Good morning. Hello. How are you? #742
Lots of gardening, No Man's Sky 4.0 update, a really long thing about the Bimetallism narrative and debt forgiveness and those gold standard weirdos.
Good morning! Hello, there, friend. How are you this fine, chilly Monday? Autumn is in the air. I like autumn now. I used to dislike autumn intensely, partially because it was a fake season. It lasted about 4 days where I grew up. But also the only thing autumn did was alert me to the fact that summer was over and it was going to get horrifyingly, miserably cold and endlessly dark again, like it usually was. This was not good news. I preferred not to think about it. These days, autumn is just a long, lazy, lovely season with pretty trees and slow-growing crops. It is foretelling the coming of another season, winter, but winter is just fine. Winter is even lovely, down here in North Carolina. Perfectly reasonable and pleasant season. Jacket weather, with one, maybe two snowfalls. I’ll take it.
Spent most of the weekend in the garden and doing yardwork. Planted my garlic to overwinter. Planted the broccoli. Thinned the bok choy and thinned the shallots that aren’t going to bulb out, even though I had a dream where they did. They were perfect shallots in my dream. I have about another month of shallots in my pantry from the summer growing sesh, but boy, it sure would be nice if I could get another batch. I finally got around to planting the two pear trees in the ground, so now all my fruit trees are in the ground. Fingers crossed. I cut back the luffa plant that was taking over our porch. I found three luffas! At least! I told myself if I could get a single luffa off of the plants this year I would be happy, and I see at least three, so that is exciting. It was sad to cut it back, but it really was getting out of control:
But mostly I finished cleaning up the tree that fell in the remnants of Hurricane Ian. I haven’t dealt with the stump yet, but I chopped up the trunk into firewood-sized pieces and hauled them onto the patio by the screened-in fireplace. I chopped all the branches for kindling and shredded the rest in my weak-ass, non-European SunJoe shredder chipper. I used the mulch from that on the pathways in the hoophouse, which now smells all sprucy and the ground is all springy and it is just lovely. I shoulda taken a picture of that. It’s great.
Other than that, I played some No Man’s Sky. There’s a new 4.0 update out, and people are all very upset about it because they re-vamped the inventory system and apparently that really messed up people’s inventory. I avoided this fate because I decided that the game was getting boring and the release of 4.0 was a great occasion to start the game over and do things a bit differently, things you could never do in your 200-plus hour save. And so it is very, very pleasant and I like it a lot. Great update. I can understand their frustration, though. In a plotless game like No Man’s Sky, some sort of trauma like this is, like, well, forgive the analogy, like a natural disaster in real life. Which, in a way, should be kind of welcome, right? You’re playing a life simulator, and in real-life, bad things happen time to time. We must face adversity and overcome it.
But I think a lot of people play games like No Man’s Sky purely for soothing purposes. To feel some semblance of control. To relax. To escape life’s real traumas and difficulties. It’s like video game ASMR or massage or something. So to them, naturally a major trauma, disaster, like half of your tech breaking, well, that would suck. It’s not why they play the game, and it stresses them out, and they have enough stress in their life. And honestly, there but for the grace of god go I, because I am essentially that sort of player. I had just, coincidentally, a couple weeks before the update gone through a whole existential debate about whether or not the game had gotten too comfortable, and decided I wanted to start over. But I can imagine if this update came out, say, three months ago. I would have been terrified.
Still reading this Narrative Economics book and I love it, it’s good common sense: narratives effect the economy. Solid thesis. Economists should factor narratives in more, though I don’t know if this book will cause that to happen, but at least it’s out there as a good sort of primer on the subject. One thing he does is he goes through five or so major, recurring narratives that have popped up again and again in economics. Things like: “machines are taking our jobs,” or “panic vs confidence.” The one I’m working through now is about “bimetallism,” which was a thing associated with William Jennings Bryan (and his famous “cross of gold” speech), who I swear to god pops up in almost every book about US history and many other topics. He seems cool? Maybe? I mean, I think he was somewhat deluded in this bimetallism thing, but in general, seems an all right dude. I would go read a biography of him, but I suspect in doing so, it’ll turn out he was not an all right dude. Anyway.
