What did your learn about these two chapter?

chapter 9 and 11

Chapter 9

CHAPTER OBJECTIVESIn this chapter, you will learn about: Tracking Inflation How to Measure Changes in the Cost of Living How the U.S. and Other Countries Experience Inflation The Confusion Over Inflation Indexing and Its LimitationsIntroduction to InflationBRING IT HOMEA $550 Million Loaf of Bread?If you were born within the last three decades in the United States, Canada, or many other countries in the developed world, you probably have no real experience with a high rate of inflation. Inflation is when most prices in an entire economy are rising. However, there is an extreme form of inflation called hyperinflation. This occurred in Germany between 1921 and 1928, and more recently in Zimbabwe between 2008 and 2009. In November 2008, Zimbabwe had an inflation rate of 79.6 billion percent. In contrast, in 2014, the United States had an average annual rate of inflation of 1.6%.222 9 InflationZimbabwe's inflation rate was so high it is difficult to comprehend, so let's put it into context. It is equivalent to price increases of 98% per day. This means that, from one day to the next, prices essentially double. What is life like in an economy afflicted with hyperinflation? Most of you reading this will have never experienced this phenomenon. The government adjusted prices for commodities in Zimbabwean dollars several times each day. There was no desire to hold on to currency since it lost value by the minute. The people there spent a great deal of time getting rid of any cash they acquired by purchasing whatever food or other commodities they could find. At one point, a loaf of bread cost 550 million Zimbabwean dollars. Teachers' salaries were in the trillions a month; however, this was equivalent to only one U.S. dollar a day. At its height, it took 621,984,228 Zimbabwean dollars to purchase one U.S. dollar.Government agencies had no money to pay their workers so they started printing money to pay their bills rather than raising taxes. Rising prices caused the government to enact price controls on private businesses, which led to shortages and the emergence of black markets. In 2009, the country abandoned its currency and allowed people to use foreign currencies for purchases.How does this happen? How can both government and the economy fail to function at the most basic level? Before we consider these extreme cases of hyperinflation, let's first look at inflation itself.Inflation is a general and ongoing rise in the level of prices in an entire economy. Inflation does not refer to a change in relative prices. A relative price change occurs when you see that the price of tuition has risen, but the price of laptops has fallen. Inflation, on the other hand, means that there is pressure for prices to rise in most markets in the economy. In addition, price increases in the supply-and-demand model were one-time events, representing a shift from a previous equilibrium to a new one. Inflation implies an ongoing rise in prices. If inflation happened for one year and then stopped, then it would not be inflation any more.This chapter begins by showing how to combine prices of individual goods and services to create a measure of overall inflation. It discusses the historical and recent experience of inflation, both in the United States and in other countries around the world. Other chapters have sometimes included a note under an exhibit or a parenthetical reminder in the text saying that the numbers have been adjusted for inflation. In this chapter, it is time to show how to use inflation statistics to adjust other economic variables, so that you can tell how much of, for example, we can attribute the rise in GDP over different periods of time to an actual increase in the production of goods and services and how much we should attribute to the fact that prices for most items have risen.Inflation has consequences for people and firms throughout the economy, in their roles as lenders and borrowers, wage-earners, taxpayers, and consumers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some imperfections and biases in the inflation statistics, and a preview of policies for fighting inflation that we will discuss in other chapters.9.1 Tracking InflationLEARNING OBJECTIVESBy the end of this section, you will be able to: Calculate the annual rate of inflation Explain and use index numbers and base years when simplifying the total quantity spent over a year forproducts Calculate inflation rates using index numbersDinner table conversations where you might have heard about inflation usually entail reminiscing about when "everything seemed to cost so much less. You used to be able to buy three gallons of gasoline for a dollar and then go see an afternoon movie for another dollar." Table 9.1 compares some prices of common goods in 1970 and 2017. Of course, the average prices in this table may not reflect the prices where you live. The cost of living in New York City is much higher than in Houston, Texas, for example. In addition, certain products have evolved over recent decades. A new car in 2021, loaded with antipollution equipment, safety