“Economists’ instincts are that uncertainty about current prices, future prices, and the real meaning of nominal trade-offs between the present and the future; distortions introduced by the failure of government finance to be inflation-neutral; windfall redistributions; and the focusing of attention not on preferences, factors of production, and technologies but on predicting the future evolution of nominal magnitudes must degrade the functioning of the price system and reduce the effectiveness of the market economy at providing consumer utility. The cumulative jump in the price level as a result of the inflation of the 1970s may have been very expensive to the United States in terms of the associated reduction in human welfare.”

— J. Bradford DeLong

Ch. 6 : "America’s Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s" in Reducing Inflation: Motivation and Strategy (1997) edited by Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

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J. Bradford DeLong 4

American economist 1960

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