[lisper]

Well, yeah, you can't create something from nothing. But that's not exactly a deep insight. All economic activity involves consumption if you want to cast the net that broadly.

The point is:

> The idea that people need to be encouraged to consume (consumption being the opposite of saving) I don't think is supported by economic theory.

People absolutely need to be encouraged to be productive. That's the whole point of an economy, to encourage people to produce things that others want in exchange for other people producing things that they want.

Honestly, how could anyone possibly not understand that?

[lottin]

I understand it fine, I just don't agree with it.

The whole point of an economy is NOT to encourage people to produce things. The point of producing is to satisfy a demand for consumption, and individuals choose their level of consumption according to their preferences and budget constraints. They don't need to be encouraged to consume. That doesn't make any sense.

[lisper]

> The whole point of an economy is NOT to encourage people to produce things.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that. Maybe things are different where you are, but where I live most people expect to be compensated for their labor, and investors expect at least a shot at a positive ROI. But if you want to work for free, by no means allow me to discourage you.

> They don't need to be encouraged to consume. That doesn't make any sense.

You're right about that. But that was not what I said. I said that they needed to be encouraged to produce, not to consume.

> I understand it fine,

Manifestly not. You couldn't even write three sentences without losing the plot.

[lottin]

You said: "Hoarding/saving for long periods of time is bad because it discourages people from taking risks by putting resources to productive use"

And later you added that by "saving" you meant specifically "not spending".

Then "taking risks by putting resources to productive use" is just a fancy way of saying "producing"

So, you're saying that people not spending is bad because it discourages people from producing.

In a market economy, the optimal level of production is the level that satisfies the desired level of consumption. If people want to save more, and therefore consume less, and as a result we also produce less, that's not bad. That's how the economy is supposed to work.

[lisper]

> the optimal level of production is the level that satisfies the desired level of consumption

You're assuming that "the desired level of consumption" is a constant. It's not. It's a function that depends on circumstances. People discover new things, and some of those discoveries lead to desires that were previously unknown or even unimaginable. It would never even occur to our neolithic ancestors to want an iPhone or a Tesla. But some of our ancestors wanted to discover new things, and some of those discoveries naturally lead to discovering new things to want.

And that's not even mentioning the fact that one of the things that people naturally want is to have children, which leads to more people wanting things. So even if the things they want are the same old things, demand will naturally grow as the population increases.

[hellojesus]

They aren't saying demand is constant. They're saying that all peoole have different utility curves, and some people are at their most efficient point on the curve when they spend all their day ealkimg in nature, with their demand being periodic walking shoes and food.

Such a person may not need to produce because their savings exceeds their total expected lifetime demand. And even if they had 80% of their assets invested, thry still may want a 20% cash buffer in case their investments go belly-up. Most people call this an emergency fund.

The idea of expiring money is plain dumb. We don't need to artifically increase the velocity of money. We don't need to increase demand for assets because people have time-constrained purchase windows. All that would do is lead to a lot of poor decisions as people scramble to find the most efficient ways to convert the expiring money into convertable value stores. Of course this would just increase demand and make those value stores more expensive. Some will be able to arbitrage market inefficiencies. I bet a whole lot more would just lose.

How would you save up cash for a good investment opportunity if it just died? How would people save for house down payments or businesses? So dumb.

Before publishing thr above, I decided to try reading the article. This Gisell dude is an idiot. Here is an example, and where I stopped reading

> The faults of money go further, Gesell wrote. When small businesses take out loans from banks, they must pay the banks interest on those loans, which means they must raise prices or cut wages. Thus, interest is a private gain at a public cost.

There is no public cost! The private bank lent money to someone they expect to pay it back. They make money if they're paid back and lose money if they don't.

The business, which would not exist without the loan, opens and brings more supply to the market. Increasing supply lowers prices (public benefits). The business emoloyes people. Those people choose to be employed at a given rate, even if that rate is lower than it could be if the business, which would not exist without the loan, didn't have to pay interest on its loan. (job creation: public benefits). The alternative presented is raising costs of goods. Okay... Either they raise them too high and have no customers and then go out of business and all concerns are washed, or they have higher prices than otherwise. But otherwise means there's no business and nothing to buy anyway, so here again thr public clearly wins. The only maybe scenario for public loss is if thr bank makes a loan thay isn't repaid. But obviously this is expected to happen from time to time, so either the losses are absorbed by the other profitable loans or the bank eventually goes out of business. Big deal. That's part of choosing a bank for bank consumers.

[lisper]

> How would you save up cash for a good investment opportunity if it just died?

That depends on how fast it died. Too much inflation is clearly bad, but so is none at all. And deflation is really, really bad. The last time the world saw deflation was during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Empirically, 2% seems to lead to pretty good outcomes by my personal quality metric. That's a halving of value every 30 years or so, which seems about right to me.