gear,Access for free at openstax.org computerized engine controls, and many other technological advances, is a more advanced machine (and more fuel efficient) than your typical 1970s car. However, put details like these to one side for the moment, and look at the overall pattern. The primary reason behind the price rises in Table 9.1and all the price increases for the other products in the economyis not specific to the market for housing or cars or gasoline or movie tickets. Instead, it is part of a general rise in the level of all prices. At the beginning of 2021, $1 had about the same purchasing power in overall terms of goods and services as 15 cents did in 1972, because of the amount of inflation that has occurred over that time period.How do U.S. government statisticians measure the Consumer Price Index?When the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates the Consumer Price Index, the first task is to decide on a basket of goods that is representative of the purchases of the average household. We do this by using the Consumer Expenditure Survey, a national survey of about 7,000 households, which provides detailed information on spending habits. Statisticians divide consumer expenditures into eight major groups (seen below), which in turn they divide into more than 200 individual item categories. The BLS currently uses 1982-1984 as the base period.For each of the 200 individual expenditure items, the BLS chooses several hundred very specific examples of that item and looks at the prices of those examples. In figuring out the "breakfast cereal" item under the overall category of "foods and beverages," the BLS picks several hundred examples of breakfast cereal. One example might be the price of a 24-oz. box of a particular brand of cereal sold at a particular store. The BLS statistically selects specific products and sizes and stores to reflect what people buy and where they shop. The basket of goods in the Consumer Price Index thus consists of about 80,000 products; that is, several hundred specific products in over 200 broad- item categories. Statisticians rotate about one-quarter of these 80,000 specific products of the sample each year, and replace them with a different set of products.The next step is to collect data on prices. Data collectors visit or call about 23,000 stores in 87 urban areas all over the United States every month to collect prices on these 80,000 specific products. The BLS also conducts a survey of 50,000 landlords or tenants to collect information about rents.Statisticians then calculate the Consumer Price Index by taking the 80,000 prices of individual products and combining them, using weights (see Figure 9.2) determined by the quantities of these products that people buy and allowing for factors like substitution between goods and quality improvements, into price indices for the 200 or so overall items. Then, the statisticians combine the price indices for the 200 items into an overall Consumer Price Index. According the Consumer Price Index website, there are eight categories that data collectors use:The Eight Major Categories in the Consumer Price Index1. Food and beverages (breakfast cereal, milk, coffee, chicken, wine, full-service meals, and snacks)2. Housing (renter's cost of housing, homeowner's cost of housing, fuel oil, bedroom furniture)3. Apparel (men's shirts and sweaters, women's dresses, jewelry)4. Transportation (new vehicles, airline fares, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance)5. Medical care (prescription drugs and medical supplies, physicians' services, eyeglasses and eye care, hospital services)6. Recreation (televisions, cable television, pets and pet products, sports equipment, admissions)7. Education and communication (college tuition, postage, telephone services, computer software andaccessories)8. Other goods and services (tobacco and smoking products, haircuts and other personal services, funeralexpenses)Unintended Redistributions of Purchasing PowerInflation can cause redistributions of purchasing power that hurt some and help others. People who are hurt by inflation include those who are holding considerable cash, whether it is in a safe deposit box or in a cardboard box under the bed. When inflation happens, the buying power of cash diminishes. However, cash is only an example of a more general problem: anyone who has financial assets invested in a way that the nominal return does not keep up with inflation will tend to be affected by inflation. For example, if a person has money in a bank account that pays 4% interest, but inflation rises to 5%, then the real rate of return for the money invested in that bank account is negative 1%.The problem of a good-looking nominal interest rate transforming into an ugly-looking real interest rate can be worsened by taxes. The U.S. income tax is charged on the nominal interest received in dollar terms, without an adjustment for inflation. Thus, the government taxes a person who invests $10,000 and receives a 5% nominal rate of interest on the $500 receivedno matter whether the inflation rate is 0%, 5%, or 10%. If inflation is 0%, then the real interest