You're still thinking about quantity when you should be thinking about price. When farmers get more efficient they can and will compete by lowering prices to capture market share, even if total bread demand stays exactly the same.
This first farmer to find the efficiency charges less to capture market share. The next farmer is pressured to find the same efficiency or go out business, etc etc until there is a new, lower price found for the same total bread demand.
Yeah nah the first farmer to find the efficiency will just keep the profit for themselves.
That doesn't happen outside a (government-enabled) monopoly. The entire history of industrial efficiency gains proves you wrong, with Ford being the most obvious example.
As long as the other farmers can replicate the gains, the first guy who discovered the efficiency will have to deal with competitors lowering their prices.
Sure, he _can_ try to "keep the profit for himself", but he'll find himself with fewer customers as his competitors undercut him.
This is pretty 101 level econ, no?
No? It isn't? The other farmers replicating the gains keep their gains from themselves too. Prices are inert.
I'm mystified as to the why you think other people's progress happens to your gain.
You are presuming a price-controlled monopoly or cartel. All it takes is one defecting farmer who wants greater market share to destroy the strategy of the "gains keepers". The cartel you are describing is not at an equilibrium - it is highly sensitive to defectors.
How do you think prices drop on anything? Where do you think these "inert prices" come from and who is setting them?
Other people's progress results in my savings because satisfying consumer wants better and cheaper than the next guy is the way a producer succeeds in the market. So to the extent that a producer (selfishly) wants to succeed more than his competitor, he will seek to satisfy me better - which is a positive result for me (better price or better good or lower transaction cost or easier to find, etc etc).
Well if it takes one defector don't defect then. Consumers are apathetic fat blobs sitting on a couch they don't deserve producer's hard gotten gains.
The **farmer** chooses to defect from the potential monopoly because he can get a better outcome for himself by doing so. And nobody can stop him from doing it - unless you have violence-backed price controls and regulations.
Producers **want** to offer "gains" (also known as better prices) to the "fat blob consumers" because it means the producers get more market share and more success.
I don't even understand what your argument is anymore... That people don't actually engage in mutually beneficial trade? Or that competitors don't actually compete? What is your point?
Your sense of entitlement leads to post hoc rationalization.
It feels as if you've stopped engaging in arguments on particular points a long time ago.
I still don't know where we disagree nor understand your position clearly, if you have one.
What "sense of entitlement"? If you mean my position as a consumer: like all participants on the market I am both a consumer for some things, and a producer for others, depending on the context.
A pure producer would starve to death. A pure consumer would run out of resources (also starve). There is no "entitlement", and even if there were, in someone's head, it would go unsatisfied unless there was also mutual coincidence of wants that happened to fit under the context of the entitlement (making it kind of meaningless).
You say you're both a producer and a consumer yet in your line of arguments so far you've taken the consumer side only (that's "you") whereas the producers that's "them".
And your economic world view favors the consumer. The producers, osteno, compete for the money of the consumer. I say we're more in a producer-favored world where consumers compete for the products and services of the producers.
A pure consumer as I believe you are, will, this is correct, eventually run out of resources i.e. money. However this could be far off in the future depending on the size of your inheritance or whatever. Long enough to create a false sense of security.
The reason you're here is to seek some assurance that the good consumer times will continue, ideally forever. You came here to receive confirmation of your preconceived notiones. Like a permant free lunch through Bitcoin growth or technological progress. However this is not the case.
I build software and sell it to consumers. This is not a hypothetical or the preamble to a thought experiment; this is a description of my economic reality.
With the money I make (either as USD or converted to Bitcoin - or better yet, paid in Bitcoin by the customer), I do some saving and some consumption. As my goal is to hold on to as much value as possible (while either saving or "waiting to consume"), I prefer to store my value in Bitcoin because it doesn't hold the _guaranteed_ counter-party risk of fiat inflation by a malicious State.
Admittedly, it has price volatility risk, but for as long as I've been moving USD into Bitcoin the line has always generall trended 📈 and I personally believe (based on my understanding of money as an abstract category of technology) that this is the current market good which will become the next money. This, I have reason to believe that trend line will continue.
All that said, back to the beginning of where we started: the line only needs to do better than inflation in order to make it smarter to get onto a Bitcoin standard for daily purchases than USD (see the 3 cases example I gave above, which you didn't disagree with the math on, just on which you think to be most likely to happen).
See there, if your economic theory about producers competing in some sort of price race to the bottom were true, you wouldn't have any money left to stack sats.
The line only needs to do better than inflation, that's true, but does it. Inflation is guaranteed, it's one of the measures central banks use to regulate the amount of currency in circulation. Anything else depends on the misery and dreams of some naive people.
I never said race to "the bottom", that would be silly. It's a race to a (constantly shifting) equilibrium (price) between producer and consumers that changes as the interest, needs and population of the consumers change; and the capabilities, needs and population of the producers change.
"Inflation is guaranteed" in fiat with central banks. But now you're beginning to argue my point...
