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It's not just "used in many ways," it has several definitions. The one that almost everybody uses -- including the Fed[0], US Dept of Labor[1], and the ECB[2] -
by monktastic1 2y ago
It's not just "used in many ways," it has several definitions. The one that almost everybody uses -- including the Fed[0], US Dept of Labor[1], and the ECB[2] -- is about rise in prices. Nobody is saying that your definition is bad or wrong, but to claim that it's the only (or even primary) one is disingenuous.
[0] https://www.clevelandfed.org/center-for-inflation-research/inflation-101 https://www.clevelandfed.org/center-for-inflation-research/i...
[1] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/statistics/inflation https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/statistics/inflation
[2] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb-and-you/explainers/tell-me-more/html/what_is_inflation.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb-and-you/explainers/tell-me-mor...
- _heimdall 2y agoSure, though it makes sense that most economists use the price inflation term. The change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory. Most economists today fall into that bucket, of course they use the term in the same way. That doesn't change the fact that the attempt to redefine it both co-opted the word and made it functionally useless. Prices change for all kinds of reasons. The amount of change alone is meaningless and using that meaning of the word allows economists today to play a lot of shell games with the numbers.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory This is totally false. It dates to the inter-War period, specifically, to describe Weimar hyperinflation. (If you just look at money supply, it was bad. If you look at prices it was the disaster that it was.)