Wealth & Money Quote by William Vickrey

Vickrey’s provocation lands like a slap at the polite table manners of economic policy: stop treating inflation as the ultimate taboo and start treating unemployment as the deeper social emergency. The line is engineered to invert mid-century orthodoxy. By putting “2 percent” next to “10 percent… or even 20 percent,” he forces readers to feel the asymmetry he thinks policymakers ignore: inflation is a broad, often negotiable nuisance; mass joblessness is a targeted trauma that degrades lives, skills, and communities.

The intent isn’t to romanticize inflation. It’s to expose what counts as “responsible” in the eyes of central bankers and budget hawks. Vickrey is smuggling a moral claim into a technocratic debate: a society that accepts unemployment as collateral damage is making a distributional choice, not a neutral one. Inflation spreads costs widely and can be partially indexed away through wage bargains, contracts, and tax policy. Unemployment concentrates costs on the already vulnerable, and the damage compounds - lost income becomes lost mobility, lost networks, lost time.

Context matters. Vickrey is speaking from the era when the Phillips Curve framed a menu of trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, and before the Volcker-era crusade made low inflation a civic religion. His “good bargain” phrasing reads like deliberately blunt classroom heresy: he’s daring students and policymakers to admit what they’re willing to sacrifice - and who they’re willing to sacrifice - for price stability.