Inflation is, paradoxically, both incredibly simple to understand and absurdly complicated. Let’s start with the simplest version: Inflation happens when prices broadly go up.
That “broadly” is important: At any given time, the price of goods will fluctuate based on shifting tastes. Someone makes a viral TikTok about brussels sprouts and suddenly everyone’s gotta have them; sprouts prices go up.
Meanwhile sellers of cauliflower, last season’s trendy veg, are practically giving their goods away. Those fluctuations are constant. Inflation is when the average price of virtually everything consumers buy goes up. Food, houses, cars, clothes, toys, etc.
To afford those necessities, wages have to rise too. It’s not a bad thing. In the United States, for the past 40 years or so (and particularly this century), we’ve been living in an ideal low-and-slow level of inflation that comes with a well-oiled consumer-driven economy, with prices going up around 2% a year, if that.
