In short
The episode argues that mainstream economics’ “2% inflation” target is arbitrary “lore” (said to be made up in a TV interview) and that inflation is used to prop up a fragile, debt-heavy fiat system. The hosts distinguish “bad deflation” from credit-crunch collapse versus “good deflation” from innovation, claiming innovation-driven deflation improves price signals and supports investment and entrepreneurship. They also reject the Keynesian “paradox of thrift” view that people must be pressured to spend; instead, saving funds production and innovation (including AI/data-center buildouts), and delaying consumption is framed as creating liquidity for entrepreneurs. They claim macro statistics like CPI are misleading and that central banks will keep the inflation framework until it fails.
Guests
Allen Farrington (investment manager; background in environmental sciences; co-author of Bitcoin is Venice; previously worked with Alan at an investment firm). Sacha Meyers (investment manager; environmental sciences background; “elusive partner”; co-author; wrote Bitcoin is Venice essays during lockdown).
Notable examples/claims
supermarket price-share logic; 1929/central-bank failures; “house of cards of debt” causing deflation; “time” thought experiment (2% longer) to show the absurdity of needing inflation expectations to act; AI translation/data-center GPU supply chain requiring “hundreds of billions” from savings.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Myth of Inflation and Deflation
0:00 to 1:00
Exploration of the misconceptions surrounding inflation and deflation.
“This 2 % figure, it was literally completely made up.”
The Origins of '2% Inflation'
1:30 to 4:00
Discussion on the arbitrary nature of the 2% inflation benchmark.
“We met at an investment firm that we both worked for.”
Challenging Assumptions in Economics
4:00 to 6:20
Critique of the core assumptions of traditional economics regarding inflation.
“dug into economics at all, like the idea of inflation was always presented as a good thing.”
Historical Context of Economic Theories
6:20 to 9:10
Exploration of the historical development of inflation as a norm.
“We're now operating in an environment where we just assume inflation is how things are and it's the water we swim in and so we don't question it.”
The Keynesian Perspective on Deflation
9:10 to 12:30
Overview of the Keynesian argument against deflation and its implications.
“But does that signify something that like you say, that's not super like him alone saying that isn't super relevant, but does it signify something?”
Understanding Inflation's Impact on Economy
14:01 to 15:44
Learn how inflation affects economic signals and overall health.
“And the idea is to try and maximize the health of that cycle by finding a rate of inflation that is neither too high, that it starts to mess up everything.”
Formation of Economic Schools and Crisis Response
15:44 to 17:44
Explore how economic schools form in response to crises and their inherent assumptions.
“And then you establish that school around it.”
Deflation: Misconceptions and Opportunities
17:44 to 20:05
Discover the two types of deflation and their implications for economic theory.
“One, let me, by the way, just answer very quickly the previous question, which I'm now realizing I didn't really address properly.”
The Paradox of Thrift Explained
20:05 to 22:38
Understand the paradox of thrift and its effects on investment and consumption.
“We think it's a good thing because when you're delaying consumption, what are you often doing with your money?”
Identifying Investment vs. Malinvestment
22:38 to 27:21
Learn how to distinguish between productive investment and malinvestment.
“They only exist to buy because of enormous investment, as Sasha just described.”
Show all 26 chapters
False Signals and Entrepreneurial Decisions
27:21 to 28:00
Examine how false economic signals impact entrepreneurial decision-making.
“I just want to build on that with, again, a tangible example that's kind of cutting through the complexity of assuming we're in this incredibly complex economic system that we are.”
Understanding Malinvestment and Inflation
28:00 to 29:18
Explore how misinformation leads to malinvestment and the effects of inflation expectations.
“is that the only reason you would ever do it?”
The Paradox of Thrift and Economic Innovation
29:18 to 31:38
Discuss the paradox of thrift and how economic progress can be viewed as a threat in traditional economics.
“If there is ever widespread enough deflation, which is always in everywhere.”
The Illusion of Economic Measurement
31:38 to 33:13
Examine the challenges of accurately measuring economic data and its implications.
“And all of this is nonsense, but it's in terms of the way the methodology is presented, it's by their logic, it's dependent on having this data.”
The Illusion of Economic Measurement
33:15 to 33:53
Examine the challenges of accurately measuring economic data and its implications.
“With AnchorWatch, your Bitcoin is insured with your own A plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy.”
Deflation and Its Impact on Wages
35:43 to 41:44
Delve into the complexities of deflation and its effects on wages and debt.
“And so these things get harder and harder to pay off over time.”
Innovation and Economic Dynamics
41:44 to 42:04
Analyze the relationship between innovation, labor value, and economic dynamics in a deflationary context.
“Because like, so Jeff Booth obviously talks about deflation all the time.”
The Impact of Deflation on Companies
42:04 to 43:53
Discussion on how deflation influences company revenues and pricing strategies.
“Because if the consumer of a product that a company is selling is paying less and less and less over time, then the income for that company gets less and less over time.”
Envisioning a Free Market Economy
43:53 to 46:04
Exploration of the potential transition to a deflationary free market economy and the role of humility in economic theory.
“I feel like this is a bit of a trick question because if we were in charge, we would just do nothing or we'd quit.”
Bitcoin's Role in Economic Theory
46:04 to 47:29
Discussion on how Bitcoin could fit into a deflationary economic framework without explicitly naming it.
“either taken over coerced or put down oh if only there were such a system it would be fabulous yeah i danny i know you're trying to trick us into saying bitcoin but again Yeah, we have a swear jar for that.”
Monetary Value Communication Challenges
47:29 to 49:26
Challenges in communicating Bitcoin's value and the need for a shift in mindset away from traditional fiat measures.
“When I brought up Bitcoin before, you rightly pushed back that it's in this kind of monetization phase.”
Critique of Neoclassical Economics
49:26 to 52:28
A critical examination of neoclassical economic theories, particularly regarding time and causality.
“And I got fully lost and I don't know what you were talking about.”
