Last week, I pointed out that inflation is astronomically high all over the place, especially in countries whose economies run similar to ours. Japan’s, for example, is currently over 2,000% higher than it was in 2020. By comparison, the US over the same period is 600% higher.

But that doesn’t seem to matter, I continue to be lectured on the myriad ways that the Biden administration’s alleged fumblings are ruining the US economy, and far beyond.

To my friends who believe this, I’d like to point out two very important points.

Aversion to Majority Opinion

First, I’m not an economist, neither are you.

So, let’s not query our trusted media outlets, do a little armchair math, throw in a little plebian philosophy, and convince ourselves that we’ve considered the political hot topics from every conceivable angle.

Instead, let’s ask the people who are qualified, folks who hold PhD’s in economics, thinkers spawned from well-heeled academic institutions who’ve spent the brunt of their lives learning how this all works. In addition, we should consider the opinions of chief economics officers who work their craft in very large organizations, folks who get fired if they get it wrong.

This group knows more than we do. Should they pen an opinion about inflation, we should listen.

Go figure, there are qualified folks on both side of the fence, some claiming that the world’s current inflation woes are directly related to COVID aftershocks, supply chain issues, and Russia’s inflation of Ukraine.

You can also find opinions from the other side. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, once claimed that inflation is the government’s way of robbing the people. My conservative friends are quick to use Dr. Sowell’s thoughts as a direct indictment of the Biden administration.

Which side has it right, liberals (and/or this blogger), who seek to place the majority of the blame on COVID/Putin/etc., or conservatives, who see Biden as the biggest part of the problem?

While you might be able to find a relative handful of qualified economists who’ll blame the current administration for US inflation, the vast majority of global economists don’t.

Please fact check me on this and share your data in the comments below. But if you believe that Joe Biden has singlehandedly driven the US into its current 8+% inflation rate, you’re not backed by the majority of qualified opinion.

We ran into this with COVID. Early on, the CDC posted its very high estimated death rate, then its advice on masks and social distancing, all hailed by one crowd as a conspiracy because there were a relative handful of qualified physicians (and many other unqualified ones) claiming that the CDC had it wrong.

Completely ignored by this crowd was the legion of qualified epidemiologists – globally, completely unrelated to the Trump administration’s medical team – posting reams of data about masks, social distancing, death rates, vaccines etc., all landing in close proximity to the CDC’s conclusions, supporting their policy.

The same holds true for today. Economists from many Ivy League institutions, and qualified folks who steer major corporations seem to be in concert with their conclusions about global inflation. Only a relative handful are posting “Let’s Go Brandon!” types of conclusions.

Following is a sampling of experts who’ve published their opinions. These have some interesting things to say about the world’s current inflation problem, but none of them claim that Biden is the root problem.

• • • Alan Greenspan, needs no introduction
    • Justin Wolfers, professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics
    • Mansueto Almeida, Chief Financial Officer, Banco BTG
    • Pactual Shusong Ba, Managing Director and Chief China Economist ofHong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX), Chief Economist of the China Banking Association (CBA) and Executive Director of the HSBC Financial Research Institute at Peking University.
    • Rima Bhatia, Group Chief Economist, Gulf International Bank
    • Bricklin Dwyer, Chief economist and head of the Mastercard economics institute
    • David Folkerts-Landau, Chief economist, Deutsche Bank. Bachelors in Economics from Harvard University, PhD in Economics from Princeton University
    • Markus Konrad Brunnermeier, Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics, Princeton University
    • Jerome Haegeli, Group Chief Economist, Swiss Re Institute
    • Jonathan Hall, Chief Economist and Director of Public, Uber. PhD in Economics from Harvard University
    • Jason Furman, Harvard Kennedy School’s Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy
    • Ethan Harris, Bank of America
    • Francis Hintermann, Accenture
    • Fernando Honorato Barbosa, Banco Bradesco
    • Beata Javorcik, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
    • Nick Johnson, Deloitte
    • Christian Keller, Barclays
    • Razia Khan, Standard Chartered
    • Monika Piazzesi, SIEPR Senior Fellow and the Joan Kenny Professor of Economics at Stanford.
    • Karin Kimbrough, LinkedIn
    • Kyle Kretschman, Spotify
    • Millan Mulraine, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan
    • Charles L. Jones, Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
    • Debora Revoltella, European Investment Bank
    • Nela Richardson, ADP
    • Michael Schwarz, Microsoft
    • Jorge Sicilia, BBVA
    • Ludovic Subran, Allianz
    • Areef Suleman, Islamic Development Bank
    • Hal Varian, Google
    • Eirik Waerness, Equinor
    • Ghislaine Weder, Nestlé

Some from this list are quick to point out that Biden’s COVID relief attempts are certainly a contributing factor. But they’re just as quick to mention that the Trump administration attempted the same thing and spent much more. According to these experts, If Biden’s COVID measures contributed to inflation, so did Trump’s.

 

Again, when we ask the experts why inflation is so high, we’ll get opinions from both sides, but it’s not a 50/50 sort of proposition, not even a 30/70 one. The number of economists who lay the majority of the blame at Biden’s feet are few and far between.

