In line with this, I sometimes feel that the best way to fix a problem is to make it worse, to the point where it's intolerable.
Kind of like a pot-hole in the street out in front of your house. If it's a small pot-hole it might go unnoticed and unfixed, but if you go take a pick-axe to it to the point where cars start bottoming out, it's more likely to get fixed.
Almost like the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
I recently witnessed someone take this strategy to task on Reddit where the Ubiquiti subreddit had become inundated with low-quality picture posts.
Ever seen /r/ProgrammerHumor? It used to be great, until it started being featured on /r/all, and the low quality “bad UI” and “I can’t find my semicolon” posts started flowing in and being upvoted. Now it’s awful. There was one great post yesterday and it was glorious (https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/g4cr9m/my_...) but it’s back to usual now :(
Wow, that Ubiquity thread is glorious. It's a perfect mix of sarcasm and reflection.
I think the problem stems from a shift in how users "reddit". The upvote button is now analogous to a "like" button. It doesn't encourage users to take context (eg subreddit) of the post into account. Reddit encourages its popular and hot feeds - a meta assortment that strips posts of some of their context.
So, everything is truly reduced to just "good or bad".
As long as the leaders don't get blamed for devaluing the currency, there will still be an incentive to do it. Most people's political careers aren't that long.
You see this happen with CEOs today. If it looks like the company is going to collapse, just change jobs. When things fall apart a couple of years later, you can talk about how things were great while you were still in charge. Few will have enough insider knowledge to know you're lying.
Eventually. The article even mentions this, that a strategy may be a long term loser (i.e., risky loans at super low interest rates), but if in the short term it chokes out competition, it means you not only win in the short term, but make it so there's no competition in the long term when those bad behaviors 'come due'.
I don't believe any government was replaced because of bad coinage.
I think an important premise is that both the good coins and the bad coins are accepted as legal tender.
In that case, people know the good coins are worth intrinsically more, so people hoard them, preferring to spend away the bad coins, thereby increasing the circulation of the bad coin.
Of course there is the other aspect, which you mentioned, that these bad coins may no longer be legal tender, perhaps because the government that minted them collapsed. That's quite a different problem.
The truly wretched coins, and the governments that issue them, tend to exit circulation, too.
Perhaps Gresham's Law has some relationship to regression toward the mean =>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean