> “As the lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus in India continues, pollution levels across much of the country have dropped sharply. Now some residents in northern India say they can see the snow-capped Himalayas 200 kilometres away for the first time in 30 years.” [1]
If we had a global deflationary economic system, the incentive to invest in capital and engage in consumerism would dissipate. People would work less, because there would be less reason to work. Without work, people would have less reason to travel. Pollution would drop accordingly.
Under a deflationary economic system, a touch over $480,000 in savings would yield an effective “UBI” of $1000/mo [2].
Once adopted by the entire world, a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms could achieve this. Humans would voluntarily work less and pollute less.
This works really well if you have $480,000 in savings, but it doesn't really work if you have 0 savings, or debt.
Deflation, with its disincentives to investment or economic growth, would reduce employment and real wages. Most Americans would lose their jobs or see their wages cut as the economy ground to a halt. Anyone with debt would likely be trapped working for the rest of their life at subsistence wages, never making enough to pay their debts off.
At that point, you'd need an entire overhaul of the economy, not just an algorithmic monetary system
So? What about the cliff? Isn't that more important than getting people out of debt? It's this kind of thing that makes reasonable people who do want to avert climate disaster wonder whether the cliff analogy isn't just a rallying cry to push an agenda of nationalization and redistribution of private property. In other words, just because we do swerve doesn't mean the socioeconomic upheaval is likely to work out in favor of people who want to eat the rich, or anything resembling justice either. More likely what will happen is everyone will get poorer in a somewhat linear fashion, meaning the rich will still be rich and the poor will be below water.
If the only way to cure the climate crisis is to prevent people from flying having tchotchkes, how naive is Corey to think that the rich will somehow stop those things before the middle class and poor do?
But it's dangerous and flawed to mix climate targets with social justice targets for this very reason. Hinging the swerve on a social/economic revolution means it will never happen.
Hyperinflation of the old currency would erase all debt denominated in it as we shift to a global deflationary economic system.
Once in the deflationary environment, the cost of borrowing would be higher, and there would be less reason to work, consume and invest. Hence, there would be less incentive to take on debt.
Many things are preferable to having 0 savings and a planet on fire.
Come on. At least read Keynes just for the sake of steelmanning. Once the marginal productivity of physical capital is below the real interest rate people will abandon production even if there is a shortage of products and people are starving on the street. They will do this until the marginal productivity of the capital is high enough i.e. the shortage is strong enough to raise prices to keep up with the high real interest rate. Hence deflation will eventually result in inflation and then the process reversed because they invested too much and you get deflation in an endless cycle.
If you have a properly tuned money system you would expect it to stabilize at some level. Cycles should be the exception and full employment the rule as says law implies. If you want to discourage consumption you should introduce consumption taxes for natural resources, co2 and other forms of pollution.
Really, the answer is so obvious. You need to let the interest rate on cash be negative like -4% and then give the central bank the task to do price level targeting. The problem with deflation is that the optimal real interest rate is 0% but if the nominal interest rate is at 0% then the real interest becomes positive. A positive interest on money effectively acts as a competitor for labor. Anything that uses labor must earn at least this interest rate hence the economy must grow. If the economy stands still there isn't enough money to service existing debt. You will get an inevitable currency collapse because you didn't consider for the case where the economy stops growing even for just a few years.
If that doesn't convince you let me tell you that a negative interest rate makes deflation palatable to the public by maintaining full employment. High interest debt is prone to default which results in an increased risk of losing your investment which lowers the effective yield of the debt. A borrower that can only pay back $10000 will only pay back that amount regardless of the interest rate, so increasing the interest rate increases the risk of default without increasing the overall return on investment. If the interest rate is cut low enough that it asks for only $10000 then you will get the same $10000 back with almost no risk, but from the perspective of the borrower his life wasn't negatively disrupted by the process of defaulting. Hence once you adjust for risk, high interest and low interest debt can have the same yield. However, in the high interest case, the borrower may be fooled into believing that he can pay his debt back, so he is strongly encouraged to work more and convince others to consume more, in short he will advocate for higher economic growth.
