Is Everyone Pretending to Understand Inflation?
Are those “experts” really experts?
Behind a paywall? Read this article here.
Inflation.
Just saying the word feels like opening a Pandora’s box of confusion wrapped in economic jargon. It’s the bogeyman of finance, the cause of why my kopi-o kosong now costs $2 instead of 80 cents back in the ’90s. But here’s the real kicker — does anyone actually understand inflation? Or are we all just nodding along, pretending like we know what’s happening, hoping nobody calls us out?
As a freelance software developer in Singapore, I’m not here to explain inflation like an economist would (spoiler alert: I’m not one). But after decades of writing code and paying for increasingly expensive laksa, I’ve come to suspect that whatever we think inflation is, it’s really just a subjective smorgasbord of ideas. And you know what? That’s okay.
Let’s take a tongue-in-cheek dive into inflation — what it is (kind of), why everyone’s definition is different, and how it impacts our everyday lives.
Inflation: The Shapeshifting Chameleon of Economics
If you Google “inflation,” you’ll get a perfectly neat definition: a general increase in prices and a fall in the purchasing power of…
