Hacker News Reader

Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

Yes. That's interesting. Your grandfather could tell you what a dinner should cost by his experience. How did that happen? Did wages not increase?

View on HN

The data's not available before 1947, but the trend is clear: you're looking at the early part of a compound growth formula (with large annual variability).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/

US GDP per person has grown about 1% per year on average.

Wages stopped increasing to match productivity in the early 1980s, and that trend continues.

> Wages stopped increasing to match productivity in the early 1980s

1970s not 1980s:

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

The gold standard made inflation nearly impossible. Thus prices stayed the same long term.

There was huge inflation during WWI, as the government sold war bonds.

"The World War I era and its aftermath, 1917–1920, then produced sustained inflation unmatched in the nation anytime since. Prices rose at an 18.5-percent annualized rate from December 1916 to June 1920, increasing more than 80 percent during that period."

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2014/article/one-hundred-years-....

Also during the Civil War I think. I was just listening to a podcast and they were talking about this. I think it took a couple of decades to get back to the gold standard after.

Also when people found gold deposits.

>>"There was huge inflation during WWI, as the government sold war bonds."

I'm not sure of what you are saying there, but it can be interpreted like war bonds is the cause of inflation.

It's exactly the opposite. At war, a government have to use all the available resources for the war effort. That will produce inflation, because the war spending is competing with the private spending for the same resources.

A way to avoid it, is for the government to retire money from the private sector. A way to retire money from the private sector is to sell war bonds to the population. If you buy a war bond, basically what you are doing is promising that you will not spend your money until after the end of the war. Normally you will get some interest for your patriotic sacrifice.

Also, for the gold standard fans out there, imagine what would happen if a government can not mobilize all the available resources of the country because it has not enough gold. That would be the most ridiculous way to loss a war.

Good point.

You can still get inflation if demand broadly outpaces supply, the money supply is only one factor

Also no minimum wage for the staff.

It's not that inflation was impossible. It's that periods of inflation were offset by periods of grinding deflation depressions.

There’s no connection between falling prices and depression. At least that’s what Milton Friedman concluded in A Monetary History of the United States, even though he initially assumed there would be.

Well, Friedman says inflation is driven by the money supply, which is partly true. But it's also true that a shrinking money supply is associated with both deflation and recession/depression.

Not really.

I’d start by studying Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech to get some perspective away from people writing about their pet economic theories.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech

Political speech is only slightly more reputable than "pet economic theories", imo. What does the academic literature say about this?

Quite a bit. I’d suggest again to check it out.

It’s an interesting period of history with many parallels to our current state of affairs.

> Quite a bit. I’d suggest again to check it out.

What a useless response. Suggest instead how to check it out! What books should be looked up or terms googled?

The linked Wikipedia article references several good books.

The Gold standard

The idea of your money purchasing less is just a creature of the last 100 years. It doesn't have to be that way, but basically there has been annual share dilution from the US currency corporation for 100 years, it was chartered by Congress in 1913. In currency contexts this is called inflation. In all other asset classes it is called dilution.

Inflation is not the same as an increase in the money supply ("dilution" as you call it).

Inflation defined as an increase in consumer prices.

Consumer prices are affected by many factors other than the money supply, for example if oil prices rise then it tends to push up consumer prices and therefore inflation even if the money supply were static.

> It doesn't have to be that way, but basically there has been annual share dilution from the US currency corporation for 100 years, it was chartered by Congress in 1913.

Sure, you can build a money system without inflation but that doesn't change that you still have to represent the loss of value via unemployment caused by saving money. i.e. you will need money with an expiration date, negative interest rate or wealth tax.

I don't have a problem with the current reality. I am only pointing out that the current reality isn't fundamentally an absolute reality, just the features of the current epoch of currency which is only 100 years old. This thread was only about why the prices for a long time in the 19th century were not changing much across those 100 years, when in the 20th century things increase. I'm not here to opine about a future alternate system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com