Complexity in Economic Models
52:28 to 56:00
Discussion on the complexities and inadequacies of standard economic models in capturing real-world dynamics.
“You could go through every single one of these things, but fundamentally, the core idea is that you have equilibriums and you're trying to maximize things.”
Dynamic Complexity in Economics
56:00 to 56:47
Explore the complexities of economic dynamics and the limitations of simplifying assumptions.
“it's going to then lead you to understanding if this, then that, then after that, this, and then it's much more complex and dynamic.”
The Bitcoin Standard Discussion
56:47 to 57:28
Discuss the implications of moving to a Bitcoin standard as a solution to economic issues.
Closing Thoughts and Future Engagements
57:28 to 58:03
Wrap up the conversation with thoughts on future discussions and book recommendations.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02Allen Farrington:This 2 % figure, it was literally completely made up. It was in a TV interview. You cannot have deflation unless your labor is worth more. The current system is going to operate under these assumptions until it no longer works. You're getting deflation because you're essentially just crumbling a very fragile house of cards of debt. You would indeed have a massive issue. But if you think that you can improve the faults of human psychology by adding even more noise on the line, you're deluded. Very successful economies have operated under conditions of deflation for thousands of years. The most innovative periods of Western civilization, a money that is creating an environment whereby innovation manifests as deflation, is going to be one that is maximally beneficial and that people will therefore want to willingly adopt.
1:00Sacha Meyers:Alan, good to have you back on the show. And Sasha, I've never met you. This is the first time we've ever met. I've told Alan this a bunch, but Bitcoin is Venice is my favorite Bitcoin book. He always says it's not a Bitcoin book, but for me it is. But it's really good to meet you. Thank you for coming on the show. Do you want to just tell everyone a bit about who you are? because the audience doesn't know you as well.
1:22Allen Farrington:No, I'm the elusive partner in the duo here. That's how I like it. Look, I used to work with Alan. We met at an investment firm that we both worked for. I still work there. So by trade, I'm an investment manager, and I have a background in environmental sciences and not studied economics either. so you know that's what you were saying earlier before you started recording perhaps and it's just an interesting area that i've developed and alan and i have been sounding boards for each other through the years and we now and again over a couple of pints start developing an idea of it more than another and then that's when we start thinking hey maybe this this is something we ought to develop so then it turns into busy afternoons and evenings and weekends where we just try and get some drafts together.
2:18Allen Farrington:Yeah, it's been a fun intellectual partnership. One thing I'd add to that, just given Sasha isn't as kind of out there in the Bitcoin community, that's presumably what most of your audience is, Danny. I'm not sure how well known this is. I don't know if I'll have said it publicly in exactly these words, but Bitcoin is Venice, just the book, the collection of essays, is basically what we spent five years talking about and then in lockdown had a good excuse to write for once. That's basically where it came from.
2:53Sacha Meyers:And now the band is back together. We've got a new chapter. Are you going to do a new version of the book?
2:59Allen Farrington:Yeah, good question. So this one, Number Go Down, is intended as a standalone essay. So you can read it without any other context. but we intend as well to probably modify it a little bit, but to slip it in as a new chapter for the second edition of Bitcoin is Venice. So I'm not sure how much we're actually like allowed to say about this. I mean, I tweeted some of this, but the second edition will come out sometime next year. We're hoping that we can launch it at next year's Bitcoin conference. There's other fun details that we're hoping for that Bitcoin magazine will probably get mad if I say now.
3:39Allen Farrington:I'm not sure they're entirely confirmed. But yeah, so standalone essay, but will be slotted in. Awesome.
3:48Sacha Meyers:Right. Let's get into the essay then. So number go down. This is all about deflation. Do you think we should start this conversation by talking about inflation, though? Because like this is to me as someone who came into Bitcoin with really like never having dug into economics at all, like the idea of inflation was always presented as a good thing. You know, like a healthy economy would have 2 % inflation. But like you start this by talking about that as obviously being one of the big myths of like Keynesian economics. So can we start there? Like what is the myth of inflation?
4:19Allen Farrington:What is the myth? You need it, I guess. You kind of alluded to it there that it's just presented as common knowledge, like kind of obvious, I guess. I mean, it's sort of difficult for me to remember if I ever even believe this or what it is people typically believe. but that it's just, you know, obviously you need a bit of inflation because otherwise we'd all starve and die. I don't know, do you want to give a more serious answer? You're still in TradFi, what do they think? So I'll answer your question in a slightly different way. I'll say that one reason we're addressing this is because it is one of the axioms of traditional economics.
4:58Allen Farrington:So any school of thought is going to be based on a number of assumptions, And those are the core assumptions that then you build on to have all of your other workings. And when you come with a fundamentally different understanding of how things work, you also need to sometimes go after the fundamental assumptions and knock them out. So this is our attempt at doing that. I would say that none of it individually is new. It's just taking arguments from bits here or there. And then we are working through it with our own logic and then maybe building on some of this. But look, the idea that things need to inflate over time is based on a number of assumptions, which we talk in the essay about how you derive that 2%.
5:45Allen Farrington:Nobody really knows. It's very much a finger in the air sort of thing. But the reason why you need it is also based on some assumptions such as paradox of thrift, which is that you need people to feel almost coerced into spending. Otherwise, they won't. And then this has deleterious effects, which feeds on itself. And so these are the core bedrock assumptions. And what we're saying is, look, you have a completely different way of thinking about it. You don't need to make those. and the economies very successful economies have operated under conditions of deflation for thousands of years really like hundreds of years the most innovative periods of western civilization have operated under gold standards where the natural order of things was to have a nominal deflation in price so this isn't something that is completely out of the ordinary out of what you can tangibly observe.
6:44Allen Farrington:We're now operating in an environment where we just assume inflation is how things are and it's the water we swim in and so we don't question it. And well, in the essay, we want to start questioning it a little bit.
