ABSTRACT
The “monetarists”, after painstaking empirical research, had discovered a close correlation between the amount of food fed in at one end of the baby and the amount of mess expelled at the other. With impeccable logic, they recommended control of the baby’s food supply by careful monitoring of significant food aggregates. Professional economists are rarely consulted on matters of child care. That is good news for babies; but it is bad news for economies. There is a temptation to regard price stability as normal. But that is contradicted by historical experience. Such periods are exceptional. To attempt to cure a dynamic economy of inflation is rather like trying to cure it of its capacity for responding to social and economic change. It may be that the real problem is not how to prevent inflation but how to allow it to continue.
