Wealth & Money Quote by Martin Feldstein

The sentence is a velvet-gloved defense of economic pain, designed to make hardship sound not just tolerable but responsible. Feldstein’s “some price” is a careful euphemism: in practice it means higher unemployment, shuttered businesses, foregone wage gains, and the political anger that follows. He keeps the human costs abstract and unassigned. No one “loses a job” here; the nation simply “pays.” That passive grammar is doing moral work, laundering distributional conflict into technocratic necessity.

The persuasive move is a time-trade: temporary suffering versus permanent gain. Feldstein is importing a core central-banking story from the post-1970s inflation hangover, when policymakers learned (and then taught) that credibility is everything. If people believe inflation will stay low, wage demands cool, price-setting relaxes, and the economy avoids a self-fulfilling spiral. So the “permanent gain” isn’t only lower prices; it’s restored faith in the rules of the game.

But the line also smuggles in a contested assumption: that the pain is both temporary and “not large” relative to the benefits. That’s true in a representative-agent model; it’s less true for the laid-off worker whose “temporary” becomes a career scar. Feldstein’s intent is to preempt that objection by scaling suffering down and scaling stability up, framing disinflation as a one-time toll paid for a lasting public good. It’s economics as moral narrative: discipline now, order later.