6:56Sacha Meyers:But where did that assumption initially come from? Because you talk about, I think it was a New Zealand banker who kind of made a throwaway comment and was that the start of this?
7:06Allen Farrington:I don't think so, no. No, I think that's entertaining in terms of this 2 % figure, that it has this kind of odd lore behind it, because it's always presented as state-of-the-art. And I guess, again, it's difficult for me to remember if I ever even bought into this, like how a normie would buy into it. But I'm pretty sure that it's understood, or at least it's mis-presented as being in some way derived, you know, scientifically or mathematically. Like it's really serious, right? It's very serious. People have thought about this and come up with the optimal answer. That's the way it's generally understood.
7:48Allen Farrington:And when you dig into where this number, basically when you do exactly what's asked, you just said, okay, but why? Where does it actually come from? You find that it was literally completely made up. It was in a TV interview by this, I forget the guy's name, New Zealand, was it finance minister or something? i wouldn't say though that that's the uh there's a distinction between you know the two percent number and and the the broader you know base of knowledge and belief that gives rise to it i think at risk of maybe going a bit deeper than you want to right now we're not just critiquing this one guy and you know everyone eating two percent mindlessly since then i think it's more that he was in a position to say that and it it then became lore because of the much more widely accepted macroeconomic thought that's, I think it's basically fair to just call it Keynesianism, you used that word already, but that had been prevalent for most of the 20th century and particularly acute in practice since 1971.
8:47Allen Farrington:So if anything, it's maybe it's like an interesting historical counterfactual, if this hadn't happened and everyone hadn't latched onto this number, how would it have been understood since? Like, how would it be justified? So yeah, So that guy and that number isn't really that important. It's just like, it's an amusing footnote in the development of this very poorly conceived theory.
9:10Sacha Meyers:But does that signify something that like you say, that's not super like him alone saying that isn't super relevant, but does it signify something? Because like, it's the same thing as when Jerome Powell goes out and talks about interest rates, which might like not have a meaningful impact in reality, but like the vibes of him saying that has a huge impact on markets. Is it the same kind of thing?
9:30Allen Farrington:No, I don't think it is quite the same. I mean, that example with Jerome Powell or the Fed and the inflation expectations and whatever else, that's interesting to get into later. This is more, I think the reason we put this up front is precisely because of how silly it seems. it's it is just this it's lore like i think i've kind of landed on a nice way of of capturing it that again you you would think from the way it's talked about that there's a much more serious source of this number and there just isn't at all it's literally just some guy thought of it on the spot and then it stuck um it's kind of again it's incident like that it could be any number right it doesn't have to be two it just happens to be two for this particularly silly reason.
10:15Allen Farrington:I think the stuff about, you know, comments from the Fed chair, that's a bit, that's more insidious. That's kind of deeper in the rot of what we're trying to attack.
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13:06Allen Farrington:one there so look even though as alan said the two percent is something that is just selected in a slightly random way we'll we'll say charitably the idea the more grounded idea is that it should be low and stable yeah so two is the conclusion on low and stable so why do they want low and stable Why should you start inflating the money? There is at the heart of this argument, a belief that you need to spur people into action. You need to spur people into spending money. And it is through this initial impetus that you then create a virtuous cycle whereby I'm who I better spend now because the money is going to be worth less in the future.
13:52Allen Farrington:So I'm going to go out and buy a new laptop or buy whatever. And then this is going to create demand, which is going to then feed into employment. And it's going to have this nice cycle. And the idea is to try and maximize the health of that cycle by finding a rate of inflation that is neither too high, that it starts to mess up everything. because I think even Keynesians will concede that if you put that number at a very high level, if you start inflating your money too quickly, you'll degrade price signals to a point that is completely unhelpful. But they still believe that there is this maximum, almost like a quadratic function where you're slowly improving the economy as you increase inflation.
14:38Allen Farrington:And if you go past that point, it starts to degrade. Our point is just that you immediately degrade. So you're just making it bad from the start and so that that's that's their that's that's their underlying
14:51Sacha Meyers:assumption behind behind this is there also like a conflation between the idea of like deflation being prices falling and deflationary bust and like credit collapse are those two things intertwined in in their thinking yeah yeah yeah yeah i was i also think so you you need to
15:07Allen Farrington:understand how schools form. They often form around or after a crisis. And in the event of fiat, you need to look at the 29, 1929 crash, and also some of the failures of central banks in dealing with these periods of economic distress. And through that crisis, you then find solutions that maybe address this specific environment. And then you think you have found now the answer, the answer to everything, instead of maybe something that either a completely misguided answer that worked for other reasons. And then you establish that school around it. And you will not want to challenge that unless or until there is another crisis that emerges.
15:54Allen Farrington:So frankly, I think that the current system is going to operate under these assumptions until it no longer works. Because I don't think you're going to convince people at central banks to slowly get rid of these models and start adopting a different understanding of the world. Look, we will have some thoughts on how that is spurred into action. But yeah, the idea is to at least lay down some foundations before the crisis such that after it's happened, hey, you have a set of tools that you can now try and understand the world with.
16:30Sacha Meyers:So with the idea that if prices are falling, people are going to hold off spending. Why is that not true? Because for me as a Bitcoiner, I know that my Bitcoin is going to appreciate value over time. And so especially with bigger purchases, I do do that. I've wanted to buy a house for a long time. And the thing that I always think is, well, it will be less Bitcoin in a few years time. So why do you think that wouldn't be the case?
16:54Allen Farrington:I'd be careful with that, Danny, though, because for one, Bitcoin, we would argue is currently monetizing, right? It's not stable. It's likely to appreciate in value purely by sucking value from other currencies. I guess narrowing in on our argument, though, the word Bitcoin doesn't actually appear in this essay at all, which is kind of a bit of a, I don't know, like a nod to our overall approach in Bitcoin as Venice. obviously the word Bitcoin does appear throughout Bitcoin is Venice, but this is why, you know, my joke about it not really being a Bitcoin book, that's just clickbait for Bitcoiners to instead learn about economics and capitalism and all our other random thoughts of trying to tie all this together.