Won't lowering interest rates lead to stimulating the economy and more debt? Actually, no. If you have negative interest rates you can abandon QE and raise the reserve ratio, in fact, you can do price level targeting (no inflation/deflation) to control the money supply according to monetarist theories which assume a constant velocity of money. Saved money is dead money, hence the need to force ever greater quantities of money into the economy to keep it alive, if you control the velocity directly, you don't need to keep adding new money. The miracle of Wörgl currency circulated 200 times faster than the national Austrian currency and therefore didn't need any deficit spending whatsoever, the money supply was somewhere around 10 per person, the local government ran all social spending programmes against unemployment on a balanced budget which is absurd considering that it was a poor indebted classic deficit spending town with 30% unemployment before Unterguggenberger became mayor.
To avoid ecological disaster, we need to slam on the brakes, not merely pump them.
> Once the marginal productivity of physical capital is below the real interest rate people will abandon production even if there is a shortage of products and people are starving on the street.
Given the profit margin on farming is something like 10%, and assuming the average annual purchasing power appreciation of our hypothetical global currency of fixed supply equals the Fed’s inflation target of 2% plus 0.25% GDP growth, how do we arrive at people “starving on the street”?
> If you want to discourage consumption you should introduce consumption taxes for natural resources, co2 and other forms of pollution
Surely the level of taxation necessary to curb industrial and retail usage of fossil fuels to the same extent of global deflationary economics would make the taxation measures politically infeasible. The tax policy would need to result in unthinkably high prices to create the drastic changes necessary. Deflation OTOH would lead to a decline in capital investment, employment, and spending without requiring any level of forcible compulsion.
A global currency of fixed supply would realistically deliver a sufficiently powerful financial incentive to galvanize widespread, voluntary adoption of ecologically sustainable consumer behaviour and business practices.
> by maintaining full employment
Particularly with the rise of automation and AI, is maintaining full employment really an achievable goal? We desperately need a way for the majority of humans to subsist without working bullshit jobs [1].
> hence the need to force ever greater quantities of money into the economy to keep it alive
We’re facing ecological collapse precisely because humanity has chased infinite growth.
>People would work less, because there would be less reason to work.
You mean most of the work will be piled up on a handful of full time employees which leaves a huge percentage of the population unemployed and destitue and ready to rebel against the system.
>Under a deflationary economic system, a touch over $480,000 in savings would yield an effective “UBI” of $1000/mo [2].
What if people decide to have less children to protect them from the rent seeking conducted by the rich families that inherited wealth over centuries? What if the above unemployed people die from starvation and are no longer there to guarantee the value of your money?
>Once adopted by the entire world, a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms could achieve this. Humans would voluntarily work less and pollute less.
Voluntarily? Are you sure about that? Aren't you just trying to make some transactions illegal by forcing a less effective medium of exchange? Also we already tried this and it failed not only with the gold standard but also with Bitcoin.
If it were that simple the Roman empire wouldn't have collapsed. No currency in history would have collapsed.
You are also discounting the fact that deflation encourages corruption as gaining money through war, crime, trafficking, environmental destruction, political bribes becomes highly profitable as once you are locked in and got a lucrative 10 million dollars you will earn more from those savings than you can earn from being an upstanding politician. Hence there is an intensive pressure to destroy physical and social capital for a share of the fixed supply currency.
> both Florida and California went through pretty stringent lockdowns
In Australia, police would patrol the streets to ensure people were staying within a 5 km radius of their residence, and to ensure they were only out for a reason deemed essential by the government.
This was accompanied by international, interstate and intrastate border closures, i.e. you couldn’t enter Australia, and couldn’t enter another state within Australia if already in Australia, nor could you in some cases even drive from one part of the state to another, without a special exemption.
I hesitate to ask what Florida did to enforce the lockdowns, because I’m fairly certain what passed for a “lockdown” outside of Asia-Pacific was a joke by comparison. I strongly doubt any of the above measures were done by any state in the US at any point in the pandemic.
That's true, sure, there are places in the world like China and even Australia that dwarf the efforts elsewhere, but Florida and California were both much more stringent than some other places.
> Without a really deep dive I'm not certain the island-country numbers of Australia or Japan would be achievable in the US
If “being an island nation” was all it took to eradicate Covid, why was Hawaii unable to do so?
It’s clear border security was a rather important factor. And can you think of a more essential responsibility of government than securing the borders?
