I struggle with the concept of technology being deflationary.
Obviously as technology increases making things gets cheaper, but I'm not sure that we as consumers are seeing that deflationary benefit. Sure, TVs are cheaper now, but we also need to replace way more often. Printers are crazy cheap but ink is insanely expensive and now HP requires a monthly subscription to extract even more from us. Smart phones are way more amazing, but somehow everyone is still paying a ton on plans and devices. Laptops are definitely cheaper than they were, but now so much software is subscription based. So while it is actually deflationary, I'm not sure the outcome is deflationary for consumers.
You'd think in 2025 only 1 in 1000 people would actually need to work to keep everyone sheltered and fed, but no, we're all just plugging away 40 hours a week.
Anyway, totally not the point of your post, I do wish we could teach kids how to use compound interest for their retirements and get them really locked in - but so many people benefit from us not doing that (Hello Amazon hiring retirees that ran out of money).
This comment is actually very much on topic.
Banks are hiding the money they are stealing by syphoning gains away from deflationary tech. The reason these things are not getting cheaper is because they are stealing it all using the convoluted mechanics of a fractional reserve and leveraged derivatives.
If Bitcoin gets big and stable enough to the point where we can actually measure value with it (unit-of-account) then it will become blatantly obvious what's been going on all these decades. The central banking system steals just enough to maintain maximum profitability. If they steal too much or get too greedy on leverage the system collapses and everyone loses.
Ah, I can see that. I thought the problem was corporations leaning into an monopolistic extractionist mindset over a 'creating a superior product/service' mindset, but the fractional reserve is always going to be the base layer of everything else.
The "greedy corporation" narrative has been very strong as of late that is true.
But there is zero evidence to suggest that corporations magically got greedier and more explorative in the last five years. In fact I would say it's not even possible as they couldn't get any greedier than they already were a decade ago. Human psychology hasn't suddenly changed. It's the banks. It's an unsustainable Ponzi that's on its last legs.
I don't put any stock in the bankers coming out of the woodwork to blame millennials buying avocado toast. It's the jackals that have been in charge for the last 50 years that have clearly fucked it all up, and the bankers are at the top of that pyramid. They're so rich we don't even know how rich they are because they point the finger at Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg as the richest people while they smartly keep their wealth and power completely hidden.