The world of central banking panics when the price level is flat or threatens to fall. Surely a falling price level would bring about calamity!
George Selgin takes on the conventional wisdom in terms that the conventions can understand. He presumes the existence of central banking and money management in this monograph to address the core question of what norms the monetary planners should follow. In doing so, he addresses the greatest misnomer of them all: that prices must never fall in aggregate.
With relentless argument and powerful rhetoric and analysis, he makes the case not for a price-level norm but a productivity norm that permits a falling price level as we saw under the gold standard. He says that this is not incompatible with rising productivity but rather is implied by it. Especially striking is how his case takes on not only Keynesian assumptions but also the monetarist ones about price-level stability.
This monograph, as influential as it has been in undermining dominant assumptions about central-bank policy, has long been out of print. The Mises Institute has cooperated with the Institute of Economic Affairs to bring out this new printing of a technical but very important study.
The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy