Blaming Capitalists and Workers for Inflation | Hacker News Reader

Blaming Capitalists and Workers for Inflation

profstonge.com

34 pointsjanandonly73 comments

What does inflation even mean these days? I thought it means when you increase the money supply the purchasing power of one dollar goes down. Then when you go to wikipedia it says inflation means "general price level of goods and services in an economy". I thought that's just a possible and likely outcome of inflation, not the definition.

Then they talk about stuff like "food inflation" and at first you think well that's good the price of food is going down as the amount of food in the markets increases, but then they say it actually means that the price of food is going up. What? In "money inflation" the value of money goes down but in "food inflation" the value of food goes up.

This doesn't make any sense. Why can't we just use the old definition for inflation? These days it seems like inflation simply means price increase and has nothing to do with monetary policy. So what is the "old inflation" called these days? Like when you increase the money supply the value of one dollar goes down. What's that called these days now that "new inflation" simply means general price increase and even supply chain disruptions can cause "inflation" somehow.

Have you considered that it was not "the old definition", but just that you were wrong about it?

It was the old definition. It made more sense when the money supply was defined as a the pool of circulating money. Now that the supply is debt based and abstract, it became non pragmatic to keep referencing it.

> Now that the supply is debt based and abstract, it became non pragmatic to keep referencing it.

Supply has been debt-based (or rather, credit-based) for decades, if not at least a century. It was wrong for decades, and yet folks like Milton Friedman insisted on using this definition:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism

Agree. I’m looking back much farther.

Well that's how it was taught to me. This new thing just confuses me and I wonder what the old inflation should be called now.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/inflation#etymonline_v_6450 >Monetary sense of "enlargement of prices" (originally by an increase in the amount of money in circulation) first recorded 1838 in American English.

Even the oldest wikipedia entry has this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inflation&oldid=2... >In some contexts the word "inflation" is used to mean an increase in the money supply, which is sometimes seen as the cause of price increases. Some economists (of the Austrian school) still prefer this meaning of the term, rather than to mean the price increases themselves. Thus, for example, some observers of the 1920s in the United States refer to "inflation" even though prices of goods were not increasing at the time. Below, the word "inflation" will be used to refer to a general increase in prices unless otherwise specified.

To me inflation means this. What should I call it because nowadays inflation simply means prince increase. What's the term for the "old inflation"? I want a word for it and apparently I can't use inflation anymore because its meaning has changed. Debasement? Can you use that when the central bank expands the money supply and causes the value of currency to decline? Because you can't call that inflation anymore as language has apparently evolved.

The 'oldest' Wikipedia article you linked isn't the 'oldest'. Should you want to go by Wikipedia for a 'truthyness' https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inflation&oldid=2...

But.. we could reference "a rise in the general price level caused by an imbalance between the quantity of money and trade needs" [1] (Cleveland Fed; On the Origin and Evolution of the Word Inflation).

[1] https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...

On reverting to to 'old' meanings, Adam Smith's The real price of everything...is the toil and trouble of acquiring it isn't inconsistent with Marx as long as toil and trouble is, in the end, people. Or perhaps myths of old beliefs that there was no sectoral, geographical nor temporal stickyness to anything. It's as if there were no sudden and unexpected changes in prices during times of a roughly constant amount of specie backing 'prices' that make 10% look like a storm in a teacup, though was it ever 1:1 or was hope to have the means to provide backing more accurate; specie based currency has a long history of volatility over the world, from West African empires to Asia.

We could even go farther... to say that inflation, a change in prices, is caused by expectations of inflation; that the supply of money is driven by the demand for money... and that gets us to whether demand is liability or asset driven which may be full circle.

I just want a word for what I think inflation means. Like when zimbabwe printed a huge amount of money and that completely broke their currency. That's what I think when I hear the term inflation, and the metaphor of inflating a currency makes sense. You blow some air or whatever into the mix of metal so that you can mint more coins with the same amount of metal. As a consequence the value of an individual coin goes down because it doesn't have as much metal in it as the old coins. A fiat currency based on trust that gets inflated by the increase of money supply is not as concrete but the effect is the same.

So when I hear "food inflation" I immediately thing of wheat breads. You rise the breads more so you can make more breads with the same amount of wheat, but of course as a consequence the value of an individual bread should go down over time because the wheat content is lower. But instead, when the media talks about "food inflation" it means the price of bread is going up and not down.

