Inflation Quotes - page 5
The new arguments for rules take an entirely different tack. They are based neither on the ignorance nor the knavery of public officials and, in fact, assume that everyone knows how the economy operates-even the government! Moreover, the government's objectives are assumed to coincide with the people's objectives, and everyone has rational expectations. Despite these seemingly ideal circumstances, modern critics argue that a central bank left with discretion will err systematically in the direction of excessive inflation. To remedy this distortion, they advocate a fixed rule.
Alan Blinder
The appropriate emotion is shame - shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The "working poor," as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The centrally planned economies, dissatisfied with the outcome of their own efforts to achieve good economic growth performance, have changed strategy and decided to import high technology from the West. as well as necessary grains to supplement their domestic agicultural supplies. This new approach has opened their economies to Western inflation because imports have been reflecting rising world price. Gold and oil sales at correspondingly rising prices have been used by the Soviet Union to finance part of their import needs. but they are fully enmeshed in world inflation accounting in balancing rising export prices.
Lawrence Klein
Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy. This causes that patch to expand at a terrifically accelerated rate, smoothing out the density and diluting away any unwanted relics. Eventually the scalar field decays into ordinary matter and radiation, reheating the universe into a conventional Big Bang state, after which things proceed as normal.
Sean M. Carroll
It turns out that the energy of a gravitational field-any gravitational field-is negative. During inflation, as the universe gets bigger and bigger and more and more matter is created, the total energy of matter goes upward by an enormous amount. Meanwhile, however, the energy of gravity becomes more and more negative. The negative gravitational energy cancels the energy in matter, so the total energy of the system remains whatever it was when inflation started-presumably something very small. ...This capability for producing matter in the universe is one crucial difference between the inflationary model and the previous model.
Alan Guth
A very plausible choice for when inflation might have happened would be when the energy scales of the universe were at the scale of grand unified theories... which unify the weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions into a single unified interaction. ..we're talking about energies which are about 10 times the equivalent energy of a proton mass. ...the initial patch would only have to be the ridiculously small size of about 10 cm across to be able to lead ultimately to the creation of everything that we see on the vast scale of which we see it.
Alan Guth
Inflation takes advantage of this possibility... to let gravity be the repulsive force that drove the universe into the period of expansion that we call the Big Bang. In fact, when one combines general relativity with conventional ideas, now, in particle physics there really is a pretty clear indication, I should say, not quite a prediction... that at very high energy densities one expects to find states of matter which literally turn gravity on its head and cause gravity to become repulsive.
Alan Guth
The gravitational repulsion created by this small patch of repulsive gravity material would be, then, the driving force of the Big Bang and it would cause the region to undergo exponential expansion... there is a certain doubling time, and if you wait the same amount of time it doubles again, and if you wait the same amount of time it doubles again... and it's because these doublings build up so dramatically, it doesn't take very much time to build the whole universe. In about 100 doublings this tiny patch of 10 cm can become large enough, not to be the universe, but to be a small marble-sized region which will then ultimately become the observed universe, as it continues to coast outward after inflation ends.
Alan Guth
Let there be no doubt that our present rate of inflation is the main cause of our economic difficulties. There never has been a more mistaken piece of economic analysis than the view that we should accept inflation to avoid unemployment. Inflation today, so far from being an alternative to unemployment, is its main cause. If our rate of cost increase is allowed to continue close to twice that of the average for the developed world it will increasingly price us out of world markets. Employers...will have to restrict their activities and still more their labour force in response to mounting and uncontainable wage and salary bills.
Roy Jenkins
Inflation in Britain is at an unacceptable level. It is now mostly home-induced and wage-induced. It is moving well out of line with that of the rest of the world. If it goes on doing so it will ruin us as a nation, both economically and politically. It is of a different order from any of our other difficulties. It is, quite simply, our biggest menace since Hitler.
Roy Jenkins
Unless we plan our resources purposefully, unless we are prepared to accept the disciplines that are necessary, we shall not be able to meet the challenge of the Communist world. As the years go by, and the people see us languishing behind, trying to prevent the evils of inflation by industrial stagnation, trying all the time to catch up with things because we have not acted soon enough-when they see the Communist world, planned, organised, publicly-owned and flaunting its achievements to the rest of the world-they will come to be educated by what they will experience. They will realise that Western democracy is falling behind in the race because it is not prepared to read intelligently the lessons of the twentieth century.
Aneurin Bevan
I am going to negotiate with the IMF on the basis of our existing policies, not changes in policies, and I need your support to do it. (Applause) But when I say "existing policies", I mean things we do not like as well as things we do like. It means sticking to the very painful cuts in public expenditure (shouts from the floor) on which the Government has already decided. It means sticking to a pay policy which enables us, as the TUC resolved a week or two ago, to continue the attack on inflation. (Shout of, "Resign".)
Denis Healey
Like it or not, one of the most spectacular events of our age is the comparative success of the Communist economic systems. ... Do you seriously imagine that there is no challenge from the Communist States on this level? And who do you think will win the contest if we stumble on as we are-the Communist States, which are not afraid of full production, or the Western States, which have still never achieved for any considerable period full production and full employment without inflation? Yes, who will win-the Communist States, who are turning out trained technicians at an unexampled pace, or the Western powers, who contentedly spend more on advertising than education?
Michael Foot
Q: Who caused the inflation?
A: The Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Q: How did he cause it?
A: By putting a flood of new money into circulation.
Q: Why did he do that?
A: To prevent the exchange rate of the pound rising last year.
Q: Why did he want to stop it rising?
A: To keep level with the Deutschmark.
Q: What for?
A: To make it easier to join the EMS.
Enoch Powell
It is worth recalling that during the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, Britain's growth rate was the lowest of all the major European economies. By contrast, during the 1980s, our growth rate has been the highest of all the major European economies. This greatly improved growth performance has been accompanied by falling inflation, which at 3½ per cent. in 1986 reached the lowest figure for almost 20 years.
Nigel Lawson
