Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

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You can see glimmers of the original definition on the wikipedia page, but the term has been misused for decades noe and basically anything you try to find for a definition of inflation will talk only about prices.

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

I can't get deep links in wikipedia on my mobile browser for some reason, but here's the full page.

The "Terminology" section vaguely references the original Latin word and gives a few nods to when currency was tied to gold. It is a bit hand wavy, though when it talks about new gold supplies being found or later mentions when the cost of money changes, those are both related to the original (correct) definition. Finding more gold increased the money supply, which may change prices though it doesn't have to.

Toman history sometimes covers the idea well as they inflated the currency by minting more coins to increase supply. I can't find a great link at the moment that covers it well from that angle though, I'll try to come back here when I'm at my desk if I find a good link down that rabbit hole.

If a word has been "misused for decades", its definition has changed.

It's a fool's errand to try to claim the original definition is the "right" or "only" definition at that point.

You've lost this semantic battle against the world, and it's honestly pretty exhausting to see you wasting effort trying to continue fighting a lost cause.

Sure, we could always make a different term for monetary inflation and avoid the ambiguity with the new definition but that doesn't fix the underlying point.

Monetary inflation is an important concept that is now almost entirely ignored. An increase in the cost of goods can be interesting, but its a second or third order effect of an extremely complicated system.

Price changes are meaningless without context and extremely difficult to understand with context. Money debasement, or inflation, is easy to understand and is a primary input to the system rather than a downstream effect.

Given that your original point was that someone used the wrong word, this feels like you're moving the goalposts now.

>the term has been misused for decades now

Am I out of touch? No it is all of modern economists who are wrong.jpg

Wait, is your argument that modern economists couldn't possible be wrong? Or in this case, that modern economists couldn't possibly have co-opted the term to better work with Keynesian economics and MMT?

If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?

>If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?

Perfect question!

In fact, the definition of "meter" has changed over time, and if you stick with the old definition, you'd be off by 0.2 millimeters:

https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/meter

Science changes as it needs to. (And the word "science" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when we are discussing economics, aka the dismal science.)

A 0.2mm difference is so vastly different from the analogy he made to using it as a measurement of volume. Hopefully you're putting this forward as an interesting factoid and did not mean it as an actual argument.

I contend his analogy is wrong; it's not like "inflation" changed from a money policy thing to a labor market thing.

Inflation historically was a measure of the change in money supply. They co-opted the same word to instead measure an entirely different concept, the change over time of a basket of goods.

In my book that's very similar to taking a distance measurement and reusing the word to instead measure a totally different concept, volume. Curious how its different though, I may just be tripping myself up here.

Classical economists didn't seem to use the term 'inflation' in either sense. I can't find any evidence that 'modern economists' have corrupted the original meaning, like you imply.

https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...

This link does at least acknowledge the original meaning of the word, though it does imply that's an outdated use in economics.

The author certainly makes this claim, but fails to provide any evidence.

"It is during this period [the era between the mid-1830s and the Civil War] that the word inflation begins to emerge in the literature, not in reference to something that happens to prices, but as something that happens to a paper currency.7"

The footnote doesn't contain any reference.

Could they be wrong about the well-understood label they’ve agreed upon to refer to a particular concept in their field? No, and in fact I’m tempted to class the answer as tautologically “no”.

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