I used to think that "inflation" is about reducing the value of something but apparently it means the complete opposite. So I guess I need a new word for that. What would that be? Debasement? Should hyperinflation that is obviously caused by the increase of money supply be renamed as hyperdebasement too? Like what happened in Zimbabwe. Or are hyperinflation and inflation completely unrelated phenomenons now?

I think "monetary inflation" is the term you're looking for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation

So I generally held the same questions as you. I think part of the answer is in our modern debt based monetary system, there isn’t one clear notion of money supply (M1, m2, m3,..). Also, these supplies of money can be only esoterically linked to price of goods (look at japan). As such talking about price of goods is more applicable to the general population. Debasement has become the unambiguous term for inflation of the money supply.

Inflation is just the increase in cost of goods.

QE can cause inflation, but QE != inflation.

It’s called food inflation because people know inflation is about cost, so you don’t need to specify inflation of food costs. You can just say food inflation.

> QE can cause inflation, but QE != inflation.

A reasonable case can be made that QE may actually be deflationary to a certain extent. See Cullen Roche in 2010:

* https://www.pragcap.com/quantitative-easing-the-greatest-mon...

* https://www.pragcap.com/wait-qe-might-be-deflationary/

Depends on where you are looking for inflation, if you look at say S&P 500 performance during QE you will see most of the money supply creation directly lead to stock price inflation and largely lead to a huge bubble in the stock market (that is largely still there) where basic fundamentals of a company did not matter to the stock prices. You see the rise of alot of highly unprofitable companies which under normal conditions would mean lowering of their stock value but instead their stocks were still going up.

QE and other fed programs of the time where designed to ensure stock market inflation, and to prevent the collapse of Big Finance. That is where most of that money supply went, not to mainstreet which is where you would see CPI increases

Come to COVID and the money supply creation was done in direct transfers to Mainstreet, and almost immediately we see CPI go nuts...

Pre-1932 US had a fixed money supply under the gold standard, and there still existed stock market bubbles:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929

Japan has had a constantly growing money supply for decades and its stock market has gone up, down, and sideways in the same time period:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=17sx4

Absolutely none of that refutes my position

> […] most of the money supply creation directly lead to stock price inflation and largely lead to a huge bubble in the stock market (that is largely still there) where basic fundamentals of a company did not matter to the stock prices.

You claim that the bubble was caused by the money supply (e.g. QE†), but bubbles have existed even with fixed money supply, so what evidence can you provide actually showing the causal link?

We now have monetary headwinds (e.g., rising rates) and while there was a correction / bear market (≥20% drop in 2022), the headwinds have continue while the market has recovered.

† Which, BTW, is is not really adding new assets, but is rather an asset swap:

* https://www.pragcap.com/the-exploding-u-s-money-supply-myth/

Inflation is a rise in the general level of prices, more money in the economy causing the value of the dollar to reduce in value can be one cause of inflation. There are various ways to measure this like the consumer price index

Things like printing money are often said to cause inflationary pressure.

Inflationary pressure can be caused by several factors such as fiscal policies, demand-pull inflation, cost-push inflation, disproportionate minting of money compared to the industrial output and demand for goods and services, increases in production costs such as raw materials and wages, a surge in demand for products and services, different variables or disruptions that push manufacturers to adjust and respond to ever-changing supply-demand economic conditions

https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/inflationary-pressure/

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/012115/consumer-pri...

> I thought it means when you increase the money supply the purchasing power of one dollar goes down.

This is the view of right-leaning folks, most famously by Milton Friedman. It turns out to not be accurate as even Friedman realized (Financial Times (UK), June 7, 2003):

> The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I'm not sure that I would as of today push it as hard as I once did.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism

I wonder what hyperinflation means these days. Is hyper food inflation a thing?

You likely thought so because it's the position UBI proponents on HN (and elsewhere) take. They claim that inflation is caused by the increased money supply only and UBI cannot possibly cause inflation, and repeat this in every UBI thread, so somebody who is not familiar with the topic might conclude that inflation is the increase of the money supply.

The old definition, the money supply expansion definition of inflation, has been memory holed.. anyone who fails to use the new definition of inflation is a thought crimer.. please correct your ways

Poor companies, forced to rise the prices and get higher profits by the evil puppet master central banks.

It is funny for the author to deny greedflation simply by explaining how it works.

> So what's next? Any prospect of workers ever making up that lost 8% will run head into the coming recession, when both wages and workers are slashed. In fact, the latest jobs numbers say even workers' drip-down has ground to a halt as full-time jobs evaporate and gig work picks up the slack.

