Note that this is within the very small subsection of the population that even has any interest in how central banking works.
Can we all agree at least that for something so fundamental as our central money supply, we do a pretty horrific job on making it clear and understandable - much less interesting?
Side note: Why the fuck would full employment be a goal of a central bank. Talk about paperclip optimization.
Full employment should be the goal of the central bank, because that is really what they are discounting when they create money - the available labour hours of the population, manifested in the government's capacity to tax.
That is, ultimately, the main asset on the balance sheet of the nation and arguably the underlying denomination. Humans trade by exchanging labour hours with each other.
> ...because that is really what they are discounting when they create money - the available labour hours
Can you explain how demanding full employment follows from that? I'm not seeing it.
It seems that by this logic, advances in fusion energy and AI which obliviate the need for 99.9% of humans to work at all would be seen as bad. I'd call that perverse.
I do agree we could do a better job, but it's just not getting easier with the direction politics is moving. A lot of people also work (mentally) very hard to make anything economics related fit their preferred point of view of how the world works, and the more down to earth reality explanations of "how things works" are often too mundane to support a lot of these views.
And some things are just complicated and not that easy to understand. I often think that taking macro and/or micro 101 courses without getting to the 201 level does more damage than they're worth in understanding the field. They make people think they can confidently understand more than they should.
I hope things can get better in terms of general understanding of economics, otherwise it makes solving problems more difficult long-term.
> Why the fuck would full employment be a goal of a central bank. Talk about paperclip optimization.
Agree it does not seem (at first glance) to be a reasonable policy goal for a bank, and further this mandate does not hold for all central banks. <edit> For example, the ECB does not have this mandate </edit>
However, some economists believe there is a relationship between % of population "employed" and inflation.
Employed in quotes because, well, see the other HN post today
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32738538
about the costs of caring for parents as an example of actions which create direct,large, partially measurable social benefit but don't count as 'employment'.
From Matt Taibbi's interview with Christopher Leonard [1]:
"But the 1% of Americans who own 40% of all the assets just get tremendous gains before that first job is created for the middle class. And so these policies dramatically widen wealth inequality, they’ve just wrenched this gap between the very rich and everybody else, which is the defining economic dysfunction of our time.
To get back to your point, nobody thinks about that when they think about the Fed, because the Fed presents everything it does in this really clinical, hyper-technical language that obscures what they’re doing and obscures this facet of it. Part of that is from how dysfunctional the media conversation around this stuff is, and that’s what I was trying to get across in that scene with the Glenn Beck monologue."
Note that this is within the very small subsection of the population that even has any interest in how central banking works.
Can we all agree at least that for something so fundamental as our central money supply, we do a pretty horrific job on making it clear and understandable - much less interesting?
Side note: Why the fuck would full employment be a goal of a central bank. Talk about paperclip optimization.