17:38Allen Farrington:So yeah, without going too far off on that tangent, I'd be careful about applying it in a contemporary context where you have Bitcoin as an alternative, because i'm sure you would agree i'm sure most listeners would agree it these circumstances are basically historically unprecedented uh which i guess so i mean in rounding off i'm kind of avoiding the question entirely you can maybe you can probe again we can go a bit further with it but that's a good reason to try to think about this as clearly as possible to think about it as from first principles as possible because it's unprecedented and all the fiat nonsense won't
18:15Sacha Meyers:work let me give you a different version then because um so for a long time people have been saying i should translate or have someone translate the podcast and do it in spanish because there's a massive audience that maybe benefit from getting bitcoin education that just don't speak english and so we did look into this and we looked into getting like essentially voice actors to do it this was years and years and years ago and then over the last few years it's like well i'll just wait until ai can do it which it now can and it's something that i may potentially do in the future And again, that is down to how much things like this will cost us.
18:47Allen Farrington:So two things. One, let me, by the way, just answer very quickly the previous question, which I'm now realizing I didn't really address properly. I also didn't. I just answered a different one. Well, don't be afraid to just catch us on that. So one, what I was saying previously is because the school is formed from a moment where there was a credit bust. And so you got deflation. And we talk about this in the essay. You're getting deflation because you're essentially just crumbling a very fragile house of cards of debt. Right? And so that's creating deflation. And so the school is created as a result of that.
19:26Allen Farrington:And so it's saying, hey, deflation is the reason we're here. Therefore, no deflation, please. Inflation, good. So let's have inflation. And you, at that point, throw the baby with the bathwater. Because we say there's two types of deflation. There's a deflation caused by a collapse in a credit crunch, and that's caused by fragility in a system. And the other type of deflation is deflation caused by the innovation over time. Okay, so that's why you need to be careful here. The school is here to look after one type and is inadvertently also killing the other. And we think that actually by doing that, you're creating more harm than good.
19:57Allen Farrington:On your second question, I'm delaying consumption for some things because it's going to be cheaper in the future. Yes, absolutely. And we think that's also a good thing. We think it's a good thing because when you're delaying consumption, what are you often doing with your money? You'll be investing it, saving it, putting it in some form of even if you're storing it as money, you're actually creating liquidity to the monetary framework, which means you're creating a more stable way for entrepreneurs to use the money system to use deep pricing signals and be able to understand how things are operating.
20:32Allen Farrington:so as deflation occurs it unlocks things that you wouldn't want to be doing before now you can get your podcast down uh translated if that's great the reason that's there it's because there's a ton of money going into ai and data centers and guess what when you build a data center when you build ai especially when you're building models you're training models you're buying let's say you're buying gpus to make a gpu first you need to make a lithography machine to make that you're going to need a factory. And once you have these GPUs, you're going to need to have a training cluster. And then you're going to need to train that model for months and have everything ready before you can even start doing any of this translating.
21:15Allen Farrington:And for that, you're going to need literally hundreds of billions of dollars invested. Where's that money going to come from? It's going to come from people saying, hey, you know what? I'm happy not spending today. I'm happy not buying a car right now. I'm happy instead investing this. And then that way we can build this factory. That way we can then create a model that can translate this thing that can now create a high standard of living for everybody. That's the function. It's not about, if you're delaying anything, you're not just not doing, it's not like there is something versus nothing.
21:48Allen Farrington:There's something today versus something tomorrow. So you need to think about your Opportunity costs, what else you're doing. I think I'd add to that the paradox of thrift is seductive because it's not complete nonsense, right? It feels plausible, provided you're lazy in your assessment of causality. So it does feel somewhat, I wouldn't say it feels right necessarily, but it feels plausible that if you don't spend, well, then how's anybody going to earn to employ, to invest, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's exactly the wrong order in which things actually happen in terms of how you arrive at a situation in a remotely complex economy where you can buy these things that have gone through a production process.
22:41Allen Farrington:They only exist to buy because of enormous investment, as Sasha just described. And the enormous investment is only possible with savings. And I think a good kind of heuristic, almost like a mental hack that we use a couple of times, and actually we use it a lot just in the rest of Bitcoin is Venice too, is to unwind the seductive trappings of the paradox of thrift that arise in the first place because of how complex our economic circumstances are. And just think about, you know, it could be like desert island economics or what we like to use a lot, just a farmer with seats, right? right? When you're saving, when you're investing, all that really boils down to is you are choosing to use your time to create more in the future rather than consume what you have now.
23:34Allen Farrington:And the more complex an economic structure, the more kind of obfuscated this becomes in terms of what you see as a consumer. You might just see, oh, I'm going to buy this. Well, AI examples are maybe be a bit confusing but well that's it's actually good that they're confusing right that makes the point it's like i'm gonna buy this or i'll use your example danny i'm gonna buy this translation service now or i'm just gonna wait for like a claude subscription to deflate in a couple years or whatever but that can only exist for the reasons i should describe which are incredibly complicated and are ultimately rooted in saving as opposed to consuming it's and that's the crux of it that it's it's it's i maybe even i'm not sure i'm not disagreeing with you but reframing what Sasha said a little bit, that it's not like these are sort of orthogonal.
Read the full transcript
24:21Allen Farrington:It's that when you really drill down to it, it might feel orthogonal in the moment as a consumer, but when you really, really drill down to it, you are either consuming now or saving for later, right? There's not really any middle choice and you certainly can't do both.
