I’m increasingly seeing commentary to the effect that falling inflation isn’t enough for voters — they want falling prices, too. Lisa Cook, who’s on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, made this point yesterday. Often the commentators will go on to note that deflation would be dangerous, and conclude that voters have unrealistic expectations.

The greater error, though, seems to me to be the one Cook and the commentators are making: treating the fall in inflation from a great height as a big accomplishment. You don’t have to want inflation to go negative to be dissatisfied. One might reasonably want inflation to be below the target rate for a while to make up for the above-target inflation we have experienced. In reality, though, inflation remains above the Fed’s target rate of two percent per year. The gap between the price level we were implicitly promised, and the actual price level keeps rising — adding to the evidence that monetary policy remains too loose.

I suspect that Americans would be significantly happier about prices if, during the last few months, they had been rising at, say, a one percent annualized rate. (And they’d be happier in general if real wages had risen, instead of fallen, since January 2021.) There is, of course, a limit to how much precision, nuance, and coherence one can expect from polls on inflation. But the public’s basic attitude seems to me to be justified. Cook’s, on the other hand, seems unjustifiably complacent.