I strongly agree with the conclusion you reach that most wealth is intangible and socially constructed. But... having concluded this, I don't think there's any going back to worrying about "the ratio of paper wealth to real output having gotten out of hand". It can't be out of hand because there's no fundamentally correct ratio.
Isn't the simpler answer that stock markets are deterministic, just like every other kind of market? That is: The price isn't the result of anything fundamental, but the byproduct of buyers and sellers searching out what society values in light of the passage of time and growth in money.
The government jacking up the money supply might change this results, but there's no way to "ring out" the money and return to a natural state. Because there is no natural state. It's like pouring more water into the ocean. You can't go back and unpour the water and collect up the individual water molecules you poured. You can't stop the ripples in the surface the pouring caused. All you can do is pour more or less water going forward.
I agree but the only Q that matters is: what happens if/when a higher portion of that paper wealth wants to convert to goods/services/inflation-hedges and you get inflation?
I guess I'd start, if it's ok, by dropping the word "paper". Since we've established that all wealth is socially constructed and the underlying "stuff" only has value in context of its social utility, we should dispense with distinguishing between "real" and "paper" wealth. There is no wealth outside its social utility.
That's a necessary background step, I think, to thinking about inflation. Inflation is problematic because it can mean a lot of different things, and I think you have to pin down exactly what kind of inflation you're talking about.
If you get inflation because you're converting your wealth into goods and services, then fundamentally you're using your wealth to replace income, right? In that case, the value of future consumption is falling. Short of "an end of the world is coming"scenario though, this should balance out or at least reach a steady rate. That is, imagine it's all the government's fault. They're printing this extra money, and putting it in peoples' hands. Because of this people are cashing in their bonds and going out and buying every French fry in sight (I couldn't get French fries from any of three groceries I tried this week!). They're so desperate for more goods and services that they pay a premium for the French fries they do find. Eventually, people start producing more French fries, and they receive more income for it, and this reaches a steady state even if the government is the one spurring it by dropping money into the system. Because at some point, the rate of this "new" money becoming income becomes stable.
I think this is what would happen if "the fed pouring in money" were all that were going on. But I think it's manifest that it's not even the main story explaining why there's no French fries available at the grocery. So I think that's much more explicable through looking at supply. Supply is lagging. And perhaps there's not enough inflation (yet) in the price of fries.
The other thing that's going on, I think, is apparent when you consider the question of people converting to "inflation-hedges". I think this is clearly more tied to the government printing money. In this case though, I think it's still pretty divorced from the current economic activity. That is, mostly people are just converting from one form of wealth to another. They're trading in their cash and T-Bills for stocks because they're safer in the context of government printing money. The Rube Goldberg Fed in part obscures this by laundering the T-Bills, and even when the money doesn't retain its value for long, there's still a base level of demand for liquidity that ensures there's not a general flight (that is, even though T-Bills and cash aren't safe from inflation, there's still demand for cash. Just like there's still demand for a car that runs but you know is slowly rusting away). So.. you get higher asset prices and eventually that starts working its way into the "current economy".
Where this leads me away from Arnold's view is that (I'm surmising) he sees this increase in nominal wealth as fundamentally dangerous. That there's a problem that maybe everyone will suddenly be tricked by the increasing nominal values and decide to commit their wealth to current consumption (like in the Fry example).
I don't think this can happen without a massive change in the underlying propensity to save at the expense of future consumption. Why? Because, being socially constructed, even the most illiquid wealth must change value faster than we can change our current consumption, which is limited by the physical constraints of production.
What I mean is, let's suppose I (and everyone else) look at our wealth and say, "I've got 5% more wealth than I need I should sell it and buy that new car/take that vacation/eat my heart's desire of French fries". Well, the first thing that has to happen is I have to liquidate that 5% of my wealth. And if everyone else does it too, the value of the wealth is going to decrease almost instantly. Much faster than we could hope to spend it. I'll look at the falling asset values of my wealth, (and later the rising prices of the goods I was considering), and come to the conclusion that I didn't actually have 5% more wealth than I needed.