24:38Sacha Meyers:So that makes sense. And like back to what Sasha was saying, I guess in that example I gave initially about the house and Bitcoin, it's like, this is where investment and malinvestment get kind of murky because the idea of me feeling like i need if i was like living in fiatland feeling like i need to get rid of money now before the house you know price inflates away from my my sort of what i can afford like it becomes it potentially becomes malinvestment but the the question that i've asked you before alan and i'd like your opinion on sasha is like how do you know what is investment and what is malinvestment
25:15Allen Farrington:so this is the very pernicious heart of this issue in the moment you do not know that's it that's why it's so bad because an investor is going to go off signals given by prices and you want these prices to not be corrupted if they are corrupted you could be a completely rational investor who is incredibly thoughtful forward-looking best intentioned and you're going to malinvest and it's not your fault because you are investing on the back of a false a faulty set of assumptions caused by a distortion in the price mechanism we see it through bubbles we see it when you make the cost of money too low you bring the interest rates down you're creating essentially a longer duration investment than is justified by the amount of savings, but this is only recognized after the facts.
26:15Allen Farrington:So we also talk a lot in our essays about how you need to run experiments, practical experiments to know things. You can't just theorize your way to an answer. And a bubble is only something that you have a diagnostic understanding of after it's burst. Before it's burst, it's not a bubble. It could be completely legitimate. It could be a completely legitimate allocation of capital to respond to needs, be brought about by consumers and innovation. And even in an environment with no noise on the line, there's no corruption, you will still get it wrong because there's human fallibility. People are excited.
26:55Allen Farrington:There's a boom and there's a bust. And that's human psychology. It will always be with us. But if you think that you can improve the faults of human psychology by adding even more noise on the line, you're deluded. I would like to see a scenario where that's actually happened because I don't know of one. So that's the trick here. You don't know about malinvestment, but let's at least ensure that the amount of malinvestment we are likely to cause is as slow as possible. I just want to build on that with, again, a tangible example that's kind of cutting through the complexity of assuming we're in this incredibly complex economic system that we are.
27:39Allen Farrington:A rhetorical device that we use in the essay is this point about would you, if you knew that it would take you something 2 % longer to do, just in terms of time, like again, cutting through even money, being part of it, just time. If it would take you 2 % longer next year, is that the only reason you would ever do it? Because, which sounds absurd, But it is pretty much logically equivalent to the fiat slash Keynesian argument of we need the, as Sasha was saying a couple of answers ago, the stimulus of the expectation of inflation to ever do anything now. this is this is a good way of trying to wrap your head around just how insane it is to really to to to not um what's the best way of putting this to to not be as aware as it's perfectly you know you're perfectly capable of being of this point of misinformation that sasha's making right this idea that you can you know malinvestment is effectively acting on uh false signals or noise I guess, right?
28:52Allen Farrington:Is acting on noise in terms of your entrepreneurial decision making. If that sounds a bit too abstract to imagine like, okay, well, what would that mean? And how would you even know? This 2 % thing with your time is basically the way you know. It's like, would you ever, do you do things basically? Do you do things now? Or do you need somebody threatening you with it taking a little bit longer next year? If you'd rather just do them now, then you can cut through all of this.
29:18Sacha Meyers:can we talk like so you both brought up the paradox of thrift and one of the things that you you were sort of hinting at in the essay which i didn't fully understand is the idea that the sort of traditional economists think that progress in the economy is potentially a threat to the system and i don't exactly know what you mean by that i i forget exactly where we mentioned this
29:41Allen Farrington:but I think I know what you're referring to, that because they are so insistent on this constant stimulus, they actually use the word stimulus. We're not even mocking them there. They say the word stimulus. If there is ever widespread enough deflation, which is always in everywhere. In reality, this is a micro phenomenon. It's individual goods. Their prices deflate. But if it's widespread enough that it makes its way into macro statistics, they get scared and they want more inflation. I think that's what we're referring to. I don't know if you remember this in any more detail. There are other angles around how if you start to innovate, fundamentally innovation is going to be doing more with the same amount or doing more with less or more efficiently or faster, these sorts of things.
30:34Allen Farrington:There's also a fear of ending up with resources which are not used. And so maybe now people are unemployed. You've just made something much more efficiently. You no longer need as many people in the factory. You now no longer have this demand. This demand is gone. And as a result, the flywheel is no longer spinning. And it's time to print. It's always time to print. That's a very important thing to understand. The ultimate flow chart. Yeah, exactly. This all gets to the heart of it. It's time to print is essentially the conclusion of every Powell interview. It's just about how much, really.
31:19Sacha Meyers:this this might be a stupid question but like especially when you break these things down in in the essay like it this the whole like the economy is a very complex thing there's loads of like second third order consequence of any decision like can it actually be measured or is
31:35Allen Farrington:the problem that they're trying to measure it too much i i very much think the latter yeah it's some things can be measured but uh i don't think anything can really be measured perfectly and most things can only be measured poorly or not at all so the more they try to what they typically do or what they typically try to do they don't really it's impossible to succeed but what they're trying to do is use measurements that they're pretending are good or even make sense when in fact they're bad or things like cpi sure yeah um i mean any basically any macro statistic is kind of false for the same trap i was mentioning before they they want to use that as justification because it seems like real data basically i mean we use this expression here and many many other times of physics envy they have pretty hardcore physics envy in that they they think in these very kind of mechanistic terms.
32:38Allen Farrington:They want to interpret, you know, quote, the economy as like a Newtonian classical system, such that if they have enough data about its initial conditions, they can then reason counterfactually about what it will do or what it would do if they intervene in a particular way. And all of this is nonsense, but it's in terms of the way the methodology is presented, it's by their logic, it's dependent on having this data. And so to your question, yes, they have to pretend that this data exists and is meaningful, but it either isn't or doesn't.
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35:27Sacha Meyers:The whole process was super easy. The application took me less than 15 minutes and in a few hours I had the dollars in my account. It was super smooth. So if you need cash but you don't want to sell Bitcoin, head over to ledden.io forward slash WBD and you'll get 0.25 % off your first loan that's ledn.io forward slash wbd but but when they say that deflation could be a threat to the system are they right in some ways because the thing that i i struggle with is like let's say i just for easy math let's say i earn 100k a year and i have a 200k mortgage um if my if we live in like a true free market deflation economy and my wages then are deflating as well as the price of everything, the debt remains at$200 ,000.
