Inflation 2021 research

Inflation is on the rise my life – how about yours?

Another way to test them is to just send out a bunch of cars to drive themselves everywhere,
without asking for permission, and see what happens. If they all do great, then you announce
“hey we have perfect self-driving cars, they’ve been driving everywhere for months now with no
crashes, aren’t we great?” And then regulators come to you and say “wait, you can’t sell these
self-driving cars, we need to study and test them for a few more years,” and you go to the press
and say “these regulators are holding up progress, people will die while they refuse to approve
our safe self-driving cars,” and you will not be wrong, and the press and the public will be on
your side and you will steamroll the regulators.

On the other hand, if you send out those cars to drive themselves everywhere and they all crash
and kill a bunch of people, that will be bad! You will be in bad trouble. “It’s better to ask
forgiveness than to ask permission,” you will say, but this is not quite right; maybe it is better
to announce success  and then smugly add “sorry we didn’t tell you first,” but it is strictly worse
to fail catastrophically and apologize. If you are going to fail it is better to ask permission,
because forgiveness will not be forthcoming. If you are going to succeed, sure, it is better to ask
forgiveness. “There’s nothing to forgive, you’re perfect, you little scamp,” everyone will reply.

If you are doing some bold novel thing, you probably do not know, ex ante, if you will succeed
or fail. Therefore you do not know, ex ante, if you should ask permission or forgiveness, if you
should follow the law or not. But if you are the founder and chief executive officer of a company
whose goal is to do some bold novel thing, you have been selected and encouraged precisely for
your borderline-crazy optimism and self-confidence. You can’t do impossible things unless you
first believe that you can, etc.

If you are certain that you will succeed brilliantly in all your endeavors, then often the optimal
strategy will sometimes be to ignore the law, or at least the parts of the law that stand in the way
of your vision. Not, like, the objectively optimal strategy, but the strategy that you
consider optimal given your subjective certainty that everything will work out for you.
The official inflation rate hit 2.2 per cent in March on a year-over-year basis, double the rate of
February. Where I’m seeing inflation is in food, restaurant take-out in particular. I will not tell
you what I paid recently to have a bowl of ramen delivered to where I live. Meanwhile, a
contractor I know was marvelling a few weeks back about how raw materials like lumber have
jumped in price.

Where are you seeing inflation? I’ll report back on where the inflation hotspots are. The
information may help you plan your household spending in a way that dekes around items that
are rising in price.