Since our underlying propensity to save doesn't change, neither does our behavior.
A better prescription would be for the Fed to cut the growth of its balance sheet and for Governments to remove real growth-inhibiting obstacles like zoning, occupational licensing, restrictions on skilled immigration and international trade, and reducing structural deficits.
When the Park Avenue doctors go to get a mortgage, theoretically, the bank estimates their human capital in terms of expected future income in much the same way as those stockholders when deciding whether to underwrite the loan, and then expects to collect dividends for decades, all tethered to an asset which is a real thing - a piece of real estate.
The the extent that lots of people take out the biggest mortgages they can afford, it's almost like their "real wealth" of their future productive capacity has already been securitized, but in a way also tethered to an asset which is a real thing, a piece of real estate.
"But the values of paper wealth nowadays are particularly arbitrary and subject to rapid changes in crowd behavior, because so much of that wealth represents intangible assets."
Having plunged headlong into the BEA website, it still remains a mystery how various forms of wealth are included in gross domestic product. Having learned here to mistrust "GDP factory" models, it would be useful to know whether the Pediatricians, Inc., sale of shares would increase GDP? Does it get counted in gross private domestic investment or as a personal consumption expenditure by the person paying for a share? Or does it not get counted until Pediatricians, Inc does something with the amount they were paid for a share? And let's say each share of Pediatricians, Inc., has an individual serial number that distinguishes it from every other share sold. And let's say Pediatrician's Inc's unstated business model is to burn through the IPO money raised. Wouldn't a Pediatricians INC share then basically be just a non-fungible token? What difference is there between selling the two? Does BEA treat the two similarly for GDP calculations? With so many companies with neglible book values and no plan to ever pay a dividend included in the stock indexes, one gets the feeling there may not be a lot of difference between the two.
And from a GDP measurement perspective, let's say little Timmy breaks his arm and shows up at Pediatricians, Inc. to have it set. Let's say that the procedure is covered by his parents' employer sponsored family health insurance plan. Presumably, the insurance plan's profits are counted in GDP, Pediatricians, Inc has profits too that get counted, and presumably (?) the value of the insurance benefit gets counted as personal consumption expenditure. Now lets say Timmy's accident happened in Germany and he goes to the local government which sets it for him at no charge to him. Presumably, there is no GDP implication for the German accident at all: the German government's expenditure setting up and running the clinic is captured as government consumption expenditure and it makes no difference whether 10 broken arms get set, or none. If that is actually how GDP calculations work, and like I say I am curious but have no definitive answer, that would seem to imply that GDP comparisons between the US and other countries are like apples and oranges. Its all our red tape that makes us rich! Especially with Covid where the USA probably gets GDP increases in government consumption expenditures for paying for the vaccines and tests. At any rate, such questions keep me from reveling as heartily as I might otherwise in all the fantastic economic news we are enjoying due to President Biden's masterful management of the US economy.
Doesn’t it make sense for the government to reduce spending on income transfers but not on R&D, infrastructure, and other productive investments? This is where I part ways with traditional right of center economics. All government spending is not the same. It also seems like many of those income transfers are reducing now. Agreed it was a bit much particularly in the last stimulus bill but it should work it’s way out of the system.
"productive investments" is going a lot of the work here.
I struggle to think of many productive government investments. Eds and Meds certainly isn't. Even "infrastructure" seems to be a scam. Defense, ha.
Honestly, the direct transfer payments might be the least damaging way the government spends money. I'd take a stimulus check over a lot of ways the government spends money.
