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 offering two distinct routes to it: an “ideal money” proper, obtained by linking issuance to “an appropriate index of the prices of internationally traded commodities” instead of leaving it to central-bank discretion, and a separate “asymptotically ideal” route that runs through central banks, via inflation targeting and competition among managed currencies.

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 specifies “an appropriate index of the prices of internationally traded commodities”, noting gold and silver as examples — so that the standard is not a policy choice renegotiated by each administration but a defined target. He judges that scheme sound but politically hard to reach. The asymptotic half of the title is a second, separate route, and it runs through central banks rather than around them: Nash reads the fashion for “inflation targeting” as a confession by officials that inflation can in fact be controlled, and argues that value stabilization against a domestic price index, followed by international comparison among managed currencies, lets the public press for better money over time. 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

Sources

• Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money - John F. Nash’s Ideal Money lectures: the industrial-price-index proposal for an ideal money, and the separate asymptotic route in which inflation targeting is read as a confession that inflation is controllable, with currency competition doing the rest