Background: I watched the No More Inflation documentary (#810697). I would urge everyone to skip the first 20 minutes—or, for the purposes of this MONEY CLASS, only watch that.
Three levels to why this phrase is nonsense:
- “Living” is a variable and subjective target that seems to mean all manner of things to different people—certainly across time as well. “Living” according to 1960’s standards would be widely considered squalor if it happened today. (Implied quality-adjustments)
- “Cost” is an economic term meaning that which must be given up—but people using this phrase use it to mean the number of fiat digits one has to give up for certain, unspecific, goods and services. If rent and eggs are $1 more this month than last month, the "cost" of "living" has increased—no matter what else happened in the economy, to the person's assets or their salaries, to the real-world supply and demand adjustments in the underlying markets.
- “The,” there is no unitary, obvious, generally agreed upon cost of living that would warrant the use of a definite article.
tl;dr = The number of fiat units don't matter. (Money is a veil.) This can best be illustrated using foreign currencies:
Look, the Canadian currency (CAD) now trades at 1.42 to the American dollar. If an average American's grocery store, say along the Canadian border, decides to price all their goods in Canadian dollars instead of American dollars, the sticker prices of everything will increase about 42%. Did the food component of the standard of living for a border-dwelling American just decrease by about 42%? Did everything in the store just get 42% more expensive?
No, of course not. They just have to do some more mental gymnastics now that they're grocery shopping, comparing their assets (wealth) and salaries (income) in US dollars to the grocery store prices in Canadian dollars. Whatever.
This is not a "cost of living."
Now expand this over time instead of across currency/jurisdiction: 2024 America vs 1970 America. Same thing.
The filmmakers listed various nominal quantities: public debt in 1970 vs 2024; house prices in 1970 vs 2024. As if nothing else changed in between, as if the nominal quantity of debt 55 years ago has any meaning today. They displayed the crashing chart of “the dollar’s” purchasing power, a chart I would like to see banished from the world:
The implication of the 96% statements is one of a huge loss—that governments have skimmed hard-working regular people of their just dues. Cash holdings surreptitiously declining in value must have harmed someone. Intrigued by the statement, I wondered where I could find the victim of this alleged swindle: where is the person who held dollar bills over a century and, stoically, faced this loss? (“Who Bears the Burden of the Dollar’s Falling Purchasing Power?” The Daily Economy, Joakim Book )
And the interviewees in the documentary talked about how wonderful it would be if prices didn’t change ($1 milk today and the next year again $1): “when there is no inflation, there is no struggle; and people can live with dignity and be themselves.” I have lots to say about that, most pressingly: life on a hard money standard will not ensure that prices don't change (#749912).
Seb Bunney, the author of The Hidden Cost of Money, showed up with his standard quips, conflating the real things—wealth and income—and the nominal—the monetary unit. (=everything would be better if we had higher real incomes and more wealth – yeah, no shit Sherlock).
Coming away from the documentary, “What tha hell is a dollar?” is the reasonable question.
Now, I know (or at least think I know) what a satoshi is—it’s the smallest denominator of bitcoin, a quantity of digital money-things in a UTXO or custodial wallet. There is a certain number of them around, objectively limited and verifiable, and at some cryptographic level I know what they are.
I don’t always know what they do: Their “value”—i.e., purchasing power; i.e., command over real goods and services—changes over time. The Stacker News ticket tells me that 957 of them make one dollar; I have some rough reference points of how dollars this or that thing trades for today, but most directly I have to do some mental gymnastics to “translate” that into the everyday goods I acquire at my local Icelandic-króna-denominated grocery story (1 USD = 138 ISK); a large cartoon of eggs will set me back some 7,000 satoshis.
Now I know what a dollar (well, 7 of them) can get me... but what tha hell is a dollar? All I, or any consumer, cares about is translating what we have into what we can get.
Most major currencies, at some point in their life cycle, were measures not of value but of weight—the British pound mostly obviously so. The dollar’s history as a term is more obscure, derived from the name of a specific silver coin.
