by ryandv | 2025-08-08 02:43:46+00:00
This is absurd. An opinion column in the NYT does not constitute an authoritative reference on the matter.

Try some Milton Friedman [0] on for size:

Now the first step towards understanding the cause of inflation is to recognize that it is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It's always and everywhere a result of too much money - of a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. [...] inflation in the United States is made in Washington and nowhere else. [...] We have evidence for the United States for over a hundred years; for Great Britain, for two hundred years; for Sweden, for two hundred years. There has never in history been an inflation that was not accompanied by an extremely rapid increase in the quantity of money. There has never in history been an extremely rapid increase in the quantity of money without an inflation.

Or otherwise, "inflation is a printing press phenomenon." There is very clearly a falsifiable hypothesis here: inflation increases if and only if the monetary supply increases. The induction is based on decades of empirical data, and Friedman presents a series of charts to illustrate the correlation. This, to me, sounds at least like an attempt at science - falsifiable hypothesis verified against empirical data, and clearly predicts that inflation will result if the monetary supply is increased.

We may quibble over the specifics and the numbers, just as one may quibble over what the exact percentage probability of rain is on any given day. Given that both economics and weather are chaotic systems, it is inherently difficult to make precise predictions in either domain. That does not mean that we cannot observe basic patterns and causal relationships.

More broadly, I dislike this form of modern journalism because I would rather read the source directly instead of having someone pre-digest the ideas for me which are thereafter coprophagically consumed. People read the headline, which is an oversimplification of an article which itself already oversimplifies, misrepresents, or misunderstands the source material, and all they repeat are the clickbait titles without bothering to look into the actual details.

I in fact looked up the book referenced in the opinion piece, and the reality of what the book asserts is far more nuanced than what the article quotes, to the point where I consider it a deliberate misrepresentation of the material:

[...] we have no compelling theory of inflation dynamics that would allow us to understand the Phillips correlation — or the historical shifts in the Phillips curve — on anything like a deep level,” he writes.

What is surreptitiously omitted is the next sentence:

What this means is that we also have no good way to explain the two most important changes to the inflation process that have taken place over the past fifty years; namely, the near-constancy of inflation’s stochastic trend after the mid-1990s, and the reduced sensitivity of price inflation to real activity.

... which is a far more technical claim than the article would have you believe. This sleight of hand is repeated again:

The fact that “we simply don’t know what caused the U.S. economy to transition into an inflation regime” like the one of 2021 and 2022 [...]

...which leaves out an important qualification from the full sentence:

What all this implies is that we simply don’t know what caused the US economy to transition into an inflation regime where inflation became a mean-reverting process and the price Phillips curve flattened.

This kind of mis-representative op-ed journalism is exactly what brings mainstream media and the progressive cathedral into disrepute. Rudd is not even talking about 2021 and 2022 in the preceding passages, he is talking about inflation expectations in the late 20th century and flattening of the Philips curve in the 90s.

This is not a collage, where you cut out passages from magazines and books and paste them together onto bristol board for artistic effect or political messaging. As a technical discipline the surrounding context and the integrity of the entire idea, as a whole, are important too.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_nGEj8wIP0