36:11Sacha Meyers:And so these things get harder and harder to pay off over time. It kind of completely flips that on its head.
36:17Allen Farrington:So your wage... So the short answer to your question is yes, but we need then to dig into it. This is a really good topic to explore. So your wage, just to touch on that very quickly, it might not deflate. It might be nominally stable. It might be the same amount as things become cheaper. it might actually go up as things go lower, or it might come down, but not as fast as other things. So we don't know exactly, but over time, if you're in an environment where you have strong innovation, you should still expect the price of things to fall faster than your wage would fall. But your wage might not fall.
36:55Allen Farrington:It might be either static or going up. So that's number one. Number two, you're then essentially putting this against a fixed number, which is your mortgage. and what happens in an environment which is incredibly dynamic fluid where prices can move and then you increase you introduce rigidity you're getting fragility you're getting a system that can break that is why debt is very dangerous so the fiat will say and this is where it's coming from that's what we were talking about in 1929 you're getting a system that's building a lot of debt, creating fragility, breaks under the weight of that fragility, and then says, well, we broke under the weight of the fragility.
37:46Allen Farrington:So instead of fixing the root cause, which is maybe don't create a system which is incredibly fragile with a ton of debt and massively over-financialized, instead of doing that, instead of fixing the root cause, you say, no, no, no, we'll just essentially have the cheat code, which is going to be all of those nominal obligations, we will slowly make them less and less relevant, which is what inflation is. Inflation is simply a way of taking those nominal obligations and inflating them away. Okay, that could be your answer. And it's very legitimate. So for example, if you today took the economy under whatever currency you're operating under, whether it's the British pound or the US dollar, whatever, the euro.
38:32Allen Farrington:If you took any of these and you flipped the framework from inflation to deflation, you would indeed have a massive issue because these nominal debts would not go away. But that's not a good reason to still operate under this system. It's the same as saying, if I stop drinking, I'll have a hangover. Here's the dog. Okay, it's the classic thing, right? We all know this analogy. But that's fundamentally what we're talking about here. Can I push back on the wage point just in a completely different direction to the way Sasha answered? I would suggest that it's very sloppy to say, oh, my wages will also decrease.
39:18Allen Farrington:And this is, knowing where I'm going with this, this is quite abstract. Sasha's answer is a lot more tangible. I also want to be wary that you can't be too definitive with this in the sense that Everything we're talking about is predicated on dynamism and innovation, and it is, of course, possible that that will cause certain jobs to simply cease to exist. So you can't say, oh, every wage will stay the same or even go up forever or anything to that effect. But if you just think about the value added by labor, if you treat it in slightly more abstract terms like that, there's really no reason to think that that will go down.
39:55And if anything, there's very strong
39:57Allen Farrington:reason to think that it will go up if there is any deflation at all. And I think this is back to being as clear, at least trying to be as clear as possible about the causality in all of this, like how you unpack the paradox of thrift. If there is any deflation, it's not, you know, this is another thing we say a couple of times in this essay and we've said elsewhere, it's not a metaphysical abstraction, right? It's not like the temperature. It's not something that's out there in the universe that you can measure. It's a causal process that is fundamentally rooted in innovation. I mean, that's basically, that's a decent summary of this entire essay, right?
40:31Allen Farrington:And we don't have time to go through all the details of this, that under the circumstances that actually you would expect without monetary interference, if people are able to innovate, you can trace what will happen and very reasonably expect deflation as a result of basically just getting better at things, right? And it's even back to the time thing. It's the inverse of the, if it would take you 2 % longer, it's actually reasonable to expect it'll take you 2 % less or considerably less than that, you know, as we even just in the labor example, as you practice things, as you get better at it. And that's I mean, that's a decent way of thinking about what capital accumulation actually amounts to.
41:06Allen Farrington:It's just not necessarily all in your head, right? It's like in the creation of tools, the more tools you create, the more valuable your labor will be, the more stuff you can create with your labor. And that's deflation, right? So you have to go through this process, you can't just like, sit your finger in the air, oh, it feels like 2 % deflation today. I wonder what my labor is worth. You cannot have deflation unless your labor is worth more. So again, you got to be careful. It doesn't mean that you can therefore predict what everybody's wages are going to do. But in general, it is very reasonable to expect that your wages will not deflate.
41:44Sacha Meyers:Can you explain that in more detail? Because like, so Jeff Booth obviously talks about deflation all the time.
41:49Allen Farrington:How much more detailed?
41:50Sacha Meyers:I give a 10 minute answer this time. But the question I have, though, is like Jeff Booth obviously always talks about like things dropping to the marginal cost of production. And so like over time, as innovation is happening and things get more and more efficient, I understand that argument. But like if you take it to the nth degree and you're like, we we. Because if the consumer of a product that a company is selling is paying less and less and less over time, then the income for that company gets less and less over time.
42:17Allen Farrington:Well, no, not necessarily, because it's very likely that they're creating more and more. So the price is going down. But there's not, again, here you have to be careful for basically the same reason that you can't say this will happen universally. But in general, there's no reason to expect that a given company's revenue would go down with deflation. If anything, you could be very, very careful here, but you might expect it to go up on the basis that it's innovative. This is exactly, again, this is the logic that we go through in much more meticulous detail than it would be advisable to try to do now.
42:55Allen Farrington:but the extent to which it is successfully innovating is in some sense captured by how much can it therefore afford to lower prices in order to take more market share in order to boost its own returns. And that's ultimately what, you know, the rationale of the individual entrepreneur, you know, the decision maker and the capital allocation process is coming down to is trying to boost returns. And the essay is basically about tracing that logic and how that ends up impacting prices. But to the extent that they're successful, I mean, I guess in particular, if they're disproportionately successful to their competitors, the act of lowering prices will feed through to them making more money.
