Re:Binance caught commingling funds between US and internati...
by vkou on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @06:30PM
(#34087783)
> How are you measuring it? It's a circular argument if you measure it in dollars.
Measure it in houses built, cars sold, concrete poured, steel refined, restaurant visits, number of people working in service industries. Measure it in color televisions and washing machines and computers sold and movies made, and the mountains of disposable crap that everyone fills their homes with. Or by looking at the skyline in Beijing in 1970, and today. The dollar is the currency of global trade, you have to print more of it to keep track with the global economy, just to prevent it from becoming a deflationary currency.
It may not less obvious if you live in the United States, but we make and consume more useful goods and services, much faster than we mine gold. That's why the cost of an ounce of gold can grow 35 times, while the cost of a loaf of bread can grow 5 times in the past 50 years.
> If it measure it in anything that can't be made more efficient due to automation & offshoring, it's no where near a 7x decrease.
Why not? The world's economy has grown by around that much in real value (Denominated in goods, not dollars) added in 50 years. [1]
> Use land, housing, healthcare, education or whatever you feel is most representative.
Land is speculative, you don't make more of it when the economy grows, and its price trends towards 1 divided by the interest rate. In a world of zero-interest, it trends towards infinity. A modern house requires a lot more economic inputs to go into it than a 1970s house. Likewise, the amount of waste and work that goes into healthcare, education, etc, has significantly increased over that same time period.
A better metric would be median wages, compared to productivity growth. Median family income in the US in 1970 was $9,870/year. Median family income today is ~$78,000. If there was zero productivity gain, and zero quality-of-life increases/decreases, this will tell us that a dollar today is worth ~8x less than a dollar back then.
But we have had productivity and quality of life increases. And you have to divide that 8x by whatever those multipliers were.
Gold is the weird outlier when it comes to the value of things, not the gold standard.
[1] It's grown about 35x, when denominated in dollars. If we actually used gold for money, it would have been deflationary, to the tune of... Whatever real economic growth the world would have had. That amount of deflation would have been utterly horrifying.
Measure it in houses built, cars sold, concrete poured, steel refined, restaurant visits, number of people working in service industries. Measure it in color televisions and washing machines and computers sold and movies made, and the mountains of disposable crap that everyone fills their homes with. Or by looking at the skyline in Beijing in 1970, and today. The dollar is the currency of global trade, you have to print more of it to keep track with the global economy, just to prevent it from becoming a deflationary currency.
It may not less obvious if you live in the United States, but we make and consume more useful goods and services, much faster than we mine gold. That's why the cost of an ounce of gold can grow 35 times, while the cost of a loaf of bread can grow 5 times in the past 50 years.
> If it measure it in anything that can't be made more efficient due to automation & offshoring, it's no where near a 7x decrease.
Why not? The world's economy has grown by around that much in real value (Denominated in goods, not dollars) added in 50 years. [1]
> Use land, housing, healthcare, education or whatever you feel is most representative.
Land is speculative, you don't make more of it when the economy grows, and its price trends towards 1 divided by the interest rate. In a world of zero-interest, it trends towards infinity. A modern house requires a lot more economic inputs to go into it than a 1970s house. Likewise, the amount of waste and work that goes into healthcare, education, etc, has significantly increased over that same time period.
A better metric would be median wages, compared to productivity growth. Median family income in the US in 1970 was $9,870/year. Median family income today is ~$78,000. If there was zero productivity gain, and zero quality-of-life increases/decreases, this will tell us that a dollar today is worth ~8x less than a dollar back then.
But we have had productivity and quality of life increases. And you have to divide that 8x by whatever those multipliers were.
Gold is the weird outlier when it comes to the value of things, not the gold standard.
[1] It's grown about 35x, when denominated in dollars. If we actually used gold for money, it would have been deflationary, to the tune of... Whatever real economic growth the world would have had. That amount of deflation would have been utterly horrifying.