> This difficulty lowers the likelihood of government fiscal responsibility and increases the likelihood of devestating inflation.
I share this worry too, but it's not like there's currently any political appetite for fiscal responsibility. I wonder if the threat of inflation and currency volatility would actually serve as better stick, than what we currently have which is continuing to run up a massive debt which will be terrible for our children?
> Probably dumb question: if debt and deficits don’t matter and a country can just print money - how does that explain cases where countries have defaulted and other countries and their own citizens lose confidence in the currency?
I think the idea is that deficits don't matter if you print money and offset any inflation (1) some sort of jobs program, (2) taxes which can take money back out of the economy and cool inflation, and maybe (3) more traditional ways of tweaking interest rates.
I'm not sure if you need all of the parts in place to see if / how it works. The fed could start offsetting deficits to the tune of $100B to the treasury and see how the USD, bond markets react. If inflation goes up, it could in theory, be offset with a tax scheme inline with MMT. I'm not saying this would be terribly smooth, but I do think it is possible to test parts MMT in relative isolation.
I mean the capacity to produce goods and services.
I am not an economist but it seems to me that factories will often run underneath max capacity. I also think that supply chains are more flexible than they were in the past. All cases of hyper inflation I know of always had a concurrent disruption to supply capacity (e.g. war, natural disaster, political strife). It seems ramping up production to meet demand is usually not an issue over the course of a year if there isn't some big externality preventing it (i.e.war). I'd be interested hearing from people who know more if this is the case.
> Printing more money does not change the real wealth in the economy. You can’t create additional purchasing power with an increase in the money supply because prices will adjust to the new level.
I think the point is more thatn printing money and transferring it to treasury coffers effectively is a tax on anyone holding USD. More government spending -> bigger deficits -> more money printed -> higher inflation (taxes). That's my understanding anyway.
Hey Simon. re: friction, I built a little service about a month ago that creates events via email — www.thad.cc
You just need to cc the address in an email and it sends invites to all of the people in the email list. I used it for an event of about ~30 and most people added their RSVP. It has chat too, but that wasn't as successful. Email is obviously not the 'coolest', but this approach at least reduces friction. I spent about a month thinking about / building this and would be happy to chat.
Everything will turn pink ;-)
Awesome that we are having same thoughts on invites and friction. Would love to chat. Feel free to drop me an email on simon@stuff.li.
Thank you - it’s very refreshing to see these points here. So many comments here miss the main points of the article or default to tired lines from Econ 101. Yes more affordable housing is good an important but it takes a long time. And there are a lot of folks suffering in the meantime. To me the core problem is your point 6 - despite our power and wealth, not enough of us give a shit about long term community goals.
Sundar's letter unsatisfactory here. Isn't the real scandal that the company weighed the risk of terminating Rubin without compensation and decided not to.
If I were a Google employee I'd be wondering when it will be expedient for Google to do the right thing in cases of gross misconduct, and when they'll take a calculated risk like they did here. I'm guessing the 13 execs sacked probably didn't have ~$100m compensation packages at stake.
The title of the piece is extremely misleading... this didn't happen today; it's since 2016. Were that not the case, I'd completely agree with you here.
I share this worry too, but it's not like there's currently any political appetite for fiscal responsibility. I wonder if the threat of inflation and currency volatility would actually serve as better stick, than what we currently have which is continuing to run up a massive debt which will be terrible for our children?