Here’s another revelation: the dollar is not a thing, not a fixture of the universe, not a fixed portion of the permanent money supply.
The faster Bitcoiners get the hang of this the better (and the less silly they look in fiat economists' eyes): the dollar is not a thing, it doesn't matter. What matters is the relationship between the number in your pocket/savings account/monthly salary and number for the things you buy.
It’s a theme I come back to over and over, in part because Bitcoiners are prone to saying asinine things about this (and since I feel part of this tribe, it becomes my obligation to discipline errors—or at least keep their extravagances in check). Also, because understanding what money does and how a monetary system operates (and importantly how various monetary regimes differ from one another, #749912) is at some level the most fascinating thing about studying money.
This is what I wrote in a previous MONEY CLASS (#793537):
Money is merely an intermediary between production and consumption that is separated by time, place, and between individuals. You’re not paying your grocery bill or rent with some abstract device; you’re producing value for your employer and handing over some embodiment of that value to the grocer or landlord. You’re paying for your bread and butter, not with imaginary constructs or digital make-belief but with the sweat of your labor—just with an intermediary step. This is why economists going back at least to Irving Fisher think of money as a “veil” of underlying economic transactions. The real and the nominal.
Money is the conveyor belt on which production moves; it is the way in which products get circulated and distributed, as [Adam] Smith so elegantly states. Yet it itself produces nothing.
Example: Imagine you pick 100 apples a day for an orchard farmer and he pays you 66 apples in wage—if you maxed out your consumption on only apples, you could eat 66 of them (ouch, stomach ache). If you become more productive, get a promotion, or put in more hours of work, maybe you could increase your apple-picking to 200, and the farmer pays you not just proportionate to your value-add (132) but 150 to account for your increased apple-picking responsibilities and efforts. Your real take-home wage is higher, even though your hourly wage might not be.
Now, let's use money instead: apples sell to a worldwide market for $1, and you're paid $66 a day. If you wanted, you could max out your salary on apples and get the same real quantities as before. Instead of a promotion, we introduce an Angel Gabriel-type money printer, who sneaks into everyone's wallet and market prices and doubles everything. The next morning you show up and see that apples sell for $2; fuck, the cost of living has gone up like crazy! Let's make a documentary! What you didn't pay too much attention to was that the orchard farmer will pay you 132 units for your work (either today, or with a contract negotiation lag or COLA-adjustment, tomorrow; or dynamically via you quitting and work for a competing farmer who has bid up the salary for apple pickers to 132-something).
Here's a cognitive dissonance that lots of people walk around with: when my income increases in fiat numbers, it's because I'm becoming better and more productive (real factor); when the grocery store increases its price, it's because inflation (nominal). But flip the examples and you spot the error: To the grocery store, its higher sticker prices are higher income, perhaps because he's more productive or has made a nicer store with goods more people want; and to him, the salary he must pay the workers to keep doing their same job is higher (OMG, inflation!).
We misinterpret the real-nominal signals here, with both parties misunderstanding that usually both of them stem from the money unit changing. You're not as good as you think you are, etc.
Put in the milk example of the lady in the documentary: if the price of milk was 1 unit the next year too, that probably means your unit income was the same as last year (and the year before, and the year before). Let's say she lost her job, or the new job she got only earned her 80% of what she used to. Would she still say that the cost of living has remained stable and there's no struggle and she can live with dignity? Probably not, because the real matters.
I have lots to say here about monetary misperception, but we'll table it.
SUMMARY
Economists think about these two different spheres—the nominal and the real—as separate domains, which gives rise to many paradoxes and much confusion. The tl;dr is that the real captures something underlying, beneath the monetary sphere (the apples and the apple orchard), that happens and exists regardless of what the money is doing; and the nominal is the gateway, the veil, the platform, the bridge in which we engage with the real.
If prices change, it could be because the money itself is changing (first example) but nothing real has taken place; or it could be because of a change in the underlying (real but not money). Or both, and we can't accurate decipher which one; or they come to us with a time lag, and we misattribute the changes.
That's today's little money lesson
Peace,
/J