Article View: sci.econ
Article #1727Re: Inflation
From: William B Dwinnell
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 00:54
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 00:54
27 lines
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2057 bytes
Your pound of butter has no absolute value. If I gave you 500 pounds of butter, your pound of butter would nolonger have the value it once had. (Assuming you have a normal diet!) The only way to explain the dianxxx diamond-water paradox is through the market. The only reason we would say that a bucket of diamonds is more b valuable than a bucket of water, is because we live in a world where diamonds are scaresxxxx scarce (low demand schedulexxxx (low supply schedule), and water is (in many places) plentiful (cheaper supply schedule). If suddenly, tomorrow diamonds became plentiful, S+D would radically change, and diamonds would lose their "value". Nothing has absolute value, is my point. It is true that some things have more practical value than others, in the here and now, than others, but that is NOT the only source of value. Does a pair of shoes have value? No practical value to me if they don't fit. But they do have value, in exchange, which is to say the market, the only place where things do have value. Tangibility is similarly NOT a good measure of value. When you walk out of the barber shop, what do you take with you that is tangible? Yet, you have received value, no? As for interest-inflation: the only reason I drew the cause-and- effect relationship from interest to inflation is that interest is usually a stated value, and inflation occurs in the proceess of losing money (in real terms). In fact, there probably is no useful way to discern one or the other as the "cause" or the "effect", bit I know that people will pay interst for my investment, so I know that there must be inflation.
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!gatech!pitt.edu!wbdst From: wbdst+@pitt.edu (William B Dwinnell) Newsgroups: sci.econ Subject: Re: Inflation Message-ID: <2420@blue.cis.pitt.edu> Date: 24 Jan 93 00:54:23 GMT References: <1993Jan23.041808.11656@athena.mit.edu> <2401@blue.cis.pitt.edu> <1993Jan23.170436.10269@athena.mit.edu> Sender: news+@pitt.edu Organization: University of Pittsburgh Lines: 27