Blockchain Books
The Price of Tomorrow
Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future
Jeff Booth's contrarian macro argument that technology is inherently deflationary and that fighting it with inflation is catastrophic.
Booth is a Canadian tech entrepreneur (Build Direct) who, after a long career watching software gut industry after industry, came to a simple and uncomfortable conclusion: technology is inherently deflationary, central banks fight that deflation with credit creation, and the resulting wedge between productivity and money supply is destroying the social contract. The book is the case for that view, and it remains one of the more provocative monetary essays of the last few years.
Who it's for
Readers who already grasp basic monetary mechanics and want a clear, well-argued case against the inflation-targeting consensus. Particularly resonant if you work in tech and have watched first-hand how relentlessly software pushes prices down inside your industry. The Bitcoin material is light and arrives late — this is a macro book first.
What it does well
The central thesis is bracingly clear: every year, technology lets us produce more with less, and that should mean prices fall and living standards rise. They don't, because policy is set on the assumption that falling prices are dangerous. Booth walks through the consequences — credit bubbles, wealth concentration, political polarisation, environmental over-extraction — in a way that makes the deflation-versus-inflation debate feel newly urgent rather than academic.
He is also unusual in writing as a builder rather than a theorist. The chapters drawing on his own company's experience navigating tech-driven price destruction give the argument a concreteness most macro books lack. And he writes plainly. The book is short, the sentences are short, and the structure is clean enough that you can hand it to a non-finance reader without apology.
Where it falls short
Some of the macro shortcuts wouldn't survive in a peer-reviewed setting. Booth treats AI's deflationary impact as more inevitable and more universal than it currently is, and he occasionally collapses distinct phenomena — productivity growth, asset price inflation, consumer price inflation — into a single story. Skeptical economists will find plenty to pick at.
The Bitcoin endorsement at the end can also feel grafted on rather than earned. Booth is clearly sympathetic, but the chapters connecting the deflation thesis to Bitcoin specifically are thinner than the rest of the book. Read it for the macro argument; treat the Bitcoin conclusion as a pointer, not a proof.