question
What causes inflation?
The most-disputed empirical and theoretical question in macroeconomics. Schools differ on whether inflation is fundamentally monetary, fundamentally driven by costs and conflict, fundamentally fiscal, or fundamentally a coordination phenomenon — and on what, if anything, central banks can do to control it.
Stub entry. Testimony from each tradition pending.
Few questions in macroeconomics have produced more sustained and structured disagreement. Monetarists locate the cause in the money supply and the conditions under which money is non-neutral. Old Keynesians foreground the demand-pull mechanism and the slope of the Phillips Curve. Post-Keynesians and MMT economists frame inflation as cost-push, conflict-driven, and constrained by real resources rather than monetary aggregates. Austrians treat it as a redistributive consequence of credit expansion. New Classicals derive it from rational expectations conditional on policy regimes. New Keynesians pair sticky prices with expectations to produce an empirical Phillips Curve that shifts with credibility.
This page collects the testimony each tradition has entered into the record, as readings produce excerpts.