Looked at properly, inflation is the money getting less valuable, which shows up as rising prices. It’s opposite, deflation, is the money getting more valuable, leading to falling prices. Something that used to be very obvious, but has perhaps become less so, is that inflation sucks if you have money, whereas deflation sucks if you owe money.

TL;DR version: You can reverse inflation, as long as you’re willing to grind into the dust everyone who owes money, making them work more and more, to earn less and less, to pay back debts that get higher and higher (because the dollars it takes to pay them off are getting more and more valuable). Society has done that many times in the past. Sometimes it works out okay; other times it produces terrible impoverishment of ordinary people, leading to social unrest.

The rest of this post looks at this in a bit more detail. I was prompted to write it because recent polls have suggested that young folks—Millennials and Gen-Z—continue to be unhappy about inflation, even though the inflation rate is down a lot. When you talk to these people, it turns out what they’re unhappy about is not inflation but rather prices: They remember what things used to cost, and they cost more than that now, which they find annoying, even if the price has largely quit going up. (And of course prices change all the time, so some prices are always going up.)

Older folk—people who lived through the inflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s—have a different perspective on that, partially because their parents and grandparents lived through the Great Depression.

Basically, they remember what happens when you try to push prices back down to what they were before a period of inflation.

There’s a sense among the “hard money” types that inflation is impossible when the currency is backed by gold, but this is false. There is often inflation under a gold standard, but it (often) ended up getting undone, meaning that looked at from the perspective of a century, it looks like there wasn’t much inflation. And indeed there wasn’t much inflation on average.

This was especially true during the heyday of the gold standard, roughly the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1816 the pound sterling was defined as 113 grains of pure gold, where it remained until 1931. (Before that it was defined as 5,400 grains of silver—about a pound of silver, hence the name a pound sterling—but in terms of value it was a similar amount of purchasing power.)

A big part of the reason that people remember the gold standard fondly is that it worked pretty well, especially for people who had money. With stable prices, it was even possible to value land not at a market price (because who would sell land?) but at the income that land would produce—an income that would remain stable for generations at a time.

However, as I said, there was still inflation. Inflation came from many sources, but two important ones: new discoveries of gold, and war. When the quantity of gold increased—as during the 1840s and 1850s when large amounts of gold were found in California and Australia—the rising quantity of gold (i.e. money) would produce inflation just like rising quantities of money produce inflation now. The other common source of inflation was war, because paying for a big war without inflation is almost impossible.

For example, there was a big inflation in the U.S. during the Civil War, when the Federal Government printed “greenbacks” to pay for the costs of the war. (The Confederates did the same, but as they lost the war their Confederate dollars ended up being worthless.) Dollars, on the other hand, were gradually revalued, with greenbacks gradually being withdrawn from circulation producing a grinding deflation that went on for more than a decade.

Like always in economics, there were other things going on at the same time. Industrialization was going on at the same time, meaning that things produced by industrial firms were getting cheaper, leading to deflation, while gold discoveries were leading to an increase in the supply of gold (= money) leading to inflation.

On balance there was deflation, meaning that people who had money were getting richer, while people who owed money were getting poorer. As long as that happens only in a small way, and as long as people sense that it’s “fair”—that nobody is cheating the system to take unfair advantage—it’s kinda nice. If you don’t owe money (and most people didn’t, because there were no credit cards, and virtually no student loans), then whatever meager savings you had got gradually more and more valuable. At the same time, wages tended not to drop (for the same reasons that wages tend not to drop these days as well), so somebody with a job ended up gradually better and better off.

Of course rich people got vastly more well off, so they loved it. The main people who hated it were farmers and small businessmen, because they generally needed to borrow money (to buy seed or raw materials), so they were constantly screwed by the fact that the money they had to pay back was worth more than the money they’d borrowed.

I started this post meaning to suggest that “kids these days” just didn’t understand the dynamics of deflation, But upon reflection, I think there’s another layer to it. Kids these days (as opposed to the Gen-X kids who trusted their parents and guidance counselors, and borrowed as much money as necessary to go to the best school they could get into) don’t owe so much money, so they’re not in the position of being utterly screwed by deflation. Many of them may be in the position of ordinary people in the great post-Civil War deflation, who ended up doing pretty well, with their wages or salary rising in value, while industrialization and globalization helps hold down prices.

The fact is, though, that deflation can absolutely destroy a generation of ordinary people. After WW I, for example, Britain, having funded the war through inflation, decided to return to the pre-war gold parity, which required a grinding deflation that lasted until 1929—great for people with money, bad for people without, devastating for people with debts. France decided instead to revalue, punishing people with money, coddling people with debts (which has its own downsides in terms of social disruption). German, the loser of WW I, saddled with debts denominated in gold, made a valiant effort to pay them back, giving up and starting WW II only when that proved utterly impossible.

