Let’s start with your presumed preferences for controlling inflation and then we’ll return to the issue of empirics.
If all you care about and the only metric you look at is inflation, then logically you should be hugely in favor of cost controls. After all, that is the easiest way to solve the problem. You can’t control the supply and demand for minerals nor can you determine their abundance. These are subject to everything from political corruption to geology. And if you think crypto escapes this or any similar circumstances, then you are equally uninformed. China accounts for 64% of Bitcoin mining and nearly 100% of supply of mining rigs via Bitmain. If you include the Mongolia and Russia, you get close to 100%. Even if the location of the rigs was more evenly distributed, China still has a strangle hold on the technology. NVIDIA used to have a monopoly on the ICs, but now that’s headed to an end. To a significant degree this is due to Trump’s policies’ effect of forcing China to in-source all this. And even without Trump, China has a long-term policy objective of freeing itself entirely of dependence on US/European tech. I.e., western democratic control of things.
So, if you trust in China, then crypto is your solution. If you trust gold, then, interestingly you’re also putting a lot of stock in China and Russia, since they account for the two largest sources. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/historical-mine-production And if you talking about mining and transporting technologies, China again has a dominant position.
In short, if you want to ignore the success (see below) of modern national economic management and rely on the supposed alternatives (gold, crypto, diamonds, etc.), you are relying on sources that practice similar economic management as we in the west do, but their political behavior and reliability as suppliers of the alternatives are, in my view, worse and have a history of terrible governance.
But let’s examine the issue of inflation and its relevance to the only thing that matters: large numbers of humans improving their lives. The short of it is, when looking over the periods and events of the times before and after the gold standard and the creation of the federal reserve, things become more consistently better.
Here is one snapshot:
If inflation were in any way a determinant of people’s well-being, then it should show up in life expectancy since life expectancy is an aggregate measure of all the factors (economic, systemic, health, income distribution, etc.). From 1860 to 2020, the curve, at best, manifests impacts only from epidemics and wars. There is no discernible impact from any other factors.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1860?amount=1
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-united-states-all-time/
There are multiple sources that repeat this view, but I use these since they’re easily available.
Here is a good paper that doesn’t really focus on inflation, but does a bit of a 360 on all factors that might.
And there are lots of other such papers, but if you look at various events and issues related to business cycles and natural disasters of various kinds, the era of the federal reserve and modern monetary management, you can see clearly that the terrible effects were uniformly worse without these.
I should add the obvious conclusion. Political system and governance are the core of how well a nations takes care of itself. And the degree of independence of policy from external influence or control helps. No way is there an ability to control all of these things. Modern economic governance that uses econometrics and Keynesian or modified Keynesian economics as a base is the most successful way to achieve the objectives of economic stability and growth.
As I said before, it’s not simple in the same way virology and epidemiology aren’t. It is therefore harder for people to understand since most people are afraid or uninformed about how complex things are and must work. People want a simple and ideally tangible explanation or means to serve them. Except when they go to the doctor.