43:41Sacha Meyers:Okay, that makes sense. And that's kind of like the supermarket example that you give in the piece, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the question I have is, do we have any shot of something like this happening? If I put you two in charge of all economies all over the world, you get to now pick economic policy.
43:59Allen Farrington:I feel like this is a bit of a trick question because if we were in charge, we would just do nothing or we'd quit.
44:05Sacha Meyers:So can it actually go from the system that we live under today to a more free market deflationary system?
44:13Allen Farrington:So I would say one thing about this is our approach is fundamentally, even though we are making quite strong arguments, and I'm very willing to back them in discussion and argumentation, we are taking, adopting a position of humility in the sense that neither of us wants to enforce this. we're not going to force people to adopt an environment that's driven or that manifests deflation what we're simply saying is that a money that is structured such that it has minimal noise on the line that's creating an environment whereby innovation manifests at the output as deflation is going to be one that is maximally beneficial and that people will therefore want to willingly adopt such a system so i will we're not here to if we were if we were to literally run the economy we wouldn't run the economy we would we would just like say oh well you guys just figure it out and we think that that's where you'll end up but let's be humble here this is an incredible as you mentioned it's incredibly complex a lot of what we're talking about is theoretical We're trying to be logical and make sense of these arguments, but we could have faulted in any individual step or any individual core assumptions.
45:42Allen Farrington:And as a result, I don't want to have billions of people operating under a very strict system that I am convinced is going to be beneficial. That's totalitarianism. And no, that's not what we're about. but it should be bottom-up adoption and it should be bottom-up adoption of something that has been created that meets these requirements and that can essentially escape any attempt at being either taken over coerced or put down oh if only there were such a system it would be fabulous yeah i danny i know you're trying to trick us into saying bitcoin but again Yeah, we have a swear jar for that. No, again, seriously, we don't use the word Bitcoin in the essay very, very deliberately because our attitude to this is kind of, if you believe all of this, Bitcoin will just come to you naturally.
46:39Allen Farrington:And maybe this is kind of the inverse of like Sasha's saying, in the argumentation, we're humble, we think. But in the marketing, we're trying to be as obnoxious as possible because we want as many normies as possible to read this. Like your audience agrees with all of this. All right. Like probably 99 % of them agree with 99 % of it realistically, but we've written this in such a way. And we kind of have in the back of our minds that we hope Bitcoin is Venice can work in this way. I mean, you know, it's hard to read, so it's not like a good introduction to Bitcoin, but for, for certain people that are susceptible to these kinds of arguments, we want them to realize they believe in Bitcoin without even mentioning Bitcoin until like two-thirds of the way into the book.
47:24Allen Farrington:And this essay will be chapter six, I believe. So it's well before we start talking about Bitcoin.
47:30Sacha Meyers:When I brought up Bitcoin before, you rightly pushed back that it's in this kind of monetization phase. How far does Bitcoin have to go until it can actually sort of fulfill what you're talking about here? Oh, that's hard. I don't know.
47:44Allen Farrington:Well, a lot, clearly. We're obviously not there yet how far i mean do you even have like what kind of answer would make sense here do you think because it's not clear to me how to try to answer that that's why i asked it because i don't know the answer to it the day you denominate the market cap in bitcoin that's yeah yeah that's a good answer actually yeah i've had this thought before this like it's a bit too no one will ever actually do this i guess until it happens and you know somewhere between 10 years and never that that, yeah, you obviously have to start talking about it. Sorry, you have to stop talking about it in dollar terms.
48:19Allen Farrington:And my idea was like, in the interim, is there a way of communicating its value as something like the percentage of global M2 and gold or something like that? But like, no one's ever gonna, you know, me and three other people will actually like that and no one will adopt it. And so, yeah, I get maybe to Sasha's point, it's like, you'll know it when you see it. sense that you definitely need to stop talking about it in dollars but i don't know what you
48:45Sacha Meyers:start talking about it in either is that's that is pretty much the same answer you gave when i asked about investment and malinvestment on a previous show they were like you were like you'll pretty much know it when you see it that that's kind of the answer um i mean i feel like that
49:01Allen Farrington:that captures a lot of our thinking right like you go to experiment a lot of it and just figure it
49:05Sacha Meyers:out yeah were you going to add something there sasha no i was just going to say you need to run
49:10Allen Farrington:the experiment you need to run the experiment and you don't know i think realistically there will be a few telltale signs okay yes if legitimately if when you ask someone how much is a bitcoin worth they say it's worth a bitcoin like one bitcoin is worth one but they don't mean that they literally that's where their brain goes to immediately we got a long way to go you know you're you're you're probably there at that point or you're very close to it but how long does that take i i have no idea and you need to just run the experiment and uh hopefully people recognize along the way there are signposts that as we get closer to that we are benefiting from operating
49:50Sacha Meyers:on this monetary system okay i'm going to use this as my personal education session now because there was a bit in this that you i'm going to find the quote because i got totally lost on one
50:01Allen Farrington:paragraph uh that probably just means we need to redraft it this is this will be good for the book
50:06Sacha Meyers:It was when you talked about time and there was the Valrasian auctioneer to Tomman. And I got fully lost and I don't know what you were talking about.
50:17Allen Farrington:That's... All right, did you want, please, please, for the listeners, please read it. No, no, do you have it? Do you have it?
50:24Sacha Meyers:It was one paragraph.
50:27Allen Farrington:Okay, so I will just, I'll eat the air whilst you go and look for it. but just prefacing this, the idea is not necessarily that we want you to understand exactly what's being said in that paragraph, because even though we are, so we do want to say, we do want to show a couple of things. One, we actually understand what the other side is saying. So we are representing the argument in a way that is technically accurate, but also very clearly. funny or satirical yeah we're we're mocking it because we understand it yeah and the idea is not for you to read that and think yeah i completely get it the idea is it's kind of
51:14Sacha Meyers:ridiculous but this is how it works so if you have it please go for it the quote let me i can find it it'll take me a minute let me find it a few moments later i think this was it it was Theat economists treat time as inconvenient friction. In the hallowed halls of neoclassical theory, time does not exist. There is only equal room. The market has achieved a Pareto optimal stasis via the Valrassian auctioneers' tatonement, yielding a price vector of zero aggregate excess demand. Every autonomistic utility maximizer has aligned his marginal rate of substitution with the price ratio, while firms reach a profit maximizing zenith where marginal cost is perfectly aligned with marginal revenue.
