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Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Is There Really A Trade-Off Between Inflation And Unemployment? — Brian Romanchuk

Rather than attempt to explain what the mainly neoclassical economists are going on about, I want to step back and try to translate their debate into terms that would be understood by people who do not share the same assumptions. I am pretty sure that post-Keynesian economists have a lot to say about the topic as well, but once again, they tend to be discussing wonkish points that would elude an outsider.…

I have an engineering background, and engineering is largely the science of trade-offs. I have no strong objections to qualitative discussions, but I would argue that we need to at least know the sign of the exchange ratio between two variables in order to say that there is a trade-off between them.
Very simply, if we can have a policy that lowers both the unemployment rate and the inflation rate (or at least leaves inflation unchanged), we cannot pretend there is a meaningful "trade-off" between them.
And this is hardly theoretical: in the United States, we saw a near monotonic decrease in the unemployment rate after the Financial Crisis, yet the inflation rate has done absolutely nothing interesting....
Bond Economics
Is There Really A Trade-Off Between Inflation And Unemployment?
Brian Romanchuk

2 comments:

  1. Links on Brian Romanchuk’s ‘Is There Really A Trade-Off Between Inflation And Unemployment?’

    The Bastard/NAIRU Phillips Curve is dead since the 1960s. For the proof see
    http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2015/01/nairu-wage-led-growth-and-samuelsons.html
    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2130421

    For details of the big picture see cross-references Employment/Phillips Curve
    http://axecorg.blogspot.com/2015/08/employmentphillips-curve-cross.html

    Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

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  2. “Phillips Curve is Dead since the 1960s”

    That’s a laugh...

    Here 2016:

    https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2016/02/18/the-circular-logic-of-inflation-expectations/

    “It’s a safe bet the FOMC will stick to the party line at its next meeting and continue foreseeing a rise to 2 percent as the Phillips curve kicks in and the “transitory effects” of declines in oil and import prices work their way through the system.”

    Get a grip...

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