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Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

Not surprised to see the good old liberal outlets like WaPo changing the narratives and trying to tell us how inflation is all normal and to suck it up. Guess what serfs, Argentina has it way worse.

I guess after 5yrs of covering Trump and spreading wokeness, WaPo forgot what struggle really feels like for people here.

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Please don't take HN threads into political or ideological flamewar. It makes discussion repetitive, tedious, and nasty. We're trying to avoid that here.

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this is nothing, a lot of comments I've seen are already flamewar and even racist, nasty generalizations, suddenly everyone is an expert in hispanics countries as if they would be all the same or as if they would share the same currency or economical situation, a lot of ignorance.

Yes, there are other bad comments as well.

Maybe this would help: you can't expect moderation to address all the bad comments in proportion to their relative badness. That level of consistency is impossible, not because we don't care (we do!) or apply the guidelines inconsistently (we try as hard as we can to be even-handed), but for the much simpler reason that we don't read everything that gets posted. There's far too much quantity here for us to see it all.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

The gist of the comment was - much of the mainstream media has been wrong about inflation playing it down initially with all the transitory rhetoric. But now instead of saying they were wrong, they instead are trying to preach inflation as new normal and making baseline comparison with hyperinflationary countries.

WaPo always seems to support leftist political forces in South America, even where there is no parallel domestic narrative in the US. For example, they supported Evo Morales in his bid for a fourth consecutive presidential term despite the Bolivian constitution limiting presidents to two consecutive terms.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/26/bolivia-d...

It's been a while, but I vaguely remember an economics professor of mine stating that it's not inflation which is the core issue for people, firms, and economies, but an increased price volatility which positively correlates with high inflationary rates. The take-away was that when people can reasonably predict what inflation might be MoM, or QoQ, businesses and individuals are able to price transactions and required rates of return accordingly.

So yeah, by that understanding, inflation can be normal in a healthy functioning economy. It is uncontrolled/unpredictable inflation that's problematic.*

*Grain of salt, I'm not an economist and it's been some time since I've seriously studied the subject matter. Commenting to join the discussion

Wages are “sticky”, and do not adjust as fast as prices for goods and services, and certainly don’t change much MoM/QoQ outside maybe a few niche industries.

That’s the problem with high or relatively high inflation.

The professor is correct, though, that consistent and predictable inflation is at least less bad than inconsistent and unpredictable inflation.

Good points. I think the point he was trying to make (or the one I recall, at least) was that higher inflation tends to result in more volatile price moments which damages economies more severely than that of cost increases outpacing earning power.

I do agree with you though, wages being generally sticky would make any moderate inflation, even predictable, a considerable negative on the economic fortunes of most individuals.

There are huge inefficiencies with high inflation, even if predictable.

For instance, if you know your dollar is worth considerably less every day, you're more likely to go spend it on things that you may not need as long as they retain value. Barter is inefficient as well. You'll be willing to wait on line as soon as you receive your paycheck. You'll fill up your tank more often. There's expenses with adjusting people's pay to account for inflation and keeping track of what a "reasonable" price should be or whether you're getting fleeced. I agree uncertainty is a huge problem, but even high anticipated inflation is a huge pain in the ass.

That's not even considering the capital controls that are often put into place that prevent you from holding stable assets. So you're stuck holding this depreciating asset or you're bending over backwards to buy as much stuff as possible to retain you wealth.

That’s the argument - higher inflation is correlated with lower levels of price stability and hampers one’s ability to predict. Other commenters have also (rightly, I think) pointed out the ‘stickiness’ of wages in the short term being an additional reason to take seriously even moderately higher levels of inflation

No, prices and wages are stickier and often don't move as fast as you think, even with digital communication. Menu and shoeleather costs remain serious harms of inflation even if you have some system where it is predictable. Anyway, it is not, look at how many macro people say for months "inflation is transitory" but no.

I’d agree on the wages side! Good point. Price stickiness seems dependent on the nature of the goods and contracts, I would expect at least

I phrase that poorly, the problem is exactly that price stickiness is not uniform and the disparity is a big driver of inflation.

The really infuriating part is that these same damn people were just screeching insistently about how "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" is unrealistic. The kind of savvy it takes to not slip backwards in a high inflation environment is exactly the same kind of savvy it takes to pull one's self up by your bootstraps.

Regardless of how realistically achievable you think the latter is does not change the fact that the cognitive dissonance is apparent.

This will come back to haunt them. People don't like economic uncertainty but they can't do much about it so they just deal. People really, really don't like spineless shysters that change their opinions to whatever is convenient that minute and they can marginalize said shysters in response.

Where is the captain of this ship? Why isn't there someone with a longer than next week timeline saying "hey let's stop lighting our credibility on fire like this"?

My take away from the article wasnt that inflation is normal and suck it up, it was: inflation sucks we cant allow it to keep increasing

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