Comment by worstspotgain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by worstspotgain | Hacker News Reader

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Beware any election-year stories that just happen to elicit a deep sense of things being astray. Larry Summers in particular has a long track record of playing complex angles in his public policy views. The technical argument in the paper is totally separate from the headline here. The headline is what matters.

You can think of macroeconomic policy as having been trained on economic history, probably more so than any other hard-science discipline. The effect of the pandemic was ridiculously unlike any history on record, times a factor of 10.

The null hypothesis is that the inflation wave came and went. You won't find a credible economist that can prove otherwise.

Furthermore, the wave could not be avoided by any amount of conventional intervention, such as massive tightening. You'd have to get into war-time tools like price controls to manually constrain the massive shifts in supply and demand as people came in and out of the labor force, switched from demanding services to goods and back, etc.

>Beware any election-year stories that just happen to elicit a deep sense of things being astray. Larry Summers in particular has a long track record of playing complex angles in his public policy views. The technical argument in the paper is totally separate from the headline here. The headline is what matters. ... The null hypothesis is that the inflation wave came and went. You won't find a credible economist that can prove otherwise.

This is an almost deceptively bad characterization of Summers' data. Your comment implies Summers said inflation is still rising, when his proposed adjusted CPI also says inflation "came and went", as it is also just as far below its peak as the inflation of the official CPI is below its own. The difference is just that Summers' peaked later (plus higher, like the headline does mention) because of his inclusion of interest; while offical increase was declining his continued to rise just because during the increase of rates that increase offset the decrease in the increase of prices. Once rates stopped increasing this naturally also stopped, and his proposed inflation has been falling faster than official inflation did in order to close with it since [1].

Thus, no ultimate difference in failure to reject your null hypothesis.

[1] https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/65fec8...

I didn't characterize his data or the technical argument in the paper at all. I characterized the disingenuous headline, and emphasized the distinction.

It's good to hear that's what you wanted to do, but I think a case can be made that your comment does not read that way.

Fair enough, in the struggle to avoid a WoT I implied some stuff. For clarification, insert the following paragraph after "The headline is what matters:"

The headline incidentally fosters the view that inflation is still a major problem, which many people hold. It reinforces their gut feeling that it's been much higher than reported, and by extension, that the reported end of the wave is untrue. As inflation and the smell of conspiracy rise to top-of-mind, they ignite blame against the current administration. The truth is that the inflation wave is essentially gone, and that the administration cannot be blamed for it in the first place.

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