March 07, 2014
The Washington Post, which adheres rigidly to the philosophy that a dollar in a non-rich person’s pocket is a dollar that could be in a rich person’s pocket, argued in its Wonkblog section that it might be time for the Fed to start raising interest rates and throwing people out of work. The story is that when the unemployment rate falls below 6.5 percent, the inflation rate might start rising.
This one is almost too much to believe even from the Washington Post. Of course the unemployment rate has come down considerably from its 10.1 percent peak in 2010, but most of the reason is that people have left the labor force. According to the OECD, the employment rate among prime age workers (25-54) is up by only 0.8 percentage points from its 2010 low and is still down by 4.0 percentage points from its pre-recession level.
But let’s look at the evidence the Post uses to make its case. The post has a chart that divides the years since 1983 into years when the unemployment rate was above 6.5 percent and years when it was below. The unemployment rate is then graphed against the change in the core inflation rate over the year. The regression line has the expected downward slope implying a negative relationship between the unemployment rate and the change in the inflation rate.
This is all nice and predictable. But the truly incredible part of the story is that in the graph itself we see that the rate of inflation actually declined in most of the years when the unemployment rate was below 6.5 percent. That’s right, fans of counting and arithmetic everywhere will be able to see that in 10 of the 19 years where the unemployment rate was below 6.5 percent the inflation rate actually fell. It only rose in eight of these years, with the rate being unchanged in one of the years. Are you scared of inflation yet?
We could look at this one from a slightly different angle. The unemployment rate was below 6.5 percent as a year-round average for 15 consecutive years from 1994 to 2008. Over this stretch the core inflation rate fell from 2.8 percent in 1994 to 2.3 percent in 2008. See, hyperinflation is just around the corner.
The incredible part of this story is that even if we took the very worst year for inflation in this thirty year stretch, the inflation rate only rose by 0.8 percentage points. So, even if we happen to draw the bad straw and we get the same sort of jump in the inflation rate in 2014 from letting the unemployment rate fall too low, we will se the core rate of inflation rise from 1.5 percent to 2.3 percent. The horror, the horror.
Hey, but it’s much better to throw more people out of work, at least by the thinking at the Washington Post.
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