And you would have been massively wrong. People have been complaining about quantitative easing since post GFC, and if you took the figures at face value, those would imply inflation was nearly 100% between the end of GFC and before the pandemic. Whatever you thought about the post-pandemic inflation, the period between GFC and pre-pandemic definitely did not see the level of inflation implied by those figures.
CPI works by asking how much people pay for rent. If home prices raise 20% in one year (not at all unreasonable in various times in the last ten years), it takes a long time for that to be reflected as many people have their rents fixed, some people have rent control, some landlords will only raise rents on new tenants, etc.
for existing, well established renters, sure. For new renters, or people who move, or people who face housing insecurity, or people who want to buy homes, it's much higher and not accurately reflected in CPI.
Lagged processes are one of the most fundamental concepts in economics. If merely recognizing the possibility that one could be at play here is throwing you for a loop, you need the simplified monetary model more than most.
Where's the hell is the lag on these graphs though!? The money supply grows both before, and after the inflationary spike. (And the fact that it stops increasing when inflation is high is not surprising at all, by the way, high inflation make the central bank raise interest rates, which reduce credit, which is where money comes from).
> "The idea that inflation and the money supply are linked is one of the most dumb one in folk economics"
"folk economics" implies it is by untrained people.
Milton Friedman's famous quote of "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" shows that he deeply believed the relationship between inflation and money supply, and one certainly cannot call Friedman a "folk economist" considering he won the Nobel prize in economics and was a professor at the University of Chicago.
Note: I am not saying he is right or supporting his belief. I am merely stating that such a belief is not a "folk economics" belief. This belief is still very prevalent in the freshwater schools of economics. [1]
As a personal anecdote, at Ronald Coase's 100th birthday party, I personally got Gary Becker and Richard Posner debating a very related topic (whether and by what degree the velocity of money of fluctuates and whether helicopter drops of cash would have been better during the early days of the money supply collapse in 2008/2009 than just giving money to the banks). In a room full of Nobel Prize winning economists in 2010, there was a very rigorous debate on the topic.
> "folk economics" implies it is by untrained people.
The problem is mostly its appropriation by untrained people though.
> Milton Friedman's famous quote of "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" shows that he deeply believed the relationship between inflation and money supply
Creationists theoreticians believe in creationism too. The problem arise when their theory reach the mainstream… (Influential people inside the Swedish Central bank making a fake Nobel prize to promote these ideas didn't help of course…)
Inflation. If i print $1 trillion dollars, i buy up all the resources you need to live and dangle them in front of you and control every aspect of your life.
This is what seems to be lost on so many. As someone with relatively little code experience, I find myself learning more than ever by checking the results and what went right/wrong.
This is also why I don't see it getting better anytime soon. So many people ask me "how do you get your claude to have such good output?" and the answer is always "I paid attention and spotted problems and asked claude to fix them." And it's literally that simple but I can see their eyes already glazing over.
Just as google made finding information easier, it didn't fix the human element of deciphering quality information from poor information.
Looking at code looking for errors is a hard thing to do well for a large amount of code. A better approach is to ensure tests cover all the important cases and many edge cases. Looking at the code may still be a good idea but mostly to check the design. I think that once you get Claude to test the code it writes well, trying to find errors in the code is a waste of time. I’ve made the mistake of thinking Claude was wrong many times despite the tests passing just to be humbled by breaking the tests with my “improvements”!
You've mistaken indifference with inability. The government can absolutely get something done very quickly if certain people wish. There are numerous examples.
the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason
Billions have been spent building walls around niche and small sites to funnel people into major platforms. Pretending this ad/discoverability infrastructure doesn't exist is very naive.
As someone who has written many docs, it's because 99% won't read it (rightfully so if it's verbose). You can turn that doc into a skill in a repo and Claude will read it everytime it's needed.
reply