- Economics
This book grew out of the Ninth Karl Brunner Distinguished Lecture, given in October 2025. I am grateful to the Swiss National Bank for the honor of the invitation and for their kind hospitality.
The lecture and this little book distill my thoughts on inflation going back four decades. Those thoughts are now spread over two books and more papers than anyone can possibly be expected to read. Those efforts also, and rightly, focus on mathematical structure of economic models. They delve into what-abouts, what-ifs, theoretical controversies, and other objections that a theory must surmount. They are aimed mostly at practicing economic researchers, focusing on how to do the economics of inflation; how to construct and evaluate models. This book summarizes, applies, and extends the ideas for a nontechnical audience. There are some equations, mostly in footnotes. Academic economists find it hard to understand words without them. But I describe every idea in words. The nontechnical reader can skip the equations entirely with no loss.