The lesson of that period, understood by pretty much everybody from the 1940s through the 2000s, was that the best thing to do after a period of inflation was to bring the inflation rate back down near zero, but accept the price increases that had already happened. (If the inflation rate is brought back down to, let’s say, 2%, prices will be generally stable. The slight remaining inflation will be barely noticeable, hidden amidst the ordinary rise and fall of prices due to changes in fashions, technological improvements in the means of production, depletion of resources, etc.)

It’s very interesting to see young folks returning to the instincts of the 18th and 19th century, thinking the prices should go back to what they were before the inflation. It goes very much against what I learned as an economics student, but who can say that what I learned was right and that their instincts are wrong?

Seems like a situation of “time will tell.”

Sources:

Inflation and a declining standard of living are two different things. Inflation is when the money becomes less valuable, resulting in rising prices. But when a whole society becomes poorer, it can look like inflation, because prices may rise, but it’s not the same thing.

“Despite the Bank of England’s efforts so far, there is accumulating evidence that inflation will be harder to stamp out than previously expected. In the past week, data has shown that pay in Britain has increased faster than expected, inflation in the services sector has accelerated and food inflation is still near the highest level in more than 45 years.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/business/economy/bank-of-england-interest-rates-inflation.html?smid=url-share

To my eye, viewed from over here, that looks less like inflation and more like a falling standard of living—largely caused by Brexit. If you block immigration, of course wages are going to go up. If transporting stuff across the border takes longer and is more expensive and difficult, of course food is going to be more expensive. That’s not inflation. That’s reducing everyone’s standard of living by raising actual costs.

It looks similar, because the symptom tends to be rising prices, but they’re two different things. If the problem is inflation, then raising interest rates (by reducing the rate of growth in the money supply) will probably help. But if the problem is a declining standard of living, then it’s probably not going to help. Higher interest rates will just be yet another expense (like border controls) that flow through to making everything cost more.

In his dedication to educating the public about the zero bound, Paul Krugman has asked several times (most recently today):

. . . what calculation leads to the notion that a target of “close to but less than 2%” is appropriate, as opposed to, say, 3 or 4 percent.

I think I know the answer: An inflation rate of 2% is small enough that price changes due to inflation are unnoticeable in the noise of other price changes, even over periods of a few years.

Among the costs of inflation are those that come from uncertainty about not only future prices, but also about current prices.

When inflation is under 2%, the price of a cookie at the local bakery might remain unchanged for years at a time. I can stop by the bakery with exact change, and be reasonably confident that I’ll be able to buy one. The costs of flour, sugar, and chocolate will vary over time—but some will rise and others will fall, and the bakery will be able to hold the line on the price of a cookie. This is a convenience for me. It’s also good for the bakery, because people who are confident that they have enough cash in their pocket to buy a cookie are more likely to stop and get one. If they had to make a stop at the ATM first to get cash—or worse, be sent away to visit an ATM mid-transaction—they might not.

At some point—and I assert that the point turns out to be slightly above a 2% inflation rate—stores find that it’s necessary to raise prices at least annually, just to keep up with inflation.

Even if the inflation rate is known and not a surprise, there’s still the threshold effect of one day the price is $x and the next day it’s $x+3%.

When the inflation rate is below 2%, prices can remain stable for years at a time—long enough for people to learn what they are. And that knowledge can make their day run more smoothly. They can be sure they have appropriate cash on hand. They don’t need to check prices ahead of each transaction.

When the inflation rate is above 3%, stores might need to raise prices twice a year, to avoid falling behind. When the prices of a hundred things are all being raised more often than annually, it becomes impossible to learn what prices are, and impossible for that knowledge to make the day run more smoothly. All of a sudden, you have to pay attention to price changes, because they’re happening all the time. In advance of every transaction, you need to allow for the fact that maybe today is the day that prices went up several percent.

Some prices change all the time anyway, especially where the item being sold is a single commodity, such as milk or gasoline. For exactly this reason, prices of those items are often prominently displayed—to reduce the transaction effort of the consumer who wants to know what the price is going to be.

I think that’s why 2% inflation is different from 3–4% inflation: Because price changes due to inflation begin to stand out from changes in relative prices, adding another whole layer of informational costs on every purchaser, on every purchase.

Some years back, I read a financial newsletter article that offered a technique for predicting inflation rates six months in advance. It had charts that compared its predictions to actual results, that showed that it was pretty accurate. Not perfect, but more than close enough to be useful for short-term planning.

Then I read the details. Their “technique” was this:

  1. Take the actual inflation for the previous six months.
  2. Double it.

As I say, their technique was pretty accurate. Partially it was accurate because the economy rarely turns on a dime—recent trends tend to continue. But it was more accurate than that, because half the months they were “predicting” had already happened! Even if the next six months were rather different from the previous six months, that would only produce so much change in the full year results.

I think that was the point when I decided to let my subscription to that newsletter expire.