Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> We know inflation should start decreasing within a year or so, but you cannot predict how millions of people will react to suddenly not being able to afford stuff.

If people in aggregate are suddenly unable to "afford" things, then you're not talking about inflation. People (again, in aggregate) have more money (not wealth) than they did a few years ago, which is what "inflation" means. On average, it's a rescaling, nothing changes.

Now, individuals may be hurt or helped[1] by this aggregate rescaling. But it remains a rescaling, and if you try to interpret it the way you just did you're going to get your predictions wrong every single time.

[1] FWIW: if you hold a mortage or any other large non-inflation-indexed loan, you should be cheering for inflation to dilute your debt. Most US homeowners are coming out ahead. They don't explain this well on the news networks though.

View on HN

It’s not just rescaling, overall production is not constant and is dependent on interest rates/economic activity/etc. eg after COVID there was all kinds of weird price dynamics due to supply/demand mismatches.

Again, that's wrong. Inflation is by definition the scale-dependent part of price changes. You're right that prices can go up because of a reduction in supply too, but that's measures as part of numbers like GDP; which, importantly, are routinely expressed using inflation-adjusted numbers to avoid precisely the conflation you and the grandparent are making.

So, sure, if you want to rephrase and lament that people are unable to afford stuff because of the recent drop in supply (or increase in demand) for the products they want, that would be logically consistent. But it would be factually wrong, as in fact in aggregate[1] world GDP is doing pretty well right now.

[1] As above, specific products and markets are always moving. Something is always more expensive than it should be and there's always a glut in something else. People were complaining about eggs last week, IIRC.

Well, monetary changes maintain the mean purchase power. But people being able to buy necessities is more about median purchase power, or really the details of its distribution.

The mean purchase power has a very small impact on society.

And I say a third time: if you want to have a discussion about unfair distribution of monetary effects on specific populations, you need to have that discussion and not just shout "inflation!". Because while your point is true, it's specious. Changes are always happening (c.f. eggs, mentioned upthread). The question isn't whether things are changing, it's about what is changing and what to do about it.

Still "elevated inflation disrupts the purchase power of most of the population" is a perfectly real phenomenon. It's not an "specific population", unless you think "almost everyone" is "specific".

And yes, the disruption tends to pass after the inflation goes away. But none of that makes the argument specious.

"Elevated inflation reduces the impact of credit card and mortgage debt" is an equally real phenomenon, though. Without numbers your argument is specious. There are winners and losers. Whose losing and by how much? I'll give you a few losers: retirees on fixed incomes, and investment employees working on commission. And a few winners: homeowners, and young professionals with significant credit debt. There are lots of others. Feel free to advocate for the policies you think are appropriate. Just please stop with the "Inflation!" nonsense as a shorthand argument.

> "Elevated inflation reduces the impact of credit card and mortgage debt" is an equally real phenomenon, though.

Yes, and it has a different temporal behavior from the impact on the purchase power. The same person can be affected by both.

As a rule, inflation infuriates people because almost everyone jut wakes up some day and discover they are much poorer than they used to be. You can't dismiss this by pointing that their net-worth improved. (But yes, the net-worth of a lot of people improves.)

> inflation infuriates people

I'll certainly grant this, not the least because they get terrible information about it from media and online sources.

> almost everyone jut wakes up some day and discover they are much poorer than they used to be

Like this. This is not true. This is a lie. You need to stop saying this. People are "much poorer" post-inflation only in the sense that they were "much richer" post-pandemic, due to the huge savings boom. If you aren't willing to look at the latter, then you're not doing the analysis correctly.

At most, "some" people are "much poorer" due to asymmetric effects. But you're just wrong here if you try to extend that to "almost everyone". Please stop.

inflation is not scale-independent, the first goods to be bid up are the ones purchased by the people who receive the freshly minted funds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon#Monetary_the...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com