Gentle reminder that Australia is an “island country” the size of the continental US with several densely-populated major cities.
> Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause.
> And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, graduation rates, violent crime)--it's indeed unclear that draconian policies in the name of public health were a net positive.
Why are we drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of Covid safety protocols based on the failed half-measures taken by America? We have a plethora of working examples to study from the Asia-Pacific region: Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and China all eradicated Covid pre-Omicron.
> But there seems to be little introspection from those who propose sweeping policy change about the need to consider second-order effects on those whose lives and livelihoods will be upturned.
Equally, there seems to be little introspection amongst American libertarians about the role their own society’s dysfunction might be playing in shaping their personal beliefs.
> The alternative is to have your boss decide for you when he wants to fire you
Just for fun, I thought I’d do the math on deflationary economics:
#!/usr/bin/env raku
use v6;
multi sub deflate($n, $r, $y)
{
my $m = $n;
loop (my $i = 0; $i < $y; $i++)
{
$m = deflate($m, $r);
}
$m;
}
multi sub deflate($n, $r)
{
$n * (1 + $r);
}
sub MAIN(:$rate = 0.0225, :$years = 10)
{
my $purchasing-power = 1;
my $deflate = deflate($purchasing-power, $rate, $years);
my $output = qq:to/EOF/.trim;
After $years years of deflation at a rate of {$rate * 100}% per year,
purchasing power is {$deflate * 100}% of what it was initially.
EOF
$output.say;
}
Without inflation, your personal wealth would grow by the average inflation rate target plus GDP growth, compounding each year.
Assuming an average inflation rate target of 2% per year (per the Fed) and an average GDP growth rate of 0.25% per year, your real purchasing power would grow by about 25% per decade.
Under this scenario, you could mimic a universal basic income of $1000 per month upon saving a total of $480,307.
Bonus: your monthly “UBI” could never be shut off by your government.
Cool, but I couldn't resist rakufying your "deflate" subroutine:
sub deflate($power is copy, $rate, $years) {
$power *= 1 + $rate for ^$years;
$power * 100
}
sub MAIN(:$rate = 0.0225, :$years = 10)
{
print qq:to/EOF/;
After $years years of deflation at a rate of {$rate * 100}% per year,
purchasing power is &deflate(1,$rate,$years)% of what it was initially.
EOF
}
The innumerable dark-seeming corners of the language is part of what makes Raku so very, distinctly “Perl”. Little traits and single character sigils that change everything. I find the black magic of Perl моѕt all∪ring ∮.
Same, very surprising. I was tracking the project for a while with great interest but they lost a lot of things that made Perl actually good at its niche. I'm amazed they made Perl look worse.
I’m disappointed in the way this Perl 6 v Perl 7 debate is developing. Perl 6 modernizes Perl with e.g. concurrent and reactive programming, built-in grammars and a reimagined regex syntax superior to legacy PCRE, named function arguments, and gradual typing.
Perl 6 was designed to be the successor language to Perl 5.
The only technical grounds for Perl 6 being metaphorically sidelined was because Perl 6 lacked the startup and runtime performance characteristics of Perl 5 — fixable problems.
Proponents of Perl 5 often contend Perl could’ve escaped developer mindshare loss without Perl 6 in the picture. But to claim Python, Ruby on Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust and JS/TS never would’ve gained serious developer mindshare had _Perl 6_ not existed seems very myopic to me. All the brilliant new languages and web frameworks launching were bound to erode Perl’s early established dominance regardless.
Things would be different now if Perl 6 was at least as performant as Perl 5. Perhaps then it would’ve become popular years ago amongst Perl users to switch all greenfield Perl code to Perl 6. Then “Perl” would’ve become synonymous with modern language features.
I think more than anything it was an error in the messaging.
Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started dying, since people assumed that Perl 5 would be soon dead, and Perl 6 had a new different syntax. And then it took 15 years to happen, during which Python and others ate its lunch.
I think a more successful strategy would have been to make it clear very early on that Perl 6 would be some sort of long term experimental project, and that Perl 5 would be expected to be a thing for a long time still.
If in 2015 Perl 5 still had a thriving ecosystem, and there was a demand of Perl-like but better, then Perl 6 could have been more successful. But in the current timeline it's a successor to an almost defunct language, and isn't such an attractive proposition.
