Continuations

NOTE: I have been posting excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s section is about technological deflation and how its interaction with UBI enhances economic freedom. Technological DeflationIf you are currently struggling to pay for your basic needs, the world will seem like an expensive place to you. Yet the data shows that a lot of things have become cheaper, and that this trend has been gathering steam for some time now. In the U.S., as the following chart shows, the prices for ...

I have been arguing that we live in an era of technological deflation driven by advances in computing (including robotics). In the US, the prices for consumer durables peaked in the mid 1990s as this chart from the St. Louis Fed shows. There are still ways in which monetary policy and potentially the price of energy could throw a wrench into this overall trend but what I want to write about today and tomorrow are the potential for price declines in two other areas: education and healthcare. A...

I wrote last September about the competing views around deflation versus inflation. Interestingly, about 9 months later we still seem don’t seem to have real clarity on the subject. Over that time we have approached deflation but there has also been a ton of government intervention, which has prompted op-eds predicting future inflation and even a new fund run by Mark Spitznagel (a long time collaborator of “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb) to bet on inflation. On the other hand have been resp...

Yesterday I wrote about how free or low priced online courses are beginning to put pressure on pricing in education. As a small addendum to that: the same day the New York Times ran a front page story about home schooling recognizing the growing importance of that movement (which in turn is enabled by much of the same content). Today I want take a look at what is happening to healthcare costs and whether there is any hope for technological deflation here also. If you haven’t seen this chart f...

I have written a fair bit about inflation in the past, starting with a post about inflation versus deflation during the financial crises in 2008, which I then followed with three posts in 2009. We are now finding ourselves in 2014 and so far there are no signs of inflation. That would seem to say that Paul Krugman had this one right and people who were worried about inflation had it wrong. Then again that would be a classic case of a turkey argument where we confuse an absence of evidence (it...

I posted a few days ago revisiting the inflation versus deflation argument. I provided a very brief comment there on Then yesterday Marc Andreessen asked on Twitter about the arguments linking computers to deflation. I am sure others have data on this but here are some of the different vectors that I see: 1. Moore’s law – this is the obvious one. We have had incredible progress in hardware that has driven down the price of computers and anything else that requires computation. 2. Automation –...