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demobilization,
cost-push inflation, where cost refers to the cost of labor and inputs to production.
demand-pull inflation, a theory that blames inflation on consumers who demand more goods than can be produced.
labor unions were deceitfully claiming to represent labor as a whole, when in fact they were representing only certain insiders.
ignominious
The end of the wage-price spiral narrative was marked by changes in monetary policy and the advent of newly popular ideas: the independent central bank5 and inflation targeting6 by central banks.
The national interest must take precedence over temporary advantages which may be secured by particular groups at the expense of all the people.…
Sydney J. Harris wrote in 1975: WHAT IS SO frustrating about this kind of thing is the difficulty in pinning down the culprits, if any … Either somebody is lying, or the whole economic process doesn’t make sense. If labor is getting “too much,” why are most working families struggling to make ends meet? If grocers are “profiteering,” why do they get glummer as prices go higher? Where does the buck stop? Nobody knows. And so each segment blames another for the vicious spiral, and each justifies its own increases by pointing to its own rising cost of doing business.
The loss of purchasing power is extremely annoying.
But the question is this: At whom should the public direct its anger?
The most extreme cases of inflation tend to happen during wars. When governments are in trouble, they may not be able to collect taxes fast enough to pay for the war, and in desperation they resort to the printing press for more money.
People were very angry that some businesspeople were made rich by the war, and the result was the imposition of an excess profits tax (not only during World War I but also during World War II). Such anger against the people who get rich during wartime is a perennial narrative, not limited to the twentieth century.
Irving Fisher, an American economist who visited Germany at the time, found that Germans did not blame their own government, which had been printing money excessively. Fisher wrote: The Germans thought of commodities as rising and thought of the American gold dollar as rising. They thought we [the United States] had somehow cornered the gold of the world and were charging an outrageous price for it.
Disease epidemiology has shown us that there will likely be repeats of variants of older epidemics in the future as reservoirs of old epidemics mutate or react to a changed environment to start a new wave of contagion.
The early invention of printed books in China, the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth century, the invention of newspapers in Europe in the seventeenth century, the invention of the telegraph and telephone in the nineteenth century, the invention of radio and television in the twentieth, and the rise of the Internet and social media have all fundamentally altered the nature of contagion,
Social media and search engines have the potential to alter the fundamentals of contagion. In the past, ideas spread in a random, non-systematic way. Social media platforms make it possible for like-minded people with extremist views to find each other and further reinforce their unusual beliefs.
Designers of social media and search engines have the ability to alter the nature of contagion, and society is increasingly demanding that they do so to prevent devious use of the Internet and the spread of fake news.
For example, in the 1800s, literature would be read aloud in the salon and in the family circle, fashions that were especially prominent in the middle of the nineteenth century. Both the salon and the family circle reading began to fade at the turn of the century,
In addition, economists long assumed that people are consistent optimizers of a sensible utility function using all available information, with rational expectations. As we’ve noted, this theory omits some clearly important phenomena.
