No, there's more to it than that. The point is that culture smuggles lethal nonsense into our skulls. There's mechanism and history in that view. Hanging children because, hey, it's the law. Clearly, "insensitivity to inflation" does not encompass that; and it was put in front of you, as part of what this is about. Overwrought, you think? Well, I don't think so. I think several thousand Canadians were condemned to death when Chrystia Freeland dumped $30 billion dollars - severely needed elsewhere - into mortgage relief - which indexing would have massively bettered, for free - as I explained in an email, to which as expected there was no reply. There's sound actuarial knowledge behind the estimate; roughly speaking, $5,000,000 government dollars = 1 life.
Would you agree that wisdom is being governed by understanding the systems we are part of, and the systems which are parts of us? Governed by awareness of the real causes of our experience, and the real effects of our actions - and inactions? If you have a better definition, I'm happy to listen.
Can you imagine feeling responsible for thousands of deaths you failed to prevent? Am I overwrought to speak like that? Is it preposterous to suggest that financially illiterate professors and cabinet ministers can cause kilodeaths without ever noticing? Can you contemplate the possibility that culture has narcotized you (and other "normal" people) and made you underwrought? That your image of normalcy (for which you are not to blame; just history happening) is tragically toxic?
Perhaps I should mention that my worldview took a swerve when I was 7, and was swarmed by deliberately maimed beggar children at a tram stop in Calcutta. In your terms, I guess I've been overwrought ever since; I certainly stopped trusting adults, which changes the trajectory.
I agree with the suggestion for use of plainer language. Make the case for the astonishing significance within the text, but be as plain as possible in the terminology, else I fear you’ll lose the vast majority of your potential future audience.
I consider myself fairly erudite, and a connoisseur of etymology, and yet the phrase “effective chrono-lucropia” is very nearly opaque to me. I still don’t understand what the ‘effective’ part is meant to signify, and my best guess at dissecting “chrono-lucropia” is: chrono=time, lucre=wealth or money, opia=seeing. If anything, the concept under discussion would seem to be ineffective time-moneyseeing as far as I can tell? In that almost everyone is naively terrible (not effective) at seeing money through time?
I included the above, not seeking explanation, but rather attempting to demonstrate how illusion of transparency and surprising inferential distances play out for a reader new to the topic. I would imagine other potential readers may have different confusions. These are meant to be supporting evidence in favor of “plain-language terminology should be preferred”.
I appreciate your grace and tact, and accept the diagnosis
The "effective" thing is about culture sneaking nonsense in under the radar: perception generated by propositions we don't believe. Hang children, because it's the law. Use a shrinking ruler because it's normal.
CL is trusting money amounts as though they measured value over timespans where they usually don't. The tricky part is that propositions which seem obvious in retrospect can seem ridiculous before the jolt. E.g., a ruler that shrinks by a factor of six is... utter nonsense. But you can't see the badness of the shrinking ruler without seeing the falsity of whole provinces of reputation. Outcome uncertain; epiphany or proof dismissal? Sometimes a 1% communication rate is a good outcome.
Andrew Benning was hanged for stealing... a spoon.
Is this real? I couldn't find any info on it other than a jstor article behind a paywall, which seems to just briefly mention it? I couldn't drill down to see if there was a better source
link added (https://time.com/archive/6829779/national-affairs-capital-punishment-a-fading-practice/)
1626: Sir Henry Spelman
Exactly 400 years ago, in 1626, Sir Henry Spelman published the first part of his Glossarium Archaiologicum - a dictionary of the mongrel usages which had evolved in the British Isles in preceding centuries. It was in Latin, and has never been translated - but a striking sentence was, in 1769, by William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:
In the time of King Athelstan, 12 pence would buy you a sturdy ox. The law from that time being still on the books in 1801, 13-year-old Andrew Benning was hanged for stealing... a spoon. The 12-penny threshold for death was finally repealed in 1827 - having been in force through an era in which the value of money dropped by a factor of about 200.
