One way I've been told to understand this is that money is actually growing at around 6%, which is to say that money growth is highly inflationary.

Of course this is way too high, so to offset this there are deflationary measures, primarily increased productivity, technological improvements etc.

The problem with this is that we end up working permanently harder and it reaches a point of unsustainability. For example, now you generally need two incomes to sustain the same lifestyle as previously, because we need more people working etc.

Other deflationary measures included the opening of the Asian labor market, and then other globalisation measures.