Not sure what JOLTS report he’s reading, but it must not be the latest one. Job layoffs are lower than pre-pandemic levels. Hires and quits were both up in May. [0]

Furthermore, it’s unclear that the shift to the gig economy is led by the employers. Baby Boomers (the largest generation the US has ever had) are retiring en mass. The pandemic killed mostly older people. Immigration ground to a halt during the pandemic. Who exactly is going to work these jobs? Robots?

[0] https://twitter.com/eliselgould/status/1676964296402817025?s...

>>Baby Boomers (the largest generation the US has ever had) are retiring en mass.

I dont know the demographics data, but I know a number of boomers personally that are "semi-retired" meaning they are "retired" but they still work some in gig-ecomony jobs, some even work in smaller roles (almost gig style )(i.e project based) for either their old employers or in the same field they were in as Full time employees.

I think this explains a large portion of the gig work that the author of the blog post pointed to, instead of the author’s theory that employers are doing it intentionally.

This means that wages will eventually rise further as those boomers take on less work and eventually enter full retirement, or stop working due to illness or death.

It’s perhaps difficult to find the flaw in this argument until you note that society isn’t 50/50 capitalists and workers. Pull on that thread a bit and combine it with the fact that neither the government nor bankers (whether central or Main Street) sit magically outside society and it starts to become pretty obvious what’s going on here. This is garden variety propaganda masquerading as rational think-piece.

Your argument is flawed. Society isn't necessarily 50/50 capitalists/workers. But corporate media and thus public discourse is.

_Corporate_ media is 50% workers? What are You going on about?..

Corporate media talks 50% about their corporate interests and 50% about "the workers" in an unconvincing way for the appearance of balance. So this is perfect for the kind of artificial antagonism that is supposed to be created by the central banks and govt as the article suggests.

That is an extraordinary claim. Most of what I see in the media is about politics, crime or the life of artists.

The map is not the territory bro

applaud emoji - yes, enough of this single dimensional thinking on hacker news.

It's not at all obvious to me - could you explain?

In order for the author’s thesis to work, the government (which is somehow absurdly neither sided with capitalists nor workers) actively pits the two classes against each other in a permanent stalemate. In order for that to work, the two must be equally matched in power, else one side would just win and the gambit would be over. Workers as a class are equal to capitalists as a class neither in number nor in combined power. It’s an absurd take.

> the two must be equally matched in power, else one side would just win

You're confusing actual battle with mere rhetorical arguments, a shouting match. There is no victor, just noise that serves as a distraction.

Besides, the thesis has two parts: what the alleged true cause of inflation is, and how attention is being diverted away from it. They can each be independently true or false.

Unless we’re getting out the torches and pitchforks and marching to the guillotines (pretty please?), it’s purely a rhetorical battle. Are you suggesting that power dynamics are irrelevant in a shouting-match?

I’m not taking issue with the “true cause” bit. I’m taking issue with the absurd notion that the central banks and govt sit outside the capitalist/worker dynamic.

The downvotes only make me stronger

“Central bankers are evil” is the upper class version of flat-earther. Looks like in this day and age, every sociological niche must grow its own stupid conspiracy theory…

"I am the worlds greatest interest rate trader, look how cheap my mortgage is" was their battle cry in the days prior to it being "all Central bankers fault".

Aren't bankers capitalists?

Nope, they are in bed with the government in a highly regulated industry. Capitalism is the absence of government control and the free exchange of good and services.

Capitalism does not imply absence of government control... That's one ideological extreme branch of capitalism, don't conflate them.

I think the confusion here is capitalism vs free markets. They're pretty darn similar at first glance, but the absence of government control is only a feature of free markets [1]

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042215/what-differe...

A market free of government control is an abstract concept. All actual markets, even the free ones, experience a variety of government controls. Some more, some less, and of different kinds depending on the political, economic and social situation they are embedded in.

markets existed before government via free association

very much subject to debate. depends a lot on what "markets" means and what "government" means.

Government is very easy to define, a system of social control for which a group or entity is given the exclusive authority to use violence to enforce that control

Thus there are no voluntary governments, as if everyone agree to something no force is required, and all government actions are enforced via the threat of violence

This is simplistic and fails to cover all the arrangements that one might one to call a government.

It also shows all the hallmarks of an over-reliance on the internet-provided definition of a government (which of course pats itself on the back of seeing what all those silly academics couldn't see).

I mean, for goodness sake, just a quick browse of Graeber & Wengrow will reveal many forms of societies' arrangements for collective decision making that violate your description (in part because your description is about enforcement, which some societies eschew, and fails to deal with collection decision making at all).