I think it’s popular to say all government funding is wasted but just a few of the successes make up for any waste. Most prescription drugs and other treatments are NIH funded. I have a relative who would have died 10 years ago from lymphoma who is alive today because of T cell therapy developed at NIH. The iPhone I’m typing on only exists because DoD and NASA funded semiconductors which created Silicon Valley. We wouldn’t have chips without that government customer. The touchscreen was an NSF grant. GPS? DoD project. The internet? And Siri. Not to mention fracking, green energy, nuclear energy, and almost all other scientific and technological advantages. Add to that railroads, roads, and it just goes on. Look government isn’t perfect but saying what did it ever do for me sounds like the Judean People’s Front in life of Brian.
Federal Spending is 30% of GDP in 2021. State spending another 10% of GDP. Local government spending another 10% of GDP.
When you spending 50% of GDP, the bar for "good ROI" is very high. I grant you that much of this is transfer payments, but a lot isn't. A lot is services in kind which it considerers to be "investments".
It's not clear to me that the things you cite are enough to overcome commandeering half the economy. And to be frank, much of that spending could have been eliminated without impact a single thing on your list.
I am perhaps especially bitter lately as even mediocre government services that I used to partake in have become completely unworkable these last two years, so my own perception of ROI has dropped off a cliff. Public schooling for instance doesn't even rise to the level of "free" daycare anymore.
I believe government spending (fed, state, and local) is more like mid 30s percent of GDP. Could be the stimulus bills got you to 50% for a short period but I don’t know. It’s more like 50% plus in Europe. Agreed lots of government services are mediocre to terrible. I am in favor of privatizing lots of those services like the postal service, DMV, etc. with some regulation. The vast majority of that federal spending is automatic: medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. With debt service that’s about 70 plus % of all federal spending. 16% is discretionary (R&D, Homeland Security, EPA, ED, etc.) and another 11% is defense.
You don't cite Mazzucato explicitly, but she is responsible for misleading people quite substantially on this issue. Nintil provides an excellent analysis of her account of the iPhone, concluding,
"State interventions in science that were conducive to the iPhone were neither crucial, nor entrepreneurial, not as numerous as Mazzucato tries to show."
This is one of many meticulously documented articles he has on her work at his site.
And as excellent as his work is, the portions I've read didn't get into the opportunity cost of all of that government spending: Sure if you spend truly humungous amounts of money over many decades, you get a few goodies. But the relevant counterfactual is not a scenario in which the private sector innovation trajectory was what it turned out to be in history, but rather what would the innovation trajectory have been had those humungous amounts been in the private sector all along.
To shift to the benefit of roads:
1. No less a witness than Friedrich Engels notes the role of the private sector in building the roads that contributed to the Industrial Revolution, "“The whole British Empire, and especially England, which, sixty years ago, had as bad roads as Germany or France then had, is now covered by a network of the finest roadways; and these, too, like almost everything else in England, are the work of private enterprise, the State having done very little in this direction."
2. The Interstate Highway System is often held up as an example of a net positive government program. Well, maybe, but few people note in the debit column the damage it caused to black urban communities,
"The road-building program ultimately displaced more than 1 million Americans, most of them low-income minorities, according to Anthony Foxx, who served as transportation secretary under Democratic President Barack Obama."
How would we feel today if the government bulldozed a significant portion of black communities because they could, not merely "displacing" people but ripping up the community relationships that play a role in the healthy development of young people. What long-term damage did this noble road-building project do to urban black culture?
This is not to say that it is impossible for government spending to add value, but that most such examples are not evaluated correctly.
Agreed that Mazzucato makes some over the top claims. I think she does a lot of harm to my side with her writing. I would also never say that government alone has done these things, just that it has been an essential player. The US has a unique model that I think has worked well. Of course there is no counter factual to look to. Government involvement "started" with Hamilton's Report on Manufactures and kept on going. I do think the author is being a bit disingenuous by limiting the scope of his article ie I'm not going to talk about the internet, gps, or semiconductors. I can't find a record of an SBIC investing in Apple so I'm going to pretend SBICs don't really impact venture capital. etc.
I just had a similar conversation with a friend of mine. I conceded to him that government funding has been involved in the development of many technologies that we highly value. Do you believe that absent government funding, none of those technologies would have been developed at all? Would some of them have been developed, but just more slowly? Would any that do not yet exists have come sooner?
