This paper is an overview of the history of, and future prospects for, undesirable levels of price inflation in the U.S. economy. The paper concludes that concerns raised in 2021 by several well-known economists and analysts – regarding the prospects for accelerating levels of inflation as a result of pandemic-era and post-pandemic fiscal and monetary policy (enacted and proposed) – is misplaced.

This paper discusses the “global economy of anger” and the “great discordance” that has been the collateral offshoot of technological progress and globalization. It shows that what is often overlooked is that these “advances” have been slowly eroding the foundations of global democracy, enabling political leaders in big and powerful countries to take actions that have no legitimacy or legal basis and are sanctioned by none other than themselves, which is anathema to the very idea of democracy.

How does law change society? In the rational actor model, law affects behavior only by changing incentives and information—the command and coordination function of law. Under the view that humans are social animals, law is also a guidepost for social norms that regulate behavior—the expressive function of law.

The advance of digital technology is changing the nature of markets, enhancing the capacity of corporations to extract more consumers’ surplus and lower the wages paid to workers. The rise of new technology has also diminished the efficacy of traditional laws to regulate firms and corporations. This is best illustrated by antitrust laws. With the new technology, there are greater returns to scale in production, and further, it is possible to have different components of the same final good be produced by different firms in faraway places.

Since the beginning of 2019, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) has begun to reconsider the wisdom of having increased its overnight policy interest rate by 100 basis point during the course of 2018, after increasing it by 75 basis points the year before. The FOMC has sent signals, with regard to its prospective actions this year, that are substantially more dovish than the guidance it delivered in 2018. The Fed’s motives may include some soft economic data and severe reversals in equity markets and long term interest rates during the last weeks of 2018, but it is clear that the FOMC’s approach to the policy rate in 2019 will be data dependent and far less dogmatic.