Ask Lemmy

There are two types of inflation. Global that comes from increases in the money supply by countries that used to be by printing money but in modern times is done through lending. When a bank loans money it only needs to have a fraction of the loan amount as a hedge but otherwise the money is essentially created and there is now more money to go around. There is also a more local inflation effect that happens individually on items due to supply and demand. The thing about that effect is barring money supply increase its relative. People have to choose to put their money toward the particular thing even as the price increases for some reason. Like paper towels and toilet paper during a pandemic. So it is usually temporary but not always as sometimes things become more expensive to make. For example if soil degradation happens then food cannot be grown in as much abundance than before and prices go up. Since people have to eat they will forgo lesser necesities if necessary. Also for example in the past when we used to drill for oil it was near the surface and easily accessible. Using the energy of one barrel of oil would net you over 100 barrels of oil. Today the return is based on source but we have sources that return only single digit barrels per barrel. One reason saudi does so well is they have consistently had the higher returns on a per oil basis. Theirs have still gone down but comparatively maintained a good rate of return. This is also how come hardwood used to be relatively cheap but since it takes a long time to grow (approx a century) it is now very expensive and most people will use softwoods or some sort of alternative. So shrinking resources or more effort to get resources along with more people means higher relative value for things people need. Earth overshoot day is now in july and it was the early 1970's when we last used only the amount of renewable resources that the earth renewed in a year so we were break even back then and have to gut things more and more as times goes by https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/. Now technology can find us new options but if that was happening well enough we would still be using no more than what the earth can recover from each year. Its not completely technologies fault as we have seen an effect that when we get more we use more. So like you get led lights but then people have more lights which are on more often or we get some other technology that uses more power or such.