Some might have come anyway but it's hard to imagine most without research universities and government leadership. You'd have to go technology by technology. I think government is key in 4 places: funding common good stuff (roads, GPS), tech that is too speculative (bio, nano, etc.), being an early customer for something that requires expensive infrastructure (chips), and creating or more often facilitating open standards (internet). The key is to limit the government to investments funneled through private and academic actors. Once it's commercially viable, government should be out except in extreme cases. In that sense it isn't really industrial policy.
You assume we prioritize containing inflation over supporting paper wealth. I'm not convinced. It'd be a fitting finale to the age of inequality if we "bail out" paper wealth via a regressive tax (inflation).
A lot of assets have taken on a wealth preservation role. That is stuff is protected against inflation better than holding cash. What's the proper discount rate on durable assets when real interest rates are negative.
Remember that a lot of people have wealth in fixed incomes or wealth were the tax rates are tied to asset price increases. You can transfer a lot of wealth from those people (usually middle class) to other assets (wealthy).
I think in practice it'll be difficult to predict which assets "protect against inflation" (see the 1970s). But in general I agree that it'll be the wealthy who benefit from inflation. No one seems to want to admit this because we have no actual ideas how to push wealth back down to the middle/lower classes.
The only thing I would add is that it seems like a lot of value today is coming from “I value this stock at $100 because I believe in the future other people will value it at $110”. I don’t really care if the present value of the company’s assets and future earnings is worth $100. I care whether other people will value my share at $110 tomorrow.
In some sense that’s rational. But I think that makes things *really* volatile. An order of magnitude more volatile than just tastes changing to make oil back into gunk.
Excellent viewpoint.
However, a lot are "swimming naked" and we won't see them until the tide goes out.
I strongly agree with the conclusion you reach that most wealth is intangible and socially constructed. But... having concluded this, I don't think there's any going back to worrying about "the ratio of paper wealth to real output having gotten out of hand". It can't be out of hand because there's no fundamentally correct ratio.
Isn't the simpler answer that stock markets are deterministic, just like every other kind of market? That is: The price isn't the result of anything fundamental, but the byproduct of buyers and sellers searching out what society values in light of the passage of time and growth in money.
The government jacking up the money supply might change this results, but there's no way to "ring out" the money and return to a natural state. Because there is no natural state. It's like pouring more water into the ocean. You can't go back and unpour the water and collect up the individual water molecules you poured. You can't stop the ripples in the surface the pouring caused. All you can do is pour more or less water going forward.
I agree but the only Q that matters is: what happens if/when a higher portion of that paper wealth wants to convert to goods/services/inflation-hedges and you get inflation?
I guess I'd start, if it's ok, by dropping the word "paper". Since we've established that all wealth is socially constructed and the underlying "stuff" only has value in context of its social utility, we should dispense with distinguishing between "real" and "paper" wealth. There is no wealth outside its social utility.
That's a necessary background step, I think, to thinking about inflation. Inflation is problematic because it can mean a lot of different things, and I think you have to pin down exactly what kind of inflation you're talking about.
If you get inflation because you're converting your wealth into goods and services, then fundamentally you're using your wealth to replace income, right? In that case, the value of future consumption is falling. Short of "an end of the world is coming"scenario though, this should balance out or at least reach a steady rate. That is, imagine it's all the government's fault. They're printing this extra money, and putting it in peoples' hands. Because of this people are cashing in their bonds and going out and buying every French fry in sight (I couldn't get French fries from any of three groceries I tried this week!). They're so desperate for more goods and services that they pay a premium for the French fries they do find. Eventually, people start producing more French fries, and they receive more income for it, and this reaches a steady state even if the government is the one spurring it by dropping money into the system. Because at some point, the rate of this "new" money becoming income becomes stable.