If you want to go with minority opinion on this one, why? I’m fine if you do but help me understand your reasoning. If you can’t, I’ll assume that you’ve done what we all do: scour the earth for opinions and perspectives that make us right, and canonize them.

Divided Truth

The other point I’d like to make is that you and I are part of a tribe.

If you believe that Biden is ruining America, you’re most likely a conservative, white Christian who lives in the suburbs. Those aren’t bad things – I lived there for a huge chunk of my adult, Christian life – but they are indicators of a particular cross section of American culture that consistently lands on one distinct side of America’s current political divide.

If, on the other hand, you believe that US inflation is more a problem of non-Biden things, your tribe is a bit more diverse in the realms of religion and race, tends to live closer to urban areas, is much more liberal, and lands squarely on the other side of the divide.

Again, not a bad thing.

But when our tribe’s emotion and fear call the shots much more than wisdom does, that’s bad. When that happens, we’re suckers for whatever media outlet that seeks to make some $$ from telling us that we’re right and everyone else is wrong.

And so, added to our tribe’s propensity to leverage emotion at the expense of everything else, our media outlets carefully curate whatever data and leave us feeling good about our politics. Allegedly well informed, we take to social media and beyond with our very limited education, fighting with those who don’t think like we do, adding to America’s very serious division problem.

Because you and I are part of a tribe, and because both tribes have gotten way too emotional, we’re vulnerable, and run the risk of falling victim to tribal thinking, much more influenced by anger and fear than the facts.

In our current divided moment, it’s crucial that we query the minds of as many experts as we can, whether it be in the arena of economics, pandemics, race, whatever. Let’s not curate these voices by what conclusions they draw, let’s curate them based on their qualifications, then listen, considering the entire time that our tribe might be wrong on this one.

Since 2020, US inflation has increased by almost 600%.

600%!!

Many of my liberal friends claim that this is due to post-COVID financial meltdown, and that inflation is up all over the world. This can’t possibly be the fault of our current president.

Conservatives will rightly point out that US inflation is higher than everyone else’s. Japan, Taiwan, Australia, France, Switzerland, and others are currently posting much lower rates. If everyone else was struggling with inflation, we could maybe blame COVID and give Biden a break. That’s not the case, and there’s only one person to blame.

So, it’s no surprise that my not-so-liberal friends are posting things like this on Facebook:

What’s missing from this crowd’s perspective is that, even in 2020, US inflation was higher than many other countries. Comparing our inflation rate to theirs doesn’t get us very far.

I say we instead compare our inflation increase to everyone else’s.

If our rate went up by 600% in the last couple of years, how does that compare to others? Did we blow everyone out of the water? You’d think so. Thankfully, this isn’t a difficult thing to investigate; global inflation trackers are plentiful on the internet. I found one that’s easy to navigate, cross checked their numbers with a few others, and came up with the following (posted from high to low). Please fact check at your leisure:

• • Japan inflation in 2020: ~.1%
  • current inflation: 2.4%
  • inflation increase: 2300%

• • Germany inflation in 2020: .5%
  • current inflation: 7.9%
  • inflation increase: 1480%

• • Canada inflation in 2020: .7%
  • current inflation: 7.7%
  • inflation increase: 1000%

• • France inflation in 2020: .48%
  • current inflation: 5.2%
  • inflation increase: 983%

• • UK inflation in 2020: .9%
  • current inflation: 9%
  • inflation increase: 900%

• • US inflation in 2020: 1.2%
  • current inflation: 8.6%
  • inflation increase: 596%

• • Australia inflation in 2020: .8%
  • current inflation: 5.1%
  • inflation increase: 537%

• • Switzerland inflation in 2020: .7%
  • current inflation: 2.9%
  • inflation increase: 314%

• • New Zealand in 2020: 1.7%
  • current inflation: 2.9%
  • inflation increase: 305%

Something happened. COVID? Ukraine? All of the above? If inflation rates have skyrocketed all over the world, it seems silly to blame it on one country, high as that country’s inflation might be, especially following a near unrivaled global pandemic.

How can we expect a pre-pandemic level of business-as-usual following something that wiped out so many people, taxed the worldwide healthcare system and is now driving unprecedented supply chain issues? Add to that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing rise in fuel prices (again, globally) and nobody should be surprised that all prices are on the rise.

But that’s my armchair analysis. I’m no economist, nor is my friend who commented on Bidenflation above. Moving forward, I’ll spare you my ramblings and offer a few thoughts from the world of qualified opinion:

Alan Greenspan, 13th chair of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006:

The U.S. has been at risk of sparking demand-side inflation for some time. As the economy recovers from the pandemic and demand for consumer goods and services has risen, so too have prices. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 5.4% in September from a year earlier, the sharpest increase since August 2008. Most of this current price change is likely being driven by pandemic-related shifts that should subside over time.

Justin Wolfers, Australian economist and public policy scholar, professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics: 

I think we learned that the coronavirus is not just a health threat, but also an economic threat. Things have probably never been shaken up as much in my lifetime as they have been over the past couple of years. So that’s the first big factor. The second is, ever since Putin started amassing troops on the border with Ukraine, gas prices started going up. And you can draw a straight line from Putin to the price that you’re seeing at the pump.

