“We don’t need bitcoin in New Zealand!”
How wrong you can be.
Saifedean Ammous is vocal on many channels (podcasts, his books, his other writings) about how in the fiat world you have to “earn your money twice”. His point is that because fiat loses purchasing power constantly you need to not only earn your money at work, but you need to also put in work just to mountain purchasing power. This often involves researching stocks, or other financial gambles.
This is a heavy burden and people are not always well-equipped to carry it. This causes substantial stress that affects work, home life, and general well-being.
Recent research by mercer gives us a way to quantify the financial value of this burden. In an article by Brianna Mcilraith, Angela Meyer, workforce specialist at Mercer is quoted as saying:
“Research shows that 13 hours a month of productive time was being lost to people stressing about financial worries. Thirteen hours a month equates to around four weeks' worth of lost productive time a year spent worrying about finances.”
We can combine this information with two data points: the count of businesses in New Zealand, and the annual GDP (production measure) for New Zealand. These are available from Statistics New Zealand.
There are 592,704 enterprises in New Zealand as of 2022 (Source) and the annual production measure of GDP for the year ended March 2022 was $251 billion (Source).
We can assume businesses operate on average 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, or 2,080 hours. This means that in New Zealand in 2022 businesses on average generated $120.6 million GDP per hour.
The quote above implies that we lost 13 hours a month from these businesses to employees (and owners?) being stressed about needing to be on the fiat treadmill. This totals about 156 hours a year.
Multiplied by the above estimate of GDP per hour I calculate that this financial worry cost New Zealand $18.8 billion in 2022 - about 7.5 percent of GDP.
Bitcoin fixes this because, as has been discussed elsewhere, saving in bitcoin alleviates the need to run faster and faster on the fiat treadmill. What need is there to research stocks, and engage in other financial gambling when on a long enough time horizon, bitcoin is going up forever?