I think this is what would happen if "the fed pouring in money" were all that were going on. But I think it's manifest that it's not even the main story explaining why there's no French fries available at the grocery. So I think that's much more explicable through looking at supply. Supply is lagging. And perhaps there's not enough inflation (yet) in the price of fries.
The other thing that's going on, I think, is apparent when you consider the question of people converting to "inflation-hedges". I think this is clearly more tied to the government printing money. In this case though, I think it's still pretty divorced from the current economic activity. That is, mostly people are just converting from one form of wealth to another. They're trading in their cash and T-Bills for stocks because they're safer in the context of government printing money. The Rube Goldberg Fed in part obscures this by laundering the T-Bills, and even when the money doesn't retain its value for long, there's still a base level of demand for liquidity that ensures there's not a general flight (that is, even though T-Bills and cash aren't safe from inflation, there's still demand for cash. Just like there's still demand for a car that runs but you know is slowly rusting away). So.. you get higher asset prices and eventually that starts working its way into the "current economy".
Where this leads me away from Arnold's view is that (I'm surmising) he sees this increase in nominal wealth as fundamentally dangerous. That there's a problem that maybe everyone will suddenly be tricked by the increasing nominal values and decide to commit their wealth to current consumption (like in the Fry example).
I don't think this can happen without a massive change in the underlying propensity to save at the expense of future consumption. Why? Because, being socially constructed, even the most illiquid wealth must change value faster than we can change our current consumption, which is limited by the physical constraints of production.
What I mean is, let's suppose I (and everyone else) look at our wealth and say, "I've got 5% more wealth than I need I should sell it and buy that new car/take that vacation/eat my heart's desire of French fries". Well, the first thing that has to happen is I have to liquidate that 5% of my wealth. And if everyone else does it too, the value of the wealth is going to decrease almost instantly. Much faster than we could hope to spend it. I'll look at the falling asset values of my wealth, (and later the rising prices of the goods I was considering), and come to the conclusion that I didn't actually have 5% more wealth than I needed.
Since our underlying propensity to save doesn't change, neither does our behavior.
A better prescription would be for the Fed to cut the growth of its balance sheet and for Governments to remove real growth-inhibiting obstacles like zoning, occupational licensing, restrictions on skilled immigration and international trade, and reducing structural deficits.
When the Park Avenue doctors go to get a mortgage, theoretically, the bank estimates their human capital in terms of expected future income in much the same way as those stockholders when deciding whether to underwrite the loan, and then expects to collect dividends for decades, all tethered to an asset which is a real thing - a piece of real estate.
The the extent that lots of people take out the biggest mortgages they can afford, it's almost like their "real wealth" of their future productive capacity has already been securitized, but in a way also tethered to an asset which is a real thing, a piece of real estate.
"But the values of paper wealth nowadays are particularly arbitrary and subject to rapid changes in crowd behavior, because so much of that wealth represents intangible assets."
Having plunged headlong into the BEA website, it still remains a mystery how various forms of wealth are included in gross domestic product. Having learned here to mistrust "GDP factory" models, it would be useful to know whether the Pediatricians, Inc., sale of shares would increase GDP? Does it get counted in gross private domestic investment or as a personal consumption expenditure by the person paying for a share? Or does it not get counted until Pediatricians, Inc does something with the amount they were paid for a share? And let's say each share of Pediatricians, Inc., has an individual serial number that distinguishes it from every other share sold. And let's say Pediatrician's Inc's unstated business model is to burn through the IPO money raised. Wouldn't a Pediatricians INC share then basically be just a non-fungible token? What difference is there between selling the two? Does BEA treat the two similarly for GDP calculations? With so many companies with neglible book values and no plan to ever pay a dividend included in the stock indexes, one gets the feeling there may not be a lot of difference between the two.