A quickie from the folks at Harvard:

I’m happy to blame Biden for his many missteps and would personally love it if things like inflation were so simple that we could blame them on someone else’s bad politics.

But it turns out that inflation, especially on a global level, is a complicated thing.

 

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Sometime in the mid-60’s, abortion rates in the US began a meteoric rise. When abortion was legalized in the early 70’s, go figure, they continued to climb. Conservative religious folks of that era declared the Supreme Court’s decision the Devil’s errand, pure evil, one that would result in the death of millions of unborn babies.

Not long after Roe v. Wade, in the midst of a liberal administration, abortion rates in the US somehow began an equally meteoric decline, one that continued all the way into 2020.

Today, with another historic decision, the Supreme Court has declared abortion illegal at the Federal level, leaving each state to decide how to proceed.

My fellow Evangelicals are celebrating. To this camp, abortion is the single worst sin in America. An unborn fetus, at any stage, is human, and should be afforded the same rights as any other human.

I’ll further complicate things by adding that a fetus is the only group of cells in mom’s body that doesn’t bear an exact match to her DNA. It lives within her body, but, at the same time, doesn’t seem to pass the “her body” test.

As a bible believing Christian, abortion has always been a tough issue. Being part of a culture that has historically placed so much emphasis on this one issue – ultimately voting a guy into office because he simply paid the right lip service to this while simultaneously lip servicing violence and sexual assault – hasn’t been easy.

What goes missing here is the fact that a big chunk of the liberal world, myself included, is not categorically pro-abortion. Hearing accusations of “baby killers,” and “they don’t care about human life” is frustrating. Not only is it untrue, it’s tone deaf, further evidence that the conservative Christian world has segregated itself from the people it’s supposed to be reaching.

I’ll argue/rant that this cross-section of American culture isn’t as concerned about abortion as it claims to be. According to the graph above, referencing data from the only two orgs that track abortion statistics, conservative administrations don’t do any better at stemming the tide of abortion than liberal ones. In fact, on average, abortion decline in the US falls more sharply when liberals are at the helm.

Again, the only rise in abortion since the 70’s happened under a conservative president, one considered to be nigh unto Christian America’s Marvel-level superhero. If these folks care so much about abortion, their politicians should be posting better numbers than the baby killers.

Having lived in this culture for so long, I can tell you that it’s not about the life of unborn babies. If it was, we’d be celebrating America’s journey into the lowest abortion rates since Roe was passed. But we don’t care about the actual numbers, and too few from the anti-abortion crowd do anything beyond voting and ranting on social media.

If we truly wanted less abortion, we’d be more actively involved. We’d fight, sacrifice, spend our time and money. We’d pay attention to the numbers, asking why those evil liberals seem to do a better job than we do. At the very least, we would have conversations with young women who’ve terminated a pregnancy. We’d gain a deeper understanding of what they’ve been through, and how this issue is much more complicated than “just get your shit together and don’t have sex.”

None of that happens because we just want the lip service, the laws, the in-writing declaration that we were right all along.

That’s one of the reasons why the decline in abortion rates flattens out during conservative administrations; throwing a bunch of laws at this issue has historically done nothing. But conservative politicians are under great pressure to do just that: declare it illegal, condemn it, vilify it, etc. If they don’t, they’re out of a job.

Liberals, on the other hand, place great focus on things like prevention, education, and resourcing would-be moms. Sure, we also push the right to terminate a pregnancy, but that, somehow, hasn’t resulted in the skyrocketing of abortion rates when a baby killer is in charge.

Again, according to the numbers, abortion rates somehow fall more sharply under a more liberal approach.

Don’t hear me claiming that liberals have some moral high ground over conservatives, there’s evil on both sides. But as a pro-life evangelical, I’ll continue to vote liberal because the conservative way simply isn’t as pro-life as it thinks it is. And I gain the added bonus of social justice, another issue that us alleged pro-lifers should be serious about.

I’m convinced: if America could somehow continue its focus on prevention, resourcing, and compassion, our numbers would continue to fall, and we could all celebrate.

We decided not to go that route, and have convinced ourselves that the overturning of Roe v. Wade is some kind of advance towards a more abortion free America, and a huge step away from injustice:

Friday’s ruling is a sober reminder of the 50 years of havoc that Roe v. Wade left in its wake. Sixty-three million children have been murdered in the womb since 1973. Without question abortion has been the single greatest moral stain on our nation in our history.

Even if abortion was banned at both the state and federal level, America’s abortion rate wouldn’t be much different than it is now. Note that rates began their first rise before Roe v. Wade, when abortion was illegal, and women were being charged with manslaughter.

Declaring this a lawless deed does nothing beyond forcing desperate moms to seek much more dangerous solutions, not because they’re hopeless sinners in need of some good-old-fashioned Evangelical morality. They’re stressed, afraid, many times alone, flat broke, in need of the more difficult things that scripture calls us to, the stuff that too many of us can’t and historically refuse to muster.