Pump more money into the economy and you get inflation. It’s a lesson as old as time. The Roman Emperors of the Third Century successively put less and less silver into their coins, slowly debasing the currency. The result? Everyone needed more coins, and so the value of each unit fell. It was the same in the famous case of Weimar Germany where bank notes carried astronomically high face denominations, but were worth no more than than the paper they were made of.

Is it the same with information? The internet, news media, social media, feeds, all churn out a torrent of information. In such circumstances it becomes increasingly hard to know the value of any one piece and many people just give up trying. All information, any information, becomes worthless and people fall back on bartering local knowledge and techniques. We didn’t have this idea first of course: authors such as James Gleick [1] and Nicholas Carr have more than touched upon it. [2] Think how so many people choose to believe the facts that suit them. That is a perversion of the brain.

It’s interesting to see this convergence between information science and economics. If facts act like money, then they too can be debased. People who throw out streams of data, designed to flood, overwhelm and mislead are the greatest inflationists of all. If they can do it with data they can do it with currencies too.

[1] James Gleick Information: A History A Theory A Flood

[2] NIcholas Carr The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains

#inflation #information science #currency #economics