To abstract a concept from this dismaying story, the bug we see in operation here may be termed [effective chrono-lucropia (ECL): the generation of false perceptions through the operation of concepts formed in a condition of naivety about the instability of the value of money]. A perceptual disorder which occurs because inherited concepts - themselves badged as reliable - are imbued with the delusion that money units are the proper measure of wealth - a proposition which becomes gravely false over extended time periods. By the nature of human cognition, awareness of the actual instability of money's value does not inhibit the delusion from operating subliminally as a feature of trusted concepts (such as laws, or financial instruments). Eradicating it requires a protracted conscious program of schemal repair: assimilation of the contradictor.
1691: Sir William Petty
(some biography, too rich to pass on): An intriguing low-born but studious character, Petty's life took a turn for the better at 14, when he broke his leg. He had been cabin boy on a merchantman, but the crew dumped him on a French shore to shift for himself. He found some Jesuits, who were so impressed with his Latin that they admitted him to their college. He supported himself by teaching navigation and English, and was soon reading Vesalius with Hobbes in Paris, and then in London becoming a member of the Invisible College which morphed into the Royal Society. Professor of Medicine at Oxford, surveyor in Ireland, and "the most rational man" that Samuel Pepys ever heard speak.
1707: Bishop Fleetwood
At Oxford, rules written in 1440 were still in force & deprived students of fellowships if their income was more than 5 pounds per year; one of them begged for help from Bishop Fleetwood, a known expert on historical prices. He anonymously published Chronicon Preciosum - a 220-page book full of tables with quaint descriptions of fat geese and sheep shorn or unshorn, tracing the value of money. He concluded that it had gone down by a factor of about 6 - and Oxford changed the rule.
1738: William Douglass
A Scottish doctor who had emigrated to Boston, Douglass was an avid participant in the pamphlet culture of the era, with two notable pamphlets about paper currencies, a novelty and hot topic at the time. His remark identifying what I call clawback is the first we have which identifies it as real principal:
He is cited twice in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations - unfortunately not for this.
1780: Massachusetts issues indexed notes
During the American Revolution, the legislators of Massachusetts were concerned about a looming injustice to their soldiers: their pay was in the form of promissory notes, to be redeemable when peace came; but wars cause inflation, and pay specified in money would likely be worth much less by the time it could be redeemed. So notes were issued with an index actually inscribed on them:
1822: Joseph Lowe proposes a national index to establish a unit of wealth
It took Lowe just 15 straightforward pages to explain his Plan for lessening the Injury arising from the Fluctuation of Prices, in a 30-page chapter entitled The Value of Money, in a 524-page book entitled The Present State of England in Regard to Agriculture, Trade and Finance: With a Comparison of the Prospects of England and France.
The section identifies the goal of tracking money's value
and the method: a price index. It ended with words that read strangely two centuries later:
Lowe died nine years later, unheralded and impoverished, partly supported by James Mill, who had been a schoolmate in Scotland and remained a lifelong friend. A strange sidelight on this is the role of John Stuart Mill - who at age 14 in 1821 spent several months in Europe, including a long stay with Lowe - who was in France finishing his book. Nonetheless, when Mill got engaged in political economy, he sided with the camp of Lord Overstone, who objected to the proposal of indexing based it seems (to state an impression based on brief descriptions) on a simple misconception: that the idea was to fix the value of money, rather than simply to measure it.
pending:
Scrope
G.R. Porter
Jevons
Bagehot
Francis Amasa Walker, 1878, 1883; Alfred Marshall, 1879, 1887; Simon Newcomb, 1885.
Irving Fisher
Modigliani
NMD
AMIRS
Bruce Webb
Friedman
Fed staffers
Shiller, Schultze
-----------------------------
1981-82
Stenason
Kesselman, Helliwell, Clark
Vancity, Peter Cook
Bossons, Anderson, Riddell & Critchley