In 2000, for all intents and purposes, Perl 6 was the successor of Perl 5. And one of the reasons the project was started, was because Perl 5 was already dying at that point. Not only losing the web server competition to PHP, but also from internal battles, close to civil war.
The internal battles ceased for a while when the Perl 6 process was started. But around 2008, it became a war between Perl 5 and Perl 6. To squelch that, the sister language meme was born. But that just meant a cease-fire, rather than peace, and the dissent and resentments continued to fester under the blanket of the sister language meme.
Until 2019, when the rename of Perl 6 to the Raku Programming Language happened. Factions within Perl 5 lost their common enemy, and fighting could start all over again. Which caused at least one pumpking to resign.
To mark Perl 6 as the cause for Perl 5's demise, is incorrect. Perl 6 was one of the effects of Perl 5's demise.
Meanwhile the Raku Programming Language continues to build a programming language of the future. You can check out the Rakudo Weekly News if you want to stay up-to-date on developments https://rakudoweekly.blog
Have you used Raku before? The new and improved regex syntax [1] IMHO completely obsoletes legacy PCRE. Writing regexes in other languages feels like stepping into an ICE vehicle after driving a Tesla: so crufty and old and obvious legacy.
Raku’s built-in grammars make parsers trivial to write. I effortlessly created two [2] — one for reordering fstab entries, and the other for converting human-readable LUKS offsets into cryptsetup sectors — on a lazy afternoon. Grammars in Raku make this second nature.
Then you have Raku’s multi-dispatch. It is more capable than Erlang/Elixir pattern matching:
# a list with at least one element, extracting the head and tail
multi sub tail(*@list ($head, *@tail)) { @tail }
multi sub tail(*@list) { @list }
[3]
==> tail()
==> say(); # []
[3, 4]
==> tail()
==> say(); # [4]
# pattern matching with arbitrary guards
multi sub user($name where { is-valid-user($_) }) { $name.say }
multi sub user($name) { "invalid name: $name".say }
sub is-valid-user($name)
{
# notice the additive character class in this regex: “letters plus digits”
# fail the match if $name is root
try with $name ~~ /(<+:Letter +digit>+)/ { $0 ne 'root' or fail }; $!.not
}
user('name'); # name
user('1234'); # 1234
user('root'); # invalid name: root
class Coordinates
{
has $.latitude is required;
has $.longitude is required;
}
class City
{
has Str:D $.name is required;
has Str:D $.state is required;
has Str:D $.country is required;
has Coordinates:D $.coordinates is required;
}
my $latitude = -37.840935;
my $longitude = 144.946457;
my Coordinates $coordinates .= new(:$latitude, :$longitude);
my Str:D $name = 'Melbourne';
my Str:D $state = 'Victoria';
my Str:D $country = 'Australia';
my City $melbourne .= new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates);
my City:D $sydney = do {
my Coordinates:D $coordinates = do {
my $latitude = -33.86514;
my $longitude = 151.209900;
Coordinates.new(:$latitude, :$longitude);
};
my Str:D $name = 'Sydney';
my Str:D $state = 'New South Wales';
my Str:D $country = 'Australia';
City.new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates);
};
# deeply nested argument deconstruction
multi sub melbourne-or-bust(
City:D $city (
Str:D :$name where 'Melbourne',
Str:D :$state,
Str:D :$country,
:$coordinates (
:$latitude,
:$longitude
)
)
)
{
my $gist = qq:to/EOF/.trim;
Welcome to the city of $name. It’s located in $state, $country.
GPS coordinates: $latitude, $longitude
EOF
$gist.say;
}
multi sub melbourne-or-bust(City:D $city)
{
'This isn’t Melbourne.'.say;
}
melbourne-or-bust($melbourne); # Welcome to the city of Melbourne ...
melbourne-or-bust($sydney); # This isn’t Melbourne
> Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started dying,
Perl 6 took a long time to make, but how much did that matter? What was Perl going to do about Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust, JS/TS, and more? The world of programming languages used to be a lot smaller than it is today.
There isn’t an infinite amount of gold on earth, whereas there _is_ an infinite amount of any linearly emitted $COIN. Linear emissions models don’t resemble terrestrial gold mining.
