Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by epistasis 1702 days ago
Very true.

And, "inflation" means a lot of different things, and almost never the thing that is of real concern: hyperinflation.

Cost push inflation is different from demand pull inflation, but if we are talking about only isolated sectors of the economy increasing in price, like oil, I don't know why we are taking about "inflation" in general.

2 comments

Energy powers everything so of course it needs to be considered as part of inflation in general.
Everything except organic local produce is either made of oil, need oil during production, or need oil for shipping. Hardly an isolated economic sector.

Edit: Even the organic local produce was probably brought to you on a gas-guzzling truck.

This is increasingly untrue, as we diversify our energy sources.

There's also at least three other things that are very different from the 1970s when inflation did seem to be caused by an oil shortage: 1) we have made massive gains in efficiency in the oil that we do use, and 2) we are unlikely to institute price controls, like Nixon did in the 1970s, and 3) we have a massive amount of fracking capacity that will come online if prices stay as high as they are now.