The gist of “bimetallism” is this: At one point, the US was on a monetary standard that accepted gold and silver (hence bi-metal) as legal tender, and legal tender could be exchanged for gold or silver. Silver was fixed in its exchange rate at 16:1. Beginning in 1873, and solidifiying in 1890 or so, the US transitioned over to monometalism, as in, “the gold standard.” As in your paper money could only be exchanged for gold, not silver.
According to Shiller in this Narrative Economics book, a cohort of Americans, primarily farmers, did not like this one bit. Shiller’s explanation is that silver was exchanging for gold on the open markets at a ratio of about 30:1, whereas in the good old days of bimetallism, the exchange ratio was fixed at 16:1. So these people were essentially advocating a “return to bimetallism,” as code for a “return to bimetallism at the old exchange rate of 16:1” which would effectively halve their debts. This debate consumed the entire country, most people either being a debtor or a creditor, and naturally both of those cohorts would have a somewhat different position on the topic of effectively forgiving one half of all debt.
This was, of course, intellectually dishonest. You could return to bimetalism with a float, or an exchange rate other than 16:1, say, 30:1, in which case, who cares. I find it kind of incredible that a whole group of people just decided to collectively maintain this illusion that this was a conversation about money supply when it was really a converesation about massive debt forgiveness. Which, honestly, I am in general pro debt forgiveness every once in a while, so why not just talk about it plainly? That seems… weird! Though I guess plenty of people do that for all sorts of topics today.
This is also weird because I have, like I said, read several books that have covered this portion of American history, most notably Jill Lepore’s These Truths and Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Gotham. And generally speaking, most people are more pro-Bryan than Shiller seems to be, and explain his position not as a veiled pitch for massive debt forgiveness, but as a pitch for a more loose money supply. That out in the west there were few banks, tons of specie and not a lot of cold, hard, gold or US gold notes. By re-adding silver to the mix, you could just have more money in circulation, which is what the west needed. Shiller does not address this at all, so now I am left wondering if I’m conflating two different issues, though I don’t think so. More research is needed.
Schiller then makes the pitch that while the Bimetallism narrative has diminished since Nixon took us off the gold standard, in fact it morphed into the “we need to return to the gold standard” narrative: a similar narrative of sound money, etc. It’s interesting because I think the more modern “take us back to the gold standard” narrative has a completely different meaning than either Shiller’s bimetallism debt forgiveness narrative or the one I understood before about a more loose money supply. In fact a return to the gold standard could be construed as the opposite of a more loose money supply. But I can see a sort of super-grouping, a grouping of all the historical narratives of: “hey government stop fidding with the money supply.” Shiller points to bitcoin as a modern manifestation of that, and yeah, I buy that.
And one last thing: Shiller reminds us that there was a bit of a resurgance in “return to the gold standard” excitement about a decade or so ago, and, gawd, yeah, I remember that. Remember that? When all the bros were going on about how we needed to get back on the gold standard, and how they were all buying gold and shit? God it was so tedious. Do not miss it one bit. I kinda made myself persona non grata at one of Emma’s aunt’s house by arguing with a cousin at Thanksgiving about how dumb a return to the gold standard was. So many bros thought this about ten years ago that you had to have a ready argument against them at hand because it was needed so often.
Where did they all go? What happened? I mean, obviously they all went to Crypto, right? Crypto bros are the old gold standard bros? And one other hilarious (sort of) thing: Shiller points out that in his first, failed, presidential campaign, Trump was going on and on and on about the gold standard and how we needed to return to it. And no one cared, so eventually he ditched the message. But it’s interesting. It simultaneously points to Trump’s ability to hone in on these sort-of fringe but sort-of mainstream issues, his tendency to throw anything up against the wall and see if it sticks, but also it’s fun to think that maybe his massive loss in that presidential campaign… sort of contributed to the death of that narrative? Ha. Wishful thinking I suppose.
Wow okay that was a really long rant about the money supply, sorry. Things on the mind, things on the mind, gotta get them out, pour them onto the page so you don’t have to think about them anymore. Thanks for tuning in.
Got a modern synthpop playlist for you, lotta good stuff, lotta good new synth pop artists. Quite fond of DC Gore, like the new Fujiya and Miyagi a lot, and into this very well-named band Jane, Inc. Maybe Jane can join that band someday.
Anyway, hope your week is swell. Hope you have Indigenous People’s Day off today, not Columbus Day. I have neither, that was dumb. Think we should re-add Indigenous People’s Day to the holiday calendar. Talk tomorrow!