rate is 5% and all $500 is a gain in buying power. However, if inflation is 5%, then the real interest rate is zero and the person had no real gainbut owes income tax on the nominal gain anyway. If inflation is 10%, then the real interest rate is negative 5% and the person is actually falling behind in buying power, but would still owe taxes on the $500 in nominal gains.Inflation can cause unintended redistributions for wage earners, too. Wages do typically creep up with inflation over time, eventually. The last row of Table 9.1 at the start of this chapter showed that the average hourly wage in manufacturing in the U.S. economy increased from $3.23 in 1970 to $30.11 in 2021, which is an increase by a factor of close to ten. Over that time period, the Consumer Price Index increased by about a factor of eight. However, increases in wages may lag behind inflation for a year or two, since wage adjustments are often somewhat sticky and occur only once or twice a year. Moreover, the extent to which wages keep up with inflation creates insecurity for workers and may involve painful, prolonged conflicts between employers and employees. If the government adjusts minimum wage for inflation only infrequently, minimum wage workers are losing purchasing power from their nominal wages, as Figure 9.6 shows.Chapter 1111.1 Macroeconomic Perspectives on Demand and SupplyLEARNING OBJECTIVESBy the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain Say's Law and understand why it primarily applies in the long run Explain Keynes' Law and understand why it primarily applies in the short runMacroeconomists over the last two centuries have often divided into two groups: those who argue that supply is the most important determinant of the size of the macroeconomy while demand just tags along, and those who argue that demand is the most important factor in the size of the macroeconomy while supply just tags along.Say's Law and the Macroeconomics of SupplyThose economists who emphasize the role of supply in the macroeconomy often refer to the work of a famous early nineteenth century French economist named Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832). Say's law is: "Supply creates its own demand." As a matter of historical accuracy, it seems clear that Say never actually wrote down this law and that it oversimplifies his beliefs, but the law lives on as useful shorthand for summarizing a point of view.The intuition behind Say's law is that each time a good or service is produced and sold, it generates income that is earned for someone: a worker, a manager, an owner, or those who are workers, managers, and owners at firms that supply inputs along the chain of production. We alluded to this earlier in our discussion of the National Income approach to measuring GDP. The forces of supply and demand in individual markets will cause prices to rise and fall. The bottom line remains, however, that every sale represents income to someone, and so, Say's law argues, a given value of supply must create an equivalent value of demand somewhere else in the economy. Because Jean-Baptiste Say, Adam Smith, and other economists writing around the turn of the nineteenth century who discussed this view were known as "classical" economists, modern economists who generally subscribe to the Say's law view on the importance of supply for determining the size of the macroeconomy are called neoclassical economists.If supply always creates exactly enough demand at the macroeconomic level, then (as Say himself recognized) it is hard to understand why periods of recession and high unemployment should ever occur. To be sure, even if total supply always creates an equal amount of total demand, the economy could still experience a situation of some firms earning profits while other firms suffer losses. Nevertheless, a recession is not a situation where all business failures are exactly counterbalanced by an offsetting number of successes. A recession is a situation in which the economy as a whole is shrinking in size, business failures outnumber the remaining success stories, and many firms end up suffering losses and laying off workers.Say's law that supply creates its own demand does seem a good approximation for the long run. Over periods of some years or decades, as the productive power of an economy to supply goods and services increases, total demand in the economy grows at roughly the same pace. However, over shorter time horizons of a few months or even years, recessions or even depressions occur in which firms, as a group, seem to face a lack of demand for their products.Keynes' Law and the Macroeconomics of DemandThe alternative to Say's law, with its emphasis on supply, is Keynes' law: "Demand creates its own supply." As a matter of historical accuracy, just as Jean-Baptiste Say never wrote down anything as simpleminded as Say's law, John Maynard Keynes never wrote down Keynes' law, but the law is a useful simplification that conveys a11.1 Macroeconomic Perspectives on Demand and Supply 275276 11 The Aggregate Demand/Aggregate Supply Modelcertain point of view.When Keynes wrote his influential