51:53Sacha Meyers:Perfection, as Michael Fassbender might say. That...
51:59Allen Farrington:what let me just say something if you don't get that then i don't know what to tell you because we really tried hard to explain the logic and um inner internal consistency and and just how approachable fs economics really is so i don't know what to tell you you don't have time to convince me i mean i would i would say less sarcastically that if you don't get that that's probably healthy that means you haven't wasted a decent amount of your time learning what these things allegedly mean in the first place this is like do you remember when you did that tweet years
52:33Sacha Meyers:and years and years ago alex where it was like you were comparing bitcoin to the fiat system and you and you did that diagram where there were just lines going everywhere oh diagram yeah i still have that piece of paper i feel like i should get it framed yeah um so go on try try and explain what
52:47Allen Farrington:what this section is about because i i don't know oh i mean it's well do you want to do it not sarcastic. You could go through every single one of these things, but fundamentally, the core idea is that you have equilibriums and you're trying to maximize things. So whether it's a firm, whether it's a consumer, you're feeling your way towards an optimal and then your vector is here. So basically, it's about optimizing. It's about having very complex models and uh maximize yeah maximizing things which we fundamentally reject as a premise for how you operate in a system that is completely uncertain uncertain not risky uncertain that has radical uncertainty that is unquantifiable in some ways and unpredictable and unmodelable so against that you're getting all of the terminology from yeah from from that school which is very technical and frankly look some of these models i think that individually they're making interesting descriptions which can get you to so for example the tatanement which is really about price discovery we do talk about price discovery but the way in which the way in which the walrusian auctioneer is operating is just not the same as the way we would describe it so it's almost an ontological difference between what we're doing and yeah and well for i i'm starting to feel a but sorry for potentially very confused listeners, just to try to wrap all this up into a more direct answer to your question, Danny.
54:15Allen Farrington:That paragraph is us invoking as much fiat economics jargon as possible, accurately, but in such an over-the-top way as to try to make the point about how ridiculous it is. So I wasn't kidding when I said before that if not only you, Danny, but if one doesn't understand it, it's honestly a good thing if you if you bother to work through the meanings of all these terms which are like not that ridiculous in isolation but when we cram them all together the joke we're making is it is ridiculous if if taken if taken to an extreme that by their methodology ought to be allowed it's actually revealed to just be ridiculous well i would take that as a compliment
55:02Sacha Meyers:if i didn't go back and read that paragraph three times being like what the fuck are they talking about um okay so so but this you then like go on to explain like how they think about time as a as a part of the economy well they don't think about time that's the point yeah and they get that wrong so can you explain why because like with time there's obviously there's always cost of capital like what is it that they look about incorrectly you mentioned causality so
55:26Allen Farrington:that's one causality is a really good one we even talked about the idea of delaying things and doing something so i think there's both it's both time and space almost so one is is what preceded this action what is causing what is happening right now what will this then cause later on rather than just almost taking things in a very static static way um and then the the other side is if you're not doing this what else are you going to be doing so it's also thinking in counterfactuals opportunity costs and these sorts of things and and that's a that's a form of causality because it's going to then lead you to understanding if this, then that, then after that, this, and then it's much more complex and dynamic.
56:09Allen Farrington:And the issue is when you start thinking dynamically, you can't think with many of these simplifying assumptions that they make because there's no more equilibrium. Everything is constantly moving and all of those things. So I think one reason why they have to abstract that away is because it just creates complexity that they can no longer resolve. and so it's just it's just an it's an annoying factor which it's better to just get rid of
56:34Sacha Meyers:yeah in some ways well i think so i know you have got to go i think we should do a part two because i have like four other sections with a ton of more questions that we get into like we i feel like we've covered like not even the first 40 percent like the first 20 of this article part two of seven exactly um but i am just very glad to see you guys back writing again um as a last question it is i i know you don't mention bitcoin i know you purposely don't mention bitcoin but it is the real way out of this for anyone that's listening to just move to a bitcoin standard as fast as possible yes next all right do you have a less facetious answer to that no okay good well we will be back with a part two potentially um i'm i'm very glad you guys are writing again i'm looking forward to the second edition of the book um thank you guys and i do think there's a lot more to unpack here so we should do it again of course hopefully uh sooner rather than later sasha everyone knows alan you've not been on the show before where do you want to send anyone if you want to find out about your work i would like to send them to the nearest bookshop
57:37Allen Farrington:and uh pick up some pick up a book that you think is interesting there you go all right thank you guys i appreciate the time
58:01Thank you.
From the publisher
“If your system can’t survive without inflation, the problem isn’t deflation.”
Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers return to the show to break down one of the most misunderstood ideas in economics: deflation.
Allen & Sacha are the authors of Bitcoin is Venice, in this episode they get into their latest essay, Number Go Down, where they challenge the core assumptions behind modern macroeconomics. They argue that the idea inflation is necessary for a healthy economy is not grounded in reality, but in flawed models, bad incentives, and a fundamental misunderstanding of how growth actually happens.
We get into why the 2% inflation target is arbitrary, how Keynesian economics confuses credit collapse with true deflation, and why falling prices driven by innovation might actually be the most important signal of a functioning economy. We also explore the paradox of thrift, malinvestment, and why distorted price signals lead to systemic fragility.
Allen and Sacha explain why saving is the foundation of real growth, how deflation can drive investment rather than kill it, and why trying to “manage” the economy through measurement and intervention is fundamentally misguided. We also get into debt, why inflation acts as a hidden bailout mechanism, and what a world built on sound money might actually look like.
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Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny
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