>>This is simplistic and fails to cover all the arrangements that one might one to call a government.

This would then imply that all collective social arrangements of people must be called "government" and that any definition of "government" that does not include every possible social arrangement of people is flawed

I reject this over broad assertion, when we attempt to broaden the definition of words to that degree they lose all value in meaningful conversation as the word now means anything. These seems to be common in modern times something that should be resisted

> This would then imply that all collective social arrangements of people must be called "government" and that any definition of "government" that does not include every possible social arrangement of people is flawed

Wow.

As made clear subsequently, "government" covers the process(es) a society uses for collective decision making and enforcement of those decisions.

It does not cover the nature of marriage, the presence or absence of multi-generational households, the size of cities, methods of transportation or the religious demographics.

It is still a narrowly defined term, but just not narrowed down to the 30 year old look-ma-i-discovered-the-internet version of "it's about the monopoly on violence".

Your derision aside (which is not really a winning method if you want to convey your point or gain understanding with others )

Why do you believe my definition which is a very old definition dating back long before computers let alone the internet is " look-ma-i-discovered-the-internet version"

Or maybe that is suppose to be a weak attack on either my chronological age (which you believe to be 30, far from accurate) or that I am naive in my views even though I have been refining my political options for decades in various venues.

So who about you formulate a better agreement than your current dismissive weak ones where by simply because you only discovered this view on the internet you assume that is the only place it was present, and therefore should be dismissed out of hand. Seems like a lot of projection going on here.

I have no idea about your age, nor do I care.

The definition of government that you offered comes from a very distinct strain of philosophy, which doesn't go back that far, historically had few believers, and gained far more prominence with the rise of Usenet than it had ever had before in the history of humanity.

I'm also not interested in convincing you of anything. My only goal is to point out fallacies, so that simplistic depictions of "what is" don't go unchallenged. It's fine with me if you continue to believe what you already believe.

You can debate that with investopedia if you think their definition is inaccurate, but I've never seen a definition of free markets that builds in a requirement for government controls.

Functionally we have few, if any, modern examples of free markets but the same goes for communism. Practically we never really implement either concept and we erroneously call what we do implement by this names, but that doesn't change the original idea or definition.

It's not about the definition, it's about reality.

The reality is that markets free of all regulation have all sorts of problems, and so in order to keep them functional and retain (almost all of) the benefits of "free markets", the participants invite/consent/tolerate the "intrusion" of government.

It doesn't really matter if that is a part of the definition or not.

Sure I totally agree we don't actually implement free markets, whether right or wrong we decided they are too idealistic and some level of regulation is important. That just means we don't have free markets though, not that the definition of a free market should be changed to match what we have.

It's the same problem with communism. No country has actually implemented Marxism or communism, we only have countries ruled by oligarchs and/or monarchs that call themselves communist because it sounds better. I'm not saying I think communism would work, but we've yet to see it actually tried at the state level.

Free markets, in the original Smithian definition, require extensive government influence to keep the market free for new participants to enter and make opportunities for themselves. This means quashing bad actors including monopolists and other actors who seek to distort the market in drastic ways.

Free markets don't require any intervention, we choose to modify the model and have a free-ish market because we ultimately don't trust those invoked long term. That isn't the conceptual design though, ideally a free market handles monopolies on its own when customers simply walk away from the bad actor.

Maybe you're just choosing not to read my comment and steamroll what I said. I can't tell.

Adam Smith, the guy who defined the term "free market", defined it as I described, not as you have attempted to retcon.

I'm not trying to steamroll you, I just disagree.

I can't find a source defining free markets as requiring government intervention, I'd be really curious to e one of you have it.

Adam Smith didn't think government intervention was necessary, as best I recall. He described what he called the invisible hand, but that is the natural market forces of self-interested parties not government control.

I copy/paste a quote from Investopedia right now for some reason, but Smith described his opinion of the tiles of government and it specifically didn't include controlling the free market

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/adam-smith-wealth-of-na...

capitalism relies on government to establish and enforce private property ownership/enclosure

State capitalism exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

Not central bankers - they are an arm of the government, charged with managing currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank

Pity the poor poor wealthy investor as money is NOT offered to them as investment returns and savings interest!

It was ... gasp ... printed and faked by scheming capitalists of the wrong (Keynesian) kind! Then handed to people who gave in to NOT WORKING during the pandemic.

Under the GOP administrations of course deficits don't matter because subsidies and defense are too important.

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