if savers have a fixed % of the monetary supply, can this cause a transfer of wealth from producers if productivity increases over time? ie in the absence of a currency one might hold commodities say coal or wheat (to keep it simple) if productivity doubled say over 20 years the value of the savings would reduce in real terms, but by holding gold, savers are guaranteed an increase in buying power which in the first instance looks unearned? what am I missing?
First, savers would not except by law have a fixed percentage of the money supply. The amount of savings and the form of savings as you suggest is constantly changing. On to time, the value of anything over 20 years is bound to change. Value is determine by consumers who are quite fickle. For example, gold has not gotten back to its 1981 price if you adjust for inflation. Keep in mind that productivity has not caught up with gold and silver, but has with diamonds and rubies. Eventually people will figure out how to manufacture gold and or silver from something else in a manner that is cheaper than mining it. So even the value of gold assuming consumers prefereces are locked in stone can go down dramatically. But this is all good. People will change the form of their savings to accomodate their situation. People may using land or land contracts as a medium of exchange in the future or may use some form of electronic money. And savers will over time adjust their savings to the preferences of consumers.
Do you mean investing or hoarding with saving?
They get an increase in buying power but they don’t actually earn anything by hoarding gold. What happens is just that things have become cheaper to make so they are cheaper because you aren’t paying for as many hours of work or kilos of raw material or whatever as you did before when you bought the product.
If people start hoarding wheat or coal it can easily be offset by production as mentioned in the previous post.
Since the previous poster also went into distant futures where we have profected the fine craft of alchemy I can touch on that too 
In such a future energy is everything and everything is energy, convertible at will. So people will probably give fuck all about who own what when it comes to consumer goods and energy might be a likely currency.
I find the question confusing.
just saving under a gold standard setup ie the person isnt speculating and may or may not be earning any interest on the saved gold backed currency. Under a Fiat system your savings are devalued over time and the interest doesnt noramlly compensate for the inflation unless you put a $1000 away in 2000 to by a compter now, and if you save using any other “vehicle” you are implicitly speculating on future asset prices. but my question is, would a rigid gold standard create too much of a bias in the other direction, in that god forbid too many people became very fiscally conservative because they are guaranteed that their savings in gold will grow its puchasing power over time.
Maybe if I put it another way, lets say an Austrian gets to choose how a new currency based on an independent algorithm would work, would the quantity of currency be fixed at X units per individual in the economy, which sort of mimics how the gold supply rises over time or would the quantity be allowed to grow if the economy was growing or are there simply too many informal and formal ways of creating credit that the absolute quantity of currency in circulation is of secondary importance once its not being deliberately “gunned” by a central bank?
Austrians would never choose a new currency. They would say, “Hey guys, from now on everyone can do as they please, accepting or declining payment in any manner he wishes. If a voluntary contract is signed by both parties saying that payment will be in chewing gum, then chewing gum it is.”
If some private company would then start minting gold, silver, copper, or chewing gum coins, and people thought them useful, then fine.
In reality if you look at wages being paid for time and work invested, you are already using energy as currency. Time and work take energy, and you are trading that for good’s, such as gold. You are just transferring it from energy into coal and wheat to be traded.
To answer your question, no. Gold would not cause a longterm perma thrifty society, as keynesian’s believe. But TBH your mis-understanding the roll of savings, interest, and credit. Also we have no idea how fast capital accumulation and economic progression should occur. As humans we assume it’s suppose to be at a certain rate, and when it’s not we have this ridiculous notion to intervene to force it faster. However pretending to know whether or not the economy is moving too slowly, or too quickly is a fruitless exercise.
If society as a whole becomes thrifty for any lengthy period of time, it will also become more productive in the long run. Market factors will be put in place over time to encourage a move towards more spending. If people prefer future consumption to present, who are we to judge? And why should we want to restrict growth in future productivity over an arbitrary dogmatic blind faith that we must be spending as much as we can, at all times.
Many of your questions would be better understood with a more concrete knowledge of capital theory. In short, no. A rigid monetary supply in and of itself does not somehow create a perma thriftiness, and stagnated economy. It may be that people are more thrifty then they are today, but all that proves is that the we are currently holding the pendulum too far out of balance.
No offense to other posters here, but some advice to the OP. I wouldn’t spend too much time considering the comments of those posted above. Saying capital theory is complicated is a huge understatement. I have very little faith in most posters here to fully grasp it. One person on these forums I do however recommend is Esuric. You would gain much by reading his historical posts on anything regarding capital theory.
Other then that there are chapters in MES, and Desoto’s Money, Bank, Credit, and Econ cycles, that will assist your knowledge in this area. I’m not telling you to read the whole books, just to chapters that are relevant.
Topics you’d be concerned with is:
- Money
- Interest
- Capital Theory
Those are things you should read up on. Or take Bob Murphy’s class in Trade Cycles at the Mises Academy. I am not sure when they will do that class again. You can sign up and watch all the lectures, and get all the relevant reading material at a discount as well.
Which is not all the same thing as trading energy. Also I highly doubt the correlation between the complete amount of energy that goes into things and there price…
How is not the same thing as trading energy? Energy would be a currency just as we have now. The correlation would be the market would not allow you to charge less than the amount of the energy required to create said good. It would set a miminal standard of price. The price over it has no bearing on this, as that is identified by external means.
If 20% of the money supply gets locked into vaults and such, then the remaining 80% grows in value ipso facto; the hoarders are effectively lending to nonhoarders, a comparison made more apt when you remember that those who later return their gold to circulation gain a boost in purchasing power until the market can adapt to the influx.
Trading what the energy has been converted into is not the same as trading energy. It has been put to specialized use and is no longer interchangeable without destroying value. It is highly likely that a great deal of things often trade at prices below the subjective value of there production … often even below the cost of production but the market will instantly notice that problem and immediately halt production.
Energy has no specific advantage for being a currency. In fact it is probably really bad as a currency since there are no caps on production and consumption of it so it would be extremely volatile and not function very well as a conduit for price information to sort out the errors mentioned above.
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about it that way. I was viewing the energy as a product of work, and not as an endless source. I could see how it could be viewed as an endless source in the future, but not at this point in time.