[littlestymaar]

> As if those are unrelated concepts.

They are. A slow/moderate increase in prices (even 20% a year) has nothing in common with “the salary you've received on the first of the month has lost most of its value by the end of the month”, the social and economic causes and consequences of these two events are completely different.

> that the common sense understanding of inflation

It's only “common sense” because Milton Friedman convinced a generation of people of it, but it goes pretty much against all empirical evidence (including in recent time). The sun and stars don't orbit around a fixed earth either, btw…

[SamPatt]

I'm listening to the audiobook "The Price of Time" right now and it gives chapter after chapter of empirical evidence.

Friedman was absolutely not the first economist to notice the connection between monetary supply and inflation. Locke wrote against artificial low interest rates in the 18th century.

[littlestymaar]

Locke probably got it from Cantillon (who made a fortune out of John Law's system, how ironic), but this reference probably summarizes the biggest mistake neoclassical economists have been making, ignoring what happened between the 18th century and the 20th one: the Industrial Revolution.

In a pre-industrial economy, the total economic output is essentially fixed (crop production, which makes the vast majority of the economic output, mostly depends on the weather) and supply is always the decisive factor in an economy.

In industrial economies however the economic output mostly depends on the demand: if there's demand for something, then the industries will just ramp-up production to fit the demand (be it for smartphones or aircraft carriers like in WWII). In this regime, you don't really have monetary-induced inflation, until the industrial output can't follow for some reason (in most cases, the output in actually decreasing, meaning that stopping money emission won't solve the issue either, and you need to actively contract the economy to curtail inflation (like Volcker did after the oil shocks) or just slow it down a bit to wait until the problem sorts itself out, à la Jerome Powell).