I think some inflation will do us good. Things get pricier so people buy less, thus require the things they do buy to last longer, and we move away from the disposable everything culture and all its byproducts.
That's not how inflation works.
First, you can't reason from a price change. Things might get more expensive because there's more demand (ie people buying more), or because supply is disrupted.
Second, inflation is a general rise in the price level. That includes a rise in wages. If you 'want' people to buy less stuff, you need to lower their real incomes. That can happen in a period of general inflation, general deflation, or even stable prices.
See also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/never_reason_fr.htm...
That's not how it works either.
When the price of fuel increases, the cost to send a worker from point A to point B increases. However the worker salaries don't change all that much, or at-least not uniformly.
> In economics, inflation refers to a simultaneous progressive increase in all prices (including wages) in an economy.
Of course, you might have a situation that mixes general inflation with a change in relative prices, eg the relative price of labour might decline.
In fact, sticky wages are one of the leading contenders for why we have (demand side) recessions at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
that will not be the effect of inflation.
manufacturing products to the requirement that products last longer (or not) is on a much longer timescale than inflationary factors.
Cars too - car quality has accelerated since the late 90s and early 2000s, and because of that, a few less people are suffering the car price hikes.
Worse moving to sustainable purchases requires up front investments so to a degree poverty breeds waste.