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Comment by HDMI_Cable | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know why, but this makes me feel a bit optimistic about the future, at least in western societies. Our current worries about inflation, the degradation of the middle class, and stagnant wages seems to be more a product of moving to the Information Age, rather than inherently pet of our society; with long term reforms, these can be fixed.

But, it also suggests that problems like wealth inequality are here to stay, or least somewhat natural.

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I think wealth inequality is fine; it's a sign of economic growth, which is naturally uneven. I object to wealth inequality on the order of ten billion times. That's not growth; that's strip mining.

I don't think it wise to presume that at all. It's little to do with wealth inequality. Especially not in the current mode. Money and wealth can both fairly readily be converted into substantial power. This is without mentioning the power laws that seem to be in place which tend towards winner take all scenarios, meaning there is a gross aggregation of power in fairly singular institutions. And when you resolve to look at the people running the institutions they're also the wealthy - this aspect is obvious, but the reality is that it yields individuals even more leverage over the system. And it's fair to assume they're working in concert, a la the invisible hand. I reckon this situates them several hundreds of orders of magnitude above their fellows.

What's worse is, by my divination at least: as a general rule, I don't find these people to be exceptional or necessarily well suited to wield such power. And I would also conjecture that the centralization of power in aspects of individual occurrence and institutions creates a behavioral uniformity, which I hypothesize necessarily leads to considerable instability ultimately creating more "too big to fail" situations which ultimately compromises the health of our polite society. And because of the immense leverage, I don't find it to be stepping out of bounds to say that it's entirely probable that our body politic is owned and operated through backroom auction of policy.

I'd also append that, from my experience, I've never seen debts factored into arguments regarding wealth disparities, but I do suppose it should be. Historically debt peonage was a considerable force. I think it would be interesting to look at the wealth distribution charts and seeing how it plays out when they traipse into the negative.

This is literal conspiracy theory drivel. When you get older you realize most rich people are insanely smart, the average person has a very poor aptitude for recognizing exceptional people and that the entire world is made up of independent entities all working for their own ends — nobody is in control and nobody has enough power to ensure their own existence beyond next week. Also, so-called billionaires could spend everything they have building a few bridges. They aren’t really as rich as people like to think.

Much of the inflation is caused by monetary policy (e.g. fiat money and expansion of the money supply).

And several prominent efforts to remove that power from the government’s hands are ongoing.

That would actually mean they can't stop inflation. If you think it's so bad, then you could take down another country by getting its citizens to adopt your new cryptocurrency then inflating it. (More realistically, a small country might adopt a different fiat currency if it's really easy to get because there's a lot of it.)

Luckily most people do want to make transactions in the official currency though; that's the upside of sales taxes.

When the average person says "inflation" they mean gas prices have gone up, which is not caused by the money supply.

The last time people cared about inflation in the 70s it was caused by an oil crisis; this time in housing inflation it's a lack of supply.

Austrians constantly predict there will be extra bad hyperinflation in the US from the national debt; not only are they wrong but they caused the 2008 recession by being wrong.

> natural

A word used - by others, if not the parent - to argue for doing nothing. Currency isn't 'natural', nor literacy, nor the Information Age nor modern healthcare. E.coli is natural, however. We should not be satisfied with natural.

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