Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money

Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money is Nash’s lecture arguing that money should hold a stable value over the long run, and that such an “ideal money” can be approached asymptotically by tying issuance to an objective price index instead of leaving it to central-bank discretion.

What the Lecture Argues

Nash starts from the observation that a currency’s usefulness as a store of value and unit of account depends on the stability of what it will buy over time, and that discretionary monetary management has historically failed to deliver that stability. His constructive proposal is an “ideal money” whose value is anchored to a broad, objectively measurable basket — he gestures at an industrial consumption price index — so that the standard is not a policy choice renegotiated by each administration but a defined target. Because a perfectly ideal money may be unattainable in practice, he frames the goal as one approached asymptotically: institutions can get closer to it by constraining issuance to the index rather than to political convenience. The argument is technocratic and design-oriented, reaching a hard-money-adjacent conclusion without invoking gold, praxeology, or the business cycle.

Why It Matters in This Wiki

This lecture is the wiki’s evidence that the case against discretionary fiat inflation is not the Austrians’ alone. It anchors the non-Austrian side of Ideal Money and reads alongside the hard money lineage: where the Austrians argue from calculation and the business cycle, Nash argues from index design — but both treat inflationary discretion as a defect to engineer out rather than a tool to wield.

See Also

• John Nash - the author
• Ideal Money - the concept node this lecture anchors from the non-Austrian side