Inflation would feel bad even if it’s redefined to be less harsh

livemint.com:

The people who experience the US economy disagree with the people who measure it, and the most likely reason is inflation: Most Americans still see it as a major problem, while economists don’t. But this debate recently veered from economics to semantics. Has the common definition of ‘inflation’ changed, and do economists just need to accept it? Felix Salmon of Axios answers ‘yes’ to both questions.

“The meaning of the word ‘inflation’ has changed," he writes. “It used to mean rising prices; now it means high prices." This helps explain the disconnect between Americans’ perceptions of the economy and economists’ assessment of it. I would answer ‘no’ to both questions, and not because I am an economist.

Both people and economists—and I might point out that there is 100% overlap between these two groups—agree on what inflation is. The confusing part is timing. According to Merriam-Webster, inflation is “a continuing rise in the general price level." When Americans complain that prices are high, they are implicitly comparing prices now to those of 2021, when inflation took off.

When economists point out that inflation is lower, they’re implicitly comparing prices now to 12 months ago. Both time frames are informative, and prices rose in both periods, so both are inflation. Redefining ‘inflation’ would be both unnecessary and counterproductive, when all we need to do is make the implicit parts explicit.

This may be a case in which the often-maligned ‘Fedspeak’ is a model. At the US Federal Reserve, where I worked for almost a decade, the time frame was always specified: the percent change in prices over 12 months, four quarters, one month, and so on. Why? Those are all measures of inflation, but without a frame of reference,