And from a GDP measurement perspective, let's say little Timmy breaks his arm and shows up at Pediatricians, Inc. to have it set. Let's say that the procedure is covered by his parents' employer sponsored family health insurance plan. Presumably, the insurance plan's profits are counted in GDP, Pediatricians, Inc has profits too that get counted, and presumably (?) the value of the insurance benefit gets counted as personal consumption expenditure. Now lets say Timmy's accident happened in Germany and he goes to the local government which sets it for him at no charge to him. Presumably, there is no GDP implication for the German accident at all: the German government's expenditure setting up and running the clinic is captured as government consumption expenditure and it makes no difference whether 10 broken arms get set, or none. If that is actually how GDP calculations work, and like I say I am curious but have no definitive answer, that would seem to imply that GDP comparisons between the US and other countries are like apples and oranges. Its all our red tape that makes us rich! Especially with Covid where the USA probably gets GDP increases in government consumption expenditures for paying for the vaccines and tests. At any rate, such questions keep me from reveling as heartily as I might otherwise in all the fantastic economic news we are enjoying due to President Biden's masterful management of the US economy.
.
"Intangible" probably hides a lot of con men and their operations
Doesn’t it make sense for the government to reduce spending on income transfers but not on R&D, infrastructure, and other productive investments? This is where I part ways with traditional right of center economics. All government spending is not the same. It also seems like many of those income transfers are reducing now. Agreed it was a bit much particularly in the last stimulus bill but it should work it’s way out of the system.
"productive investments" is going a lot of the work here.
I struggle to think of many productive government investments. Eds and Meds certainly isn't. Even "infrastructure" seems to be a scam. Defense, ha.
Honestly, the direct transfer payments might be the least damaging way the government spends money. I'd take a stimulus check over a lot of ways the government spends money.
I think it’s popular to say all government funding is wasted but just a few of the successes make up for any waste. Most prescription drugs and other treatments are NIH funded. I have a relative who would have died 10 years ago from lymphoma who is alive today because of T cell therapy developed at NIH. The iPhone I’m typing on only exists because DoD and NASA funded semiconductors which created Silicon Valley. We wouldn’t have chips without that government customer. The touchscreen was an NSF grant. GPS? DoD project. The internet? And Siri. Not to mention fracking, green energy, nuclear energy, and almost all other scientific and technological advantages. Add to that railroads, roads, and it just goes on. Look government isn’t perfect but saying what did it ever do for me sounds like the Judean People’s Front in life of Brian.
Federal Spending is 30% of GDP in 2021. State spending another 10% of GDP. Local government spending another 10% of GDP.
When you spending 50% of GDP, the bar for "good ROI" is very high. I grant you that much of this is transfer payments, but a lot isn't. A lot is services in kind which it considerers to be "investments".
It's not clear to me that the things you cite are enough to overcome commandeering half the economy. And to be frank, much of that spending could have been eliminated without impact a single thing on your list.
I am perhaps especially bitter lately as even mediocre government services that I used to partake in have become completely unworkable these last two years, so my own perception of ROI has dropped off a cliff. Public schooling for instance doesn't even rise to the level of "free" daycare anymore.
I believe government spending (fed, state, and local) is more like mid 30s percent of GDP. Could be the stimulus bills got you to 50% for a short period but I don’t know. It’s more like 50% plus in Europe. Agreed lots of government services are mediocre to terrible. I am in favor of privatizing lots of those services like the postal service, DMV, etc. with some regulation. The vast majority of that federal spending is automatic: medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. With debt service that’s about 70 plus % of all federal spending. 16% is discretionary (R&D, Homeland Security, EPA, ED, etc.) and another 11% is defense.
You don't cite Mazzucato explicitly, but she is responsible for misleading people quite substantially on this issue. Nintil provides an excellent analysis of her account of the iPhone, concluding,
"State interventions in science that were conducive to the iPhone were neither crucial, nor entrepreneurial, not as numerous as Mazzucato tries to show."
https://nintil.com/mazzucato-and-the-iphone-ii-the-myth-of-the-entrepreneurial-state
This is one of many meticulously documented articles he has on her work at his site.
