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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (33631)	6/30/1999 12:10:00 AM
From: kech	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

LindyBill- Social Scientists, i.e. econonomists, are actually pretty precise about how they define inflation. It has a mathematical formula based on the derivative of the change in price level with respect to time. What I was trying to say is that there are many causes of inflation - this is what people disagree about. I think this is what you are objecting to as well - not the definition of the term. I.e. which is the cause of the current form (or absence of ) inflation. Here too, the causes and theories of causes are pretty precise. I mentioned some, there are more. But what happens, is that people, sometimes they are practioners and not social scientists, implicitly assume that whatever caused inflation the last time in their experience, is what always causes it. This is often why wages might be thought of as the root cause of inflation -- this is dusting off a theory of cost push inflation rooted in short supply of one factor - labor. There is a risk here of getting into the "more buyers than sellers" argument raised by J.K. but something like that is going on, except instead of for Q shares it is for labor. Similarly you can imagine, demand pull. A more general theory you cited is a monetary cause - but here you have to buy into a classical or neo-classical theory of macroeconomic policy. A Keynesian theory actually gives you real effects from monetary growth which fools workers into actually working harder from a growth in money supply and doesn't cause inflation as quickly. Anyway, all these models and theories are clearly defined. That isn't the problem. The problem is determining which is most important now and whether there might be multiple causes etc. This probably is more than you wanted to hear but occasionally even I have to defend social science.