And a surprising thank you for engaging. Don’t know if you follow/read Patrick Tan here on Medium, but he’s crypto investment advisor and a very good writer…of course except for, IMO, the issue of the ideology of crypto.
It’s incredibly easy to find this data for income/prices/inflation. I originally was going to include all the references, but thought they would clutter the read. I will get this for you tomorrow, since it’s getting late here.
My primary response to this is the same as my initial one: how is it you crypto folks look at inflation alone as if that is a measure of anything? If living standards are increasing as fast or faster, what does it matter? If income and opportunities and demand for goods are increasing and the concomitant compensation of those earning (whatever) in the economy is increasing, then this is good. This is very basic economics. When deflation increases or grows to large, this is even more devastating. But it’s so weird that fact is never mentioned by crypto folks. Why? Do you view it as good?
Increasing income/prices/inflation/living standards is the foundational story of the explosion in prosperity in western liberal democracies for the last 200 years. The only people who have started to exhibit the failure of this system are those whose wages have declined in relation to inflation. But not because inflation has risen so fast. It’s been incredibly stable for the last 50 years, around 2%/year. Income mal-distribution is what has become a problem. Not fractional reserve banking or the absence of a gold or crypto standard. But that is never mentioned by crypto folks? Why?
Where inflation “matters” is only in places where corruption, governmental incompetence, and constraints on education and opportunity exist.. or externalities such as being sanctioned by other economic powers for some (usually) good or (sometimes) bad reason. Silver used to be vastly more valuable in my lifetime. No more. How does that fit in? Gold could be as well, but a few ten thousand years of it being a valued and useful commodity is just an accident: they come and go. Platinum is even more valuable, copper used to be as well, but no more.
Neither gold nor crypto function as currencies nor can they ever. Nor are they “economies”, as the muddled talk of crypto-vs-fractional-reserve-banking often implies. They are speculative commodities at best and to the extent they’re useful in and of themselves, they are a means of carrying out illicit exchanges with a good minimal discovery prospects. Diamonds and other valuable minerals are the same. They can never be part of an advanced economy and in any way be measured in any context but these.
You can read my Medium post on the ideology behind the whole silliness of the “evils” of fractional reserve banking and its relation to the crypto world. It’s not my best piece, since I wrote in a burst of frustration in the midst of getting something else done. But it pulls the main strings together.
https://medium.com/@jsadove/the-economic-ideology-of-crypto-and-ddlts-e8f5b476996d
I have no idea what you mean by Bitcoin providing a lot of options… for people who would not have a lot of options. Surely, the only case of that is for those who want to transact illicit activity. In that you are correct. I know, however, these kind of statements are either never elaborated on or are provably unfounded, eg. Venezuela.
I’ll get you the wage, price and inflation data tomorrow. Probably sometime in the afternoon.