Linear emissions are a security tax paid for by investors. Do investors enjoy paying this tax? Investors generally don’t “enjoy” being debased through inflation.
Ethereum got away with having no defined emissions policy early on, but they pulled it off during an era when information was low and ignorance was widespread. Many of their investors assumed Ethereum had a fixed supply just like Bitcoin did — and they had to scramble to rectify this years later.
“Governed emission” is achievable via systems of on-chain governance. Non-stakers get debased by tail emissions measures voted in by stakers. Stakers profit from the inflation measure or are hardly debased at worst.
While antithetical to gold, it achieves the stated goal of incentivizing ongoing chain security while also benefiting investors, particularly assuming staking yield is widely accessible to all in a decentralized manner.
> there _is_ an infinite amount of any linearly emitted $COIN
The amount emitted at any time is not only finite, but limited by time, with the yearly supply inflation going down toward 0. There's no essential difference with a capped supply [1].
A tail emissions rate of 0.03% or less annually seems acceptable.
#!/usr/bin/env raku
use v6;
multi sub inflate($n, $r, $y)
{
my $m = $n;
loop (my $i = 0; $i < $y; $i++)
{
$m = inflate($m, $r);
}
$m;
}
multi sub inflate($n, $r)
{
$n * (1 - $r);
}
sub MAIN(:$rate = 0.0003, :$years = 100)
{
my $purchasing-power = 1;
my $inflate = inflate($purchasing-power, $rate, $years);
my $output = qq:to/EOF/.trim;
After $years years of inflation at a rate of {$rate * 100}% per year,
purchasing power is {$inflate * 100}% of what it was initially.
EOF
$output.say;
}
All else equal, a 1% annual rate of inflation costs you over half of your purchasing power per century. Even a 0.1% yearly inflation rate charted out over several centuries results in a collapse of purchasing power. This level of inflation practically requires investors to take countermeasures, like searching for alternative stores of value...
Expanding the supply on demand through on-chain governance in a way stakers can profit from, while sacrilege to “digital gold”, would be more palatable to me than rates of tail emission higher than 0.03% or so.
I’m only commenting from the perspective of investors concerned over debasement. 0.03% annual inflation reduces purchasing power by about 7% every 250 years.
Just to make sure I understand correctly, Eth2 stakers have no “voting” power, but are relied upon in a core capacity to ensure the continued functioning of the network?
Something about this explanation seems incomplete.
Phone-a-friend consensus aka “weak subjectivity” doesn’t meaningfully differ from the administration of centralized Git repositories. If your blockchain requires human intervention to resolve disputes, as do all pure proof of stake implementations, you probably never needed a blockchain to begin with.
All blockchains require social coordination. How do you think Bitcoin operates? A protocol is developed and some facet of society decides to build a client to support that. Somebody adds a new BIP and the network of users may decide to coordinate in order to upgraded the protocol (soft or hard fork).
> All blockchains require social coordination. How do you think Bitcoin operates?
That’s a great question, and one Jude C. Nelson — who has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeton — is better equipped to answer [1] than me (or you, probably):
“PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked, and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS, block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and, since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're being honest about this?).”
I haven’t looked through the entire thread but the challenge of recovering from a PoW 51% attack is that the attacker still holds ASIC mining power and can re-attack each new fork. The same is not true in PoS where the attacker’s funds can be targeted and effectively depleted in a fork, leaving it prohibitively expensive for the attacker to continually attack each new fork.
See the “spawn camping” description and defence in my prior link.
> “As the lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus in India continues, pollution levels across much of the country have dropped sharply. Now some residents in northern India say they can see the snow-capped Himalayas 200 kilometres away for the first time in 30 years.” [1]
If we had a global deflationary economic system, the incentive to invest in capital and engage in consumerism would dissipate. People would work less, because there would be less reason to work. Without work, people would have less reason to travel. Pollution would drop accordingly.
Under a deflationary economic system, a touch over $480,000 in savings would yield an effective “UBI” of $1000/mo [2].
Once adopted by the entire world, a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms could achieve this. Humans would voluntarily work less and pollute less.
[1] https://www.sbs.com.au/language/english/audio/himalayas-visi...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31759685