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How come we experience so much more inflation than deflation? in other words, why does our buying power decrease far more often than it increases?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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A few good comments and quite a few... not so good. A lot of explanations that focus on 2nd order, downstream effects and the machinations of economists and politicians. Price is one of myriad ways to measure the past & current state of the economy and to make guesses about its future.
"Inflation" is what we call it when it costs $1.00 to buy a dozen eggs last year and $1.10 to buy a dozen of the same eggs this year. "Deflation"is what we call it if the price goes down to $0.90 this year. Just to set some terminology.
No one person or group or policy or activity causes inflation or deflation. It's just a measure of buying power.
But there is one key difference between inflation and deflation: the latter has a limit. Prices can go up forever, but they can only go down to $0.
So when all the people are trying to craft policies that influence the economy, they don't want the economy to go in the direction of the brick wall of $0 prices.
It's probably the case that inflation is the only thing that can happen and have a functioning economy over the long term. If that's the case, then keeping it low is the best approach, which is why the American economic establishment has a target of 2% inflation.
I'm a little confused and not knowledgeable on this at all so I'm genuinely curious: if inflation goes crazy for years, like 8% for 4 years let's say, why is there no concerted effort to drop it for a while, like -5% for 4 years, to "bring it back" to the 2% aimed for originally? If that makes sense. It seems like if inflation gets insane we're all just stuck with it for the rest of time?
No expert, but another advantage of inflation is to create incentives to invest/spend money. With a deflation you are rewarding people that keep their money in a pillowcase. Which is probably bad.
Additionally there probably are some control structures to increase or decrease inflation, but they will bring their own cost with them. So controlling Inflation may be not controllable enough/not worth it to do so.
Bitcoin is deflationary and why it has failed as an alternative currency. Nobody wants to spend it. HODL.