Perhaps the problem is a steady state versus growth model economic configuration, and we also need finer grained control over stimulating or discouraging very specific economic activities.

This is the vast majority of homeowners in most countries.

Which also spills into rent costs, of course.

There's an alternative, which is to ask whether something EVEN HAS A CHANCE of being relevant in 10 years. Experimentation and risk-taking is fine, hamster-wheeling and "bullshit jobs" are a waste of life and destroy the earth, for little benefit.

Slap on sunscreen, then use statins to counter the high blood pressure (rather than get free exposure to the sunlight we all evolved to live under).

Have both parents in full-time employment, while kids get warehoused in daycare.

Overwork people to the point they have neither time nor inclination to cook for themselves from scratch, instead using meal kits, ready meals, takeout, restaurants.

Alienate people from their own bodies with manipulative marketing that weaponizes their insecurities against them, then patch up the self-esteem with totally unnecessary cosmetics, gyms, fashion, surgeries, etc.

All these activities fatten GDP, but which of them really represent human flourishing?

We measure the wrong things, at least in part because the right things so often cannot be measured. We need to trust in the unmeasurable, but that is antithetical to the technocrat.

I have always thought most of the sunscreen products we have today have shady ingredients by just looking at the list of endless number of chemicals. I mean why do we need 50+ chemicals in a product when just zinc oxide can do. This was confirmed when Neutrogena last year had to tee all some of their sunscreen products last year. Increasing blood pressure is a new one I haven’t heard of before.

The interventionist’s prescription, though, is to always wear sunscreen, to take vitamin D supplements, and to take statins to control blood pressure.

I suppose my original point was that this represents a perverse exercise in ditch digging and filling. Using one expensive product to block the sunlight we evolved under, then using yet more products to compensate for the disrupted natural functioning of our skin (which we likely don’t fully understand anyway, so the counter-interventions are a partial remedy at best).

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6830553/ [2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26992108/

I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's impossible in practice to reliably predict what will be relevant in 10 years.

Also, I don't believe it's possible to get the signal without the noise. I've even come to believe the noise may be the generator of signal. We live in a probabilistic universe, not a deterministic one.

Pre fiat, economies did have continuous injections of gold and silver mining to provide debt free money supply. Would it be wrong to QE via direct printing and government spending? At least then we may get roads, bridges, and other societal assets out of QE vs record prices for picasso’s.

Please excuse my economic ignorance.

In the absence of money (or debt), we are reduced to barter. I give you a donkey, you provide me with grain for a month.

But suppose you don't need a donkey? Well, you can trade it for something you do want; so the donkey is now a medium of exchange, i.e. money. Instead of carrying donkeys around, you can instead carry some token, with the legend "I promise to pay the bearer on demand one donkey". You could even stamp a donkey's head on the token.

> if an economy is growing, it needs more money

I get that. But why does that mean the government has to print money (or buy back government bonds, or whatever)? Why does the market not automatically synthesise the means of exchange that lubricate the matching of supply and demand? Is it simply because a barter economy is inefficient? But then why doesn't a barter economy automatically produce means of exchange that are efficient?

Again, I apologise for my manifest ignorance.

Say you give me a donkey and I give you an "IOU - one donkey or equivalent". That IOU represents my debt to you. If my reputation is good, you could trade that IOU to someone else for say, 10 chickens, you pass my debt to them. If my reputation is really good, your town could pass my IOU around for different goods and then my IOU acts just like money.

Cash (and money) works the same way as an IOU. It's just that the owner of the debt is abstract and far removed from the holder of the cash.

So it seems that in an economy without money, money will arise automatically, in the form of debts that are to a greater or lesser extent formalised. So why do economies need central banks? What's wrong with that kind of "informal money"?

I have a strong suspicion that we don't; that it's governments that need central banks.

This is generally the way we react to that sort of things. And even if things still sometimes break (in slightly different ways than before) these systems have allowed us enormous amounts of economic growth.

The central bank won't have to set the interest rates anymore if the reserve requirement is something sane like 20% or 30% as banks are limited in their bank reserves and thus incentivized to choose the right interest rate for themselves. This also eliminates the need for QE.

You still need the central bank as an inter banking network by the way.