EconomistaAustriaco on Nostr: Alright here goes: Once upon a time in England there lived a pedophile named John ...

Alright here goes: Once upon a time in England there lived a pedophile named John Maynard Keynes, who engineered the Bank of England financing entry into World War I by surreptitiously buying government bonds and pretending that the public bought them. The money supply shot up and the Bank could no longer redeem its bills in gold, so they suspended gold convertibility. When the war ended, they could not just come clean and devalue the pound and get back on a gold standard at a rate that takes into account all the devaluation. They instead insisted on trying to somehow bring the pound back to its old prewar rate. But this was impossible because people had too many pounds in their hands, it caused a drain of gold out of Britain and created massive economic problems, which they thought they could fix by creating even more money. One thing led to the other and the world would never go back on a gold standard and it would instead start using government credit as money. Gold's supply increases at only ~1.5% per year, whereas government money grows at around 14% per year. This means it became almost impossible for people to save, and so people became a lot less certain about the future and they became a lot more short-termist, financially, and in all other aspects of life. "Ain't nobody got time fo dat" became the soundtrack of the century as humanity regressed backwards into more and more animalistic present-orientation at the expense of future provision. This is reflected in all manners of human institutions, from the collapse of the family to the emergence of hideous modern architecture, and the disappearance of fine art, which required plenty of sacrifice and hard work for long periods which barbaric easy money civilizations could no longer afford. It was replaced by high time preference art made by people who have no ability to think of the long term cannot spend enough time on learning a proper craft, and are just looking for clever shortcuts and 'making a statement' and narcissistic navel-gazing and similarly irrelevant and hideous nonsense. And that's how the civilization that gave us Michelangelo gave us Damien Hirst. I wrote a book about this! (Fiat Standard)

🖋️: saifedean (npub1gdu…6nak)