A tract on monetary reform

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1. dragonwriterMay 2023
   > your article says what I said, not what you are saying.

   No, it says what I said: they don’t, in practice, move together, though ideally they should.

   Here’s an article with a national chart since 2000 against a year 2000=100 baseline, again note that they do not, in fact, move together, though they usually (but not always) move in the same direction:

   https://seekingalpha.com/article/4583749-house-prices-vs-ren...

   > (“yes, short term prices can move independently from long term because liquidity, menu prices, etc, it’s why economists always say “in the long run”)

   Yes, that’s what economists say when they need an excuse for making statements that are non-actionable and not predictive of real behavior on any meaningful timescale. “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.” John Maynard Keynes, The Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)

   > Would it surprise you to meet somebody on HN who knows more about the math of finance than you and the SF Chron put together?

   It would not. Neither would it surprise me to find someone who claims that while getting basic facts wrong and failing reading comprehension. HN is quite diverse in that way.

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2. dragonwriterFeb 2015
   > So if these folks are so good at predicting to the point where we should trust their predictions, then why aren't they all retired from predicting the stock market and getting rich?

   Because the value of particular investments is a different thing than any of the things that they are dealing with, in much the same way that climate is different than weather.

   > I think it's plain for most folks to understand that living beyond your means continually eventually means that debt payments comprise a large portion of your budget.

   This isn't actually necessarily true. IF you continually live beyond your means (expenditures > revenue) then, assuming financing costs aren't continually decreasing, you will have debt service costs that, on average, increase over time.

   If your revenue also increases over time, however, its quite possible to continually have expenditures exceed revenue without having debt service costs increase as a share of total expenditures.

   > It's not hard to see that eventually the debt will be crushing. [...] What's much harder to do is predict exactly at what point this will occur.

   That's the only thing that matters. Predicting what a trend would result in given an infinite time horizon is pointless "But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." [0]

   > I would fully agree that the exact date of the debt service exceeding other large fixed payments is highly speculative.

   Defense and nondefense discretionary spending may be large, but they aren't fixed.

   > But that it will happen, absent structural changes, I don't find terribly contentious.

   I'm not really interested in why you find it contentious, I interested in the basis for your position that the level of debt service at which that will occur is a (1) problematic in itself as a level of expenditures on debt services (dismissing the conclusion in the article that the expert consensus is that it is not), and therefore a matter of near term concern.

   [0] John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)

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3. inopinatusJan 2014
   You are quite right, and there is an older commentator than Palahniuk to invoke. The original quote comes from John Maynard Keynes in his 1923 "Tract on Monetary Reform":

   But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.

   Pray that we will always have someone standing up against the surveillance state.

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