This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This isn't the sort of thing that people are likely to be "wrong" about, because their evaluation of the economy is based on metrics that impact them directly.
Lunch at Five Guys costs me $30 right now, so for me, the economy is bad. There's no argument you can present to me on this forum right now that will make my burger stop costing $30. Job numbers, real wages, exact rate of inflation and etc, are all irrelevant, because my burger still costs $30. So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.
This line of thought is actually highly atypical. Even in 2022/2023 iirc a majority of Americans rated their own economic circumstances as good/improving, they just thought the country as a whole wasn't.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, I wasn't planning on getting involved in politics, but if that's what you're concerned about, I have a plan that all but guarantees to get the cost of that hamburger down: First, we'll raise interest rates up to Volcker-era levels. If this managed to get inflation down by double digits, with inflation currently sitting at 2.5%, it should be enough to get double-digit deflation. Next, I'm going to raise taxes on practically everyone. Current middle class brackets are in the 21%–24% bracket, let's get them into the 25%-30% range they were at before the Reagan tax cuts. Next, we'll get rid of all tariffs. There's no reason for Five Guys to be forced to pay extra if they can get cheaper beef from Brazil. Finally, end all immigration restrictions. Farmers, food processing plants, and restaurants shouldn't have to pay anyone $15/hr when there are plenty of people who would work for the minimum wage and be glad to get it. Now, there's a decent chance that you might not have a job after my plan takes effect, rendering the cost of restaurant food a moot point, but that would do it.
More options
Context Copy link
That makes sense. Unfortunately, it's demonstrably false. Polls ask both "how are you doing economically?" and "how's the economy doing in general?" (but, erm, worded better by people who know how to ask poll questions). While the former doesn't exactly track the stock market minute-by-minute, the latter is consistently (at least in the past several years) strongly affected by partisanship. I totally believe that people's feelings about their own economic situation is difficult to judge from top-level economic statistics, especially ones biased towards measuring how well the economy is working for rich people, but people's assessment of the economy of a whole is strongly influenced by their political leanings over any observation of the facts.
Also, to be clear, this isn't a "Republicans are lying" claim. Both sides are heavily influenced by partisanship here. Look at the first graph in the first link I gave above: at Biden's inauguration the answer to "is the economy getting better?" flipped from around 50% of Republicans/10% of Democrats to around 10% of Republicans/50% of Democrats. That chart seems more useful for determining who is president than anything else.
More options
Context Copy link
I would add that the problem is the government data is controlled by the people who benefit from positive data. It isn’t totally fake but there are fudge factors and it isn’t entirely clear if they are 1) being fudged and 2) if so the size of the fudging.
For example food inflation was in the mid twenties over the Biden admin. Industry group calculated it around 35%. Maybe the industry group is wrong or maybe the government is wrong. But the industry group seemingly fits my experience a bit more.
More options
Context Copy link
If such a candidate existed you wouldn't vote for him anyway. At least I don't think so, because I don't think communists are well-received here.
Paul Volcker wasn't a communist, and it doesn't take communism to keep prices stable instead of wildly inflating.
But no, nobody is running on that platform, because it would require cutting off the gravy train. The Dollar Endgame is coming, eventually, and when it arrives it will be in a rush.
You didn't ask for a candidate to "keep prices stable." You asked for a candidate to actively bring the price of products down. That's a much bigger ask, and much closer to the realm of price controls.
The guy you just replied to wasn't me.
I'm not a strict market libertarian, I think that if there are reasonable interventions we can make in the economy then we should do that. I agree that direct price controls are a bad idea, but to suggest that there are no actions whatsoever that can be undertaken to reduce inflation doesn't strike me as plausible.
Fair. My fault for not checking. But to but you and @KMC , the original comment did say to actively reduce prices. If this quick source is correct the last time we had deflation was 1954. And generally speaking, deflation means the economy is in a very bad condition.
Ok, so spell this out for me. I swear this isn’t a gotcha. I don’t know anything about economics, I’m here to learn.
Deflation is bad. Ok. So do you think we should literally never have deflation? Can we at least keep prices static? Because if we can’t decrease them, and if we can’t keep them static, then that seems to imply that they would continue to unboundedly increase into the future. We would eventually get to the point where a loaf of bread is a million dollars. That doesn’t seem desirable. What am I missing here?
Yes? There is nothing wrong with this.
