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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

It's the same with corporate profits.

LMAO no. It's foolish to equate an individual selling a single asset like a car with businesses that can range from little niche supply workshops up to dominating whole industries. Pure laws of supply and demand only hold true under conditions of perfect competition, and much of what we call 'business' is about playing the meta-game - out maneuvering competitors financially, creating moats and other barriers to entry to keep competitors out of a market sector, using marketing to maximize product differentiation and shape consumer perception, leveraging regulatory complexity in one's favor or lobbying for it to be reduced in order to gain some cost advantage.

Real world markets are a lot more complex than the little toy ones used to explain fundamental economic concepts.

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My claim is that we can't determine what caused a price change by looking at the distributional effects of that price change.

I demonstrated this with an example, where we know what caused a price change (supply chain issues for a substitute product plus increased demand) and know the distributional effect (higher margins for sellers of used cars). If we naively try to explain the price change based on the distributional effect, we would claim that higher prices were purely caused by increased greed. We know this to be false.

Look, perhaps companies really did become more greedy in 2020 and that's what has really caused inflation. Or maybe large amounts of stimulus caused increased demand. Or perhaps the war in Ukraine has caused supply chain issues which drives up prices. My point is that looking at the distributional effects of inflation is just completely disconnected from the question of what caused inflation in the first place.

At the very least, if you're claiming that we can figure out what caused inflation by looking at the distributional effects, can you provide some evidence, or some argument, to support that claim? Because I think my example demonstrates that common sense ("X benefitted from inflation, therefore X caused inflation") is not a good guide here, and if anything, the additional complexity of real markets works against you here - if we can't even explain inflation based on distributional effects in a toy market, what makes you so confident we can do so in the market as a whole?

For some goods (like cars) supply issues have indeed been the major driver of price inflation.

But for many consumer goods, manufacturers have exploited the perception of inflation to increase prices or (as highlighted in the source article) to shrink package volumes while retaining the same price point. It's much less clear that supply is the driver here; bear in mind the fact that moving to smaller package sizes often imposes considerable overhead as whole production lines need to be retooled, new package containers designed and manufactured etc. It's not a passive response to market phenomena, it's a straightforward investment in the idea of giving consumers less value for their money.

While I don't disagree that government policy and economic shocks can often be inflationary without any intention on the part of the business community to drive prices up, consider too that sometimes there is such intent and organizations like the Chamber of Commerce exist largely to beg for support from the public purse in hard times and deflect criticism onto whatever scapegoats are convenient in good times.

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