14th June 2021. Grenfell | Inflation
Remembering the dead; The invention of ‘inflation’
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#1: Remembering the dead
I hadn’t planned to post anything this week—I’m on a busy schedule for a client—but I was reminded over the weekend that it is the fourth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire today.
The photographer Feruza Afewerki, who lost four members of her family in the fire, has an outdoor exhibition close to the site of the tragedy, documenting survivors and the bereaved.
I happened to walk past it, and took a couple of photographs, seen below.
(Photos by Andrew Curry. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The exhibition is part of the Gold and Ashes project—a response by the local creative community to the fire, which—lest it be forgotten, killed 72 people. They are publishing a book shortly.
The inquiry, so far, has told a tale of official neglect, even hostility, and a public works culture in which everyone was incentivised to cut corners.
This is one reason why the folk singer Martin Simpson has promised to play Leon Rosselson’s song Palaces of Gold at every gig he does until there is justice for the Grenfell victims.
#2: The invention of ‘inflation’
This is absolutely my final post here for a while on the subject of inflation. But the latest edition of Adam Tooze’s newletter has a good piece on the history of the idea of ‘inflation’ and why it matters.
Tooze made his reputation with a book on the Weimar inflation of the 1920s, which is one of the spectres at this particular table. He draws on this work for the article, much of which is a history of inflation statistics in general and Weimar inflation statistics in particular.
But for me, the article was a reminder that social and economic data are not independent of the thing they describe. And inflation data, as he reminds us, generates both winners and losers:
Inflations are contentious. They generate winners and losers. That is why we care about inflation. Winners may not want to have their gains documented. Losers will want to documenting their losses so as to seek redress. Inflation numbers are not merely descriptive.
And he has a good metaphor that spells out the type of knowledge represented by economic data:
They are not a radar gun pointed at a speeding car from the side of the road by [a] uniformed police officer. They are more like an improvised speedometer attached to the inside of a ramshackle Max-Max vehicle. There is no fixed outside that any of us can access. You can’t “get off” economic history or “outside it”. And inside the vehicle there is no undisputed authority. Who gets to attach the speedometer, is part of the battle to decide who is in charge. Not only are statistics on “the inside”, we were already in motion when we started rigging them up.
Inflation data are only about 150 years old (although earlier series can be constructed retrospectively). They were part of the process by which nation-states became nation-states.
The post-war Weimar inflation data emerged through a complex process of social negotiation, documented in the piece, that involved the government, employers, and trades unions. The details don’t matter, but the process does:
The history of price statistics in Weimar’s hyperinflation should interest us at this point not because we are at any risk of repeating that inflation, but because it reveals the politics of economic measurement in the raw. Who counts what, for whom, on the basis of which conceptual grid? When are numbers published? Who has the authority to interpret them? Today, a hundred years on, we may be deep in the weeds debating the relative merits of core inflation numbers... these remain the questions that define the politics of economic measurement.
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