work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money during the 1930s Great Depression, he pointed out that during the Depression, the economy's capacity to supply goods and services had not changed much. U.S. unemployment rates soared higher than 20% from 1933 to 1935, but the number of possible workers had not increased or decreased much. Factories closed, but machinery and equipment had not disappeared. Technologies that had been invented in the 1920s were not un-invented and forgotten in the 1930s. Thus, Keynes argued that the Great Depressionand many ordinary recessions as wellwere not caused by a drop in the ability of the economy to supply goods as measured by labor, physical capital, or technology. He argued the economy often produced less than its full potential, not because it was technically impossible to produce more with the existing workers and machines, but because a lack of demand in the economy as a whole led to inadequate incentives for firms to produce. In such cases, he argued, the level of GDP in the economy was not primarily determined by the potential of what the economy could supply, but rather by the amount of total demand.Keynes' law seems to apply fairly well in the short run of a few months to a few years, when many firms experience either a drop in demand for their output during a recession or so much demand that they have trouble producing enough during an economic boom. However, demand cannot tell the whole macroeconomic story, either. After all, if demand was all that mattered at the macroeconomic level, then the government could make the economy as large as it wanted just by pumping up total demand through a large increase in the government spending component or by legislating large tax cuts to push up the consumption component. Economies do, however, face genuine limits to how much they can produce, limits determined by the quantity of labor, physical capital, technology, and the institutional and market structures that bring these factors of production together. These constraints on what an economy can supply at the macroeconomic level do not disappear just because of an increase in demand.Combining Supply and Demand in MacroeconomicsTwo insights emerge from this overview of Say's law with its emphasis on macroeconomic supply and Keynes' law with its emphasis on macroeconomic demand. The first conclusion, which is not exactly a hot news flash, is that an economic approach focused only on the supply side or only on the demand side can be only a partial success. We need to take into account both supply and demand. The second conclusion is that since Keynes' law applies more accurately in the short run and Say's law applies more accurately in the long run, the tradeoffs and connections between the three goals of macroeconomics may be different in the short run and the long run.11.2 Building a Model of Aggregate Demand and Aggregate SupplyLEARNING OBJECTIVESBy the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain the aggregate supply curve and how it relates to real GDP and potential GDP Explain the aggregate demand curve and how it is influenced by price levels Interpret the aggregate demand/aggregate supply model Identify the point of equilibrium in the aggregate demand/aggregate supply model Define short run aggregate supply and long run aggregate supplyTo build a useful macroeconomic model, we need a model that shows what determines total supply or total demand for the economy, and how total demand and total supply interact at the macroeconomic level. We call this the aggregate demand/aggregate supply model. This module will explain aggregate supply, aggregate demand, and the equilibrium between them. The following modules will discuss the causes of shifts in aggregate supply and aggregate demand.Why does AS cross potential GDP?Economists typically draw the aggregate supply curve to cross the potential GDP line. This shape may seem puzzling: How can an economy produce at an output level which is higher than its "potential" or "full employment" GDP? The economic intuition here is that if prices for outputs were high enough, producers would make fanatical efforts to produce: all workers would be on double-overtime, all machines would run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Such hyper-intense production would go beyond using potential labor and physical capital resources fully, to using them in a way that is not sustainable in the long term. Thus, it is possible for production to sprint above potential GDP, but only in the short run.At the far right, the aggregate supply curve becomes nearly vertical. At this quantity, higher prices for outputs cannot encourage additional output, because even if firms want to expand output, the inputs of labor and machinery in the economy are fully employed. In this example, the vertical line in the exhibit shows that potential GDP occurs at a total output of 9,500. When an economy is operating at its potential GDP, machines and factories are running at capacity, and the unemployment rate is relatively lowat the natural rate of unemployment. For this reason, potential GDP is sometimes also called full-employment GDP.