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Non-Tech : Deflation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (249)	1/23/2004 6:13:20 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 621

<Some things are easy - a pie can only be cut into so many shares and then you run out of pie.> Life as a zero-sum game. That's a common view coming from territorial dominance hierarchy chimpoid agrarian and hunter gatherer life. But actually, the pie can be more or less infinite. The limit is I suppose something to do with the mental capacity of 7 billion humans [how many will be alive in a decade or so, unpleasant events excluded]. Our puny brains can only cope with a certain amount and that provides a natural limit. Once we are saturated, that'll be it. But there is a very very long way to go before people feel economically saturated. A large proportion of the world would still like to get a decent feed on a reliable basis. They don't feel economically saturated. On a grander scale, mathematicians figure that the universe is actually inflationary, with more and more stuff forming a bigger and bigger pie, which is accelerating [whatever 'accelerating' means in the grand scheme of things where acceleration is defined by gravity which is defined by time which is defined by distance in a Goedelian self-referential loop going nowhere that we can understand]. Just thinking out loud. Deflation seems to be an uncommon state of matters though the apparent existence of black holes shows that when things fizzle to the inside of event horizons, there's collapse to a great big nothing. In an economic sense, it should be easy enough to keep things circling around in an inflationary rather than deflationary way, producing more and more and getting better and better. But governmental megalomaniacs are notorious for creating catastrophe out of thin air, so I suppose deflation is possible. Mqurice