[lmm]

Deflation has a natural tendency to spiral; things will be cheaper in the future, so people put off spending, which brings prices down further and so on. You create an incentive to hoard cash rather than consuming or investing, and that is also self-reinforcing, so money stops functioning as money with all the trouble that implies.

[nradov]

This is obviously not how things generally work in the real world. Prices for personal computers have been deflating for years. The computing power in a $1000 laptop today would have probably cost at least $3000 a decade ago. And yet customers keep buying them instead of putting off spending because they want to have stuff today.

[lmm]

People buy computers when they want or need them, yes. But they absolutely do put off buying them because a better model is coming. Whereas people rush to buy e.g. a house as quickly as they can, because the price of houses keeps going up.