systems (e.g. marketing), which is where the value-add of ML can come from.
(3) Remember the utility of econometrics is to measure economics -- that might be something like a value impact assessment, describing the output of a randomized control trial (for which the Nobel prize[2] was just awarded[3]), and similar. Economics is much bigger than only the macroeconomy.
Notes:
[0] The Lucas critique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique, Theory before business-cycle measurement: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~lchrist/papers/qr1042....
[1] To describe or predict: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/shmueli.pdf
[2] I am aware the prize is not a real Nobel, the name is The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
[3] List of Economics Nobel Prize winners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...
Huh? Wasn't the economy very cyclical throughout the entire XIX century - before FED, IMF and fiat currency in general were established?
The fundemental question behind the development of Austrian monetary theory is not why there are booms and bust, but why these errors of judgement occur throughout the economy in often times very different sectors at the same time. Turns out this is more often than not because of significant, and crucicially, artificial distortions to the price system that causes resources to be put to use in places where they otherwise would not be, and creates illusions of profits to those who control said resources (individual employees, investors, executivies in companies etc.). Eventually the law of scarcity catches up, and the bust materialises and prices realign themselves (through deflation, which establishment economists are terrified of) to what they should be in a natural price system.
The only way to avoid this inevitable deflationary collapse of prices is to continue the illusion, of course, which is what central banks have been doing since 2008. This makes the eventual realignment much worse though since the price system continues to be distorted to an extent larger than it previously was.
The panics that occured prior to the instatement of the Federal Reserve were more often than not caused by either inflationary policies pursued by the the Treasury and general government interference, as was the case in the panic of 1907 in an effort to save overleveraged banks, or overextension of credit (and consequent overexpansion of the money supply) by fractional-reserve banks. In most cases however, these recessions resolved themselves rather quickly and did not lead to prolonged depressions and recovery periods like we saw in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
The single largest quarter of growth in US history was the first quarter of FDR's first term, when he stopped the money supply from contracting further with the bank holiday and stopped defending the gold standard.
It is amazing to me that we live in an era with tiny amounts of inflation despite large central bank interventions, and yet Austrians still presume to claim that their theory is vindicated. Prominent Austrians claimed we would have runaway inflation after QE, and it just didn't happen. There are no set of facts that will ever cause Austrians to admit their theory is wrong.
I think it is amazing to me that economists have redefined the definition of inflation from an increase in the money supply to an increase in the consumer price index. Yes, we haven't seen significant rises in CPI yet, but you cannot deny there has been hyperinflation in other sectors of the economy like equities and real estate. As far as I can tell mainstream economists don't really believe in the Cantillon effect (that inflation happens in a gradual sector-by-sector fashion) so inflation in certain sectors of the economy is unthinkable as, according to them, money is neutral and inflation always happens everywhere at the same time and that for some reason CPI is the best measure for this. This is categorically and logically wrong and does not hold up to critical analysis.
>Prominent Austrians claimed we would have runaway inflation after QE, and it just didn't happen.
Just because it hasn't happened yet does not mean it won't happen. All fiat currencies have always throughout history, without exception, and always for the same reasons, ended with hyperinflation and the total destruction of the currency. I don't see how the US Dollar possesses properties that renders it immune to monetary laws.
We haven't seen hyperinflation in equities or real estate. Both are below their historical highs. Anyway, it's not "inflation" it's an asset bubble -- prices are too high given underlying cash flows. And if investors are so incompetent at investing that an increase in the money supply makes them immediately blow it at the casino, that's a strong argument that we can't trust markets to invest. The Austrian argument leads inexorably to an anti-Austrian conclusion. (I'm not convinced, but I'm not the one who thinks there's necessarily an asset bubble.)
Nobody thinks CPI is automatically the best guess of inflation -- it's just one attempt. Everyone knows that prices don't all go and up and down together, and we have to use a proxy. Anyway, the Fed doesn't use CPI. They use PCE deflator, and they only consider goods where price changes are more persistent (so called "core inflation").
The vast majority of fiat currencies have not experienced hyperinflation so far. In contrast, all gold standard currencies have gone off the gold standard, so the historical evidence points strongly towards fiat, not against.
Does the Austrian school have a solution or counter point to that argument?
Ah, so how do we handle that total cap of 21 million bitcoins?
In the sad case that you’re not, what:’s the difference between “infinite divisibility” of a bitcoin and, say (for the sake of argument) joint ownership (perhaps through shareholding of a firm with a single monetary asset) of a single dollar cent?
Inflation reduces the value of money over time which encourages investment and economic growth. It also punishes those who hoard cash and rewards anyone who engages in economic activity like say, working or starting a business.
There's a reason that governments support inflationary policies.
As it got adoption its deflationary nature really took off, igniting a speculative bubble that made it useless for actual commerce.
Bitcoin is unbelievably deflationary, much more so than gold. You have a hard limit combined with breakage due to lost keys and hoarding which causes more deflation which causes more hoarding.
A less extreme version of this happened with gold, but gold is far less deflationary than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is absurdly deflationary. I don't think it was intended to be a Ponzi but there is no other outcome.
Of course too much inflation is also very bad. The ideal in most cases is a very slight rate of inflation.
There's a reason everyone abandoned hard currency. No country with hard currency has been able to compete. Flexible currency allows real world economic growth to be prioritized over monetary religion. Wealth is measured in goods, services, knowledge, health, etc. not bank balances.
Of course the Fed system does have huge problems. It sucks, but it sucks less than most alternatives. I'll say stick with it until an actually better alternative is found.
My favorite quote on central banks is from a colleague with a military background: the Fed is a weapon and abolishing it would be akin to unilateral disarmament. Countries with more flexible currencies like China would run right over us. He also pointed out that loose money (Reaganomics) is how we won the cold war. In the end it was not nukes or Star Wars but high deficits.