Hot Air

The Tyranny of the Phillips Curve – HotAir

Repeat after me, class: Growth does NOT cause inflation. Write it on the blackboard 100 times.

For decades, the economics profession has been trying to tell us all just the opposite. They keep shoveling out the dumbest economic concept of all time: the Phillips Curve. This was the lame-brained “theory” by neo-Keynesian economists of the 1960s and 1970s that to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve needs to raise unemployment and slow down economic growth.

The whole concept of an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation blew up when it was put into practice in the mid-1970s and the result was rising inflation AND rising unemployment. Then in the 1980s and ’90s, with free-market supply-side policies in place, we had low inflation and low unemployment.

Over the past 40 years or so, if there is a relationship between unemployment and inflation, they tend to run…

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