And as excellent as his work is, the portions I've read didn't get into the opportunity cost of all of that government spending: Sure if you spend truly humungous amounts of money over many decades, you get a few goodies. But the relevant counterfactual is not a scenario in which the private sector innovation trajectory was what it turned out to be in history, but rather what would the innovation trajectory have been had those humungous amounts been in the private sector all along.
To shift to the benefit of roads:
1. No less a witness than Friedrich Engels notes the role of the private sector in building the roads that contributed to the Industrial Revolution, "“The whole British Empire, and especially England, which, sixty years ago, had as bad roads as Germany or France then had, is now covered by a network of the finest roadways; and these, too, like almost everything else in England, are the work of private enterprise, the State having done very little in this direction."
https://www.stephenhicks.org/2019/10/13/friedrich-engels-answers-who-will-build-the-roads/
2. The Interstate Highway System is often held up as an example of a net positive government program. Well, maybe, but few people note in the debit column the damage it caused to black urban communities,
"The road-building program ultimately displaced more than 1 million Americans, most of them low-income minorities, according to Anthony Foxx, who served as transportation secretary under Democratic President Barack Obama."
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-freeways-flattened-black-neighborhoods-nationwide-2021-05-25/
How would we feel today if the government bulldozed a significant portion of black communities because they could, not merely "displacing" people but ripping up the community relationships that play a role in the healthy development of young people. What long-term damage did this noble road-building project do to urban black culture?
This is not to say that it is impossible for government spending to add value, but that most such examples are not evaluated correctly.
Agreed that Mazzucato makes some over the top claims. I think she does a lot of harm to my side with her writing. I would also never say that government alone has done these things, just that it has been an essential player. The US has a unique model that I think has worked well. Of course there is no counter factual to look to. Government involvement "started" with Hamilton's Report on Manufactures and kept on going. I do think the author is being a bit disingenuous by limiting the scope of his article ie I'm not going to talk about the internet, gps, or semiconductors. I can't find a record of an SBIC investing in Apple so I'm going to pretend SBICs don't really impact venture capital. etc.
I just had a similar conversation with a friend of mine. I conceded to him that government funding has been involved in the development of many technologies that we highly value. Do you believe that absent government funding, none of those technologies would have been developed at all? Would some of them have been developed, but just more slowly? Would any that do not yet exists have come sooner?
Some might have come anyway but it's hard to imagine most without research universities and government leadership. You'd have to go technology by technology. I think government is key in 4 places: funding common good stuff (roads, GPS), tech that is too speculative (bio, nano, etc.), being an early customer for something that requires expensive infrastructure (chips), and creating or more often facilitating open standards (internet). The key is to limit the government to investments funneled through private and academic actors. Once it's commercially viable, government should be out except in extreme cases. In that sense it isn't really industrial policy.
Oh forgot about Google (nsf grant).
You assume we prioritize containing inflation over supporting paper wealth. I'm not convinced. It'd be a fitting finale to the age of inequality if we "bail out" paper wealth via a regressive tax (inflation).
A lot of assets have taken on a wealth preservation role. That is stuff is protected against inflation better than holding cash. What's the proper discount rate on durable assets when real interest rates are negative.
Remember that a lot of people have wealth in fixed incomes or wealth were the tax rates are tied to asset price increases. You can transfer a lot of wealth from those people (usually middle class) to other assets (wealthy).
I think in practice it'll be difficult to predict which assets "protect against inflation" (see the 1970s). But in general I agree that it'll be the wealthy who benefit from inflation. No one seems to want to admit this because we have no actual ideas how to push wealth back down to the middle/lower classes.
The only thing I would add is that it seems like a lot of value today is coming from “I value this stock at $100 because I believe in the future other people will value it at $110”. I don’t really care if the present value of the company’s assets and future earnings is worth $100. I care whether other people will value my share at $110 tomorrow.
In some sense that’s rational. But I think that makes things *really* volatile. An order of magnitude more volatile than just tastes changing to make oil back into gunk.