Well 'eventually' there would be nothing wrong with that - though it might takes many centuries. While targets like 2% are slightly arbitrary, some (low) level of inflation is necessary unless we want stagnation and unemployment.
More options
Context Copy link
At that point you replace old dollar by new dollar at 1 000 000:1 and continue.
Not sure has it happened to dollar already at some point, but it was done for many currencies.
Or print banknotes starting from 1 (million in small print) to say 500 (million in small print).
More options
Context Copy link
Nothing, more or less, and the inflation will inevitably lead to hyperinflation, and then there will be a currency reset, and we'll do it all over again unless our currency is no longer fiat.
The trick is when the inflation will lead to hyperinflation, but fiat always ends in worthless currency.
This is why I referenced Volcker. Sometimes you have to suffer through the pain of something bad, because of the alternatives (see, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, entitlements in general).
More options
Context Copy link
I'm hardly an economics professor myself, but I do know some things. Inflation happens because demand is higher than supply.
For examples of good inflation, if the economy is doing well, people have money to spare. They literally don't value $1 as much because they have so many of them, and businesses are able to get away with higher prices. Another example: when you hire a person, you are hiring a person to make them not do anything else. In other words, if in a given population everyone has the necessary education to go into astrophysics, if you want someone to flip burgers for you, you have to pay them a salary high enough that they don't go into astrophysics instead.
The bad reasons for inflation are obvious: Supply drops to lower than demand.
Deflation happens when supply is high but demand is low. Supply being high is good, but if demand is low for a long period of time that generally means something is wrong. Either you predicted demand poorly or customers turned frugal.
As unintuitive as it may seem, I think you generally always want inflation, but inflation for the good reasons. That should be slow enough that a loaf of bread costing a million dollars would happen, but maybe 10,000 years in the future. You've lived your entire life to where a penny is not really even worth the time it takes to pick up, but it wasn't that way from the beginning. Inflation is bad when your income doesn't keep up with it.
If a loaf of bread ever got to the point where it was a million bucks and you wanted to stop it, the only relatively reasonable way to do that would be a currency exchange. You print some nuBucks, force the economy to use nuBucks after 2 years, but they can trade $1,000 old dollars for 1 nuBuck. That's still a major hassle that most would want to avoid.
You're assuming the money supply is constant, which it isn't. If nothing changes with supply or demand, but the money printer shoots out 10x the number of paper bills, then you're going to have inflation.
We've already had inflation, serious inflation, but due to the way in which is was done, it was mostly confined to asset prices (real estate and stocks). You can argue about supply and demand and building and immigration all you like when it comes to house and land prices, but those things are not applicable when it comes to stocks, and they are also inflated far over the $30 hamburger example.
It's inevitable, but you're right, nobody wants it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not an economist either, but I don't think a loaf of bread being a million dollars is too much different from a turkey dinner in 1960 costing 60 cents versus now costing $7. I'd guess we start seeing the dollar like the Japanese see the yen, where $10,000 to buy a pair of shoes is just what's expected and perfectly affordable for most people.
More options
Context Copy link
The econ 101 explanation, which I believe is pretty much correct, is that we always want some inflation and never want deflation. Deflation means that cash just naturally accrues value - the $100 in my hand today is worth more tomorrow if I don't spend it. So I don't spend it unless absolutely necessary. And if everyone does this, then the economy slows down, there's less growth, and everyone suffers from the fewer goods being produced and services being rendered. Inflation has the opposite effect, where currency constantly loses value; so the most value you can get out of that $100 is right now, which puts pressure on you to look for the right opportunity to trade it for a useful product or service right now.
Of course, too much inflation is well known to cause serious issues. Income tends to be sticky and laggy - most people's salaries aren't pegged to inflation, but rather get raised once every period of time, and so if inflation is very high, then most workers suffer. Which is kinda what happened the last few years. This is why the US federal reserve's dual mandate includes hitting a 2% inflation rate - it's positive, but not so positive as to cause issues, at least most people seem to think so.
So eventually, yeah, a loaf of bread will cost a million dollars. If a loaf of bread were to cost $2 today, then at 2% inflation, that'd take a little over 660 years. Much like how movie tickets cost a literal nickel like a century ago and cost $15 today. But the idea of inflation is that, when a loaf of bread costs $1,000,000, the average income will also be (1,000,000/2)*(average income today), so things will remain the same in relative terms. In practice, it doesn't work that perfectly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, it's firmly in the realm of deflation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link