Robert Thibadeau
2 min readNov 16, 2024

--

I used to teach at the Business School at CMU. What’s funded by economic or population growth?

.. not on a per capita basis. (this is not necessarily true).

The availability of funding, printing fiat money out of nothing, has been recognized for about 140 years (towards the end of the 1800s). Just inventing money out of nothing with no future growth just creates debt that brings down societies economically. Where do these people get their money? You can't just print it with no records. That's been tried. It just creates inflation. Runaway inflation. (If any trade between countries is allowed).

Simply demanding that some global ruler exists as a dictator of finances has to be solved as a problem.

But if you simulate economic growth (value creation) to cover the debt by paying it off with taxes. What's been recognized for 140+ years is that growth is pretty inevitable unless it's been actively destroyed. Universal healthcare works because of this, for example. Healthier people will create the value that pays for the universal healthcare. That is known to work. Also paying a guaranteed minimum is known to work iwhen it is configured to generate value. Free education also works this way. (And many other things...e.g., paying for roads, utilities, etc.)So a population does not need to grow. However, realizing this value by printing fiat money was recognized as universal in populations that did grow... it is what started government investments that really did not exist before 140 years ago. And, it has been repeatedly proven to work time and again.

Keynes is the guy who worked out some of the detail but this was realized before Keynes. BTW: the country with the most debt in the world is China, by far. Yet they support social credit without a degative effect on their economic growth. Over building more recently has hurt them a bit, but they are still growing rather dramatically and their investments continue to create an oversupply of economic value.

--

--

Robert Thibadeau
Robert Thibadeau

Written by Robert Thibadeau

Carnegie Mellon University since 1979 — Cognitive Science, AI, Machine Learning, one of the founding Directors of the Robotics Institute. rht@brightplaza.com

Responses (1)