Inflation Is Running at Half the Rate It Was, and the Country Is Exactly as Furious as Before

THE STATEHOUSE DESK — I have a chart. I want to establish that first, because everything I am about to tell you rests on the chart, and the chart is the only thing in this office that has never lied to me. The chart shows two lines. The top line is inflation, and it is coming down. The bottom line is how angry people are about inflation, and it is a flat line, the kind of flat you get on a heart monitor, in the part of the show where someone says the thing nobody wants to hear.

The data is not in dispute. Prices are rising at roughly half the rate they were. My model confirms this, and my model, I will remind you, has correctly predicted zero elections in its operating history, which I regard as a strong baseline. A model that is always wrong is at least reliable. You can set your watch by it, as long as you set it to the opposite time.

So here is the finding, stated without hedging, because I do not hedge: the number went down and the feeling did not move. I ran the correlation. There is no correlation. The two lines on my chart are not in a relationship. They have never met. They do not follow each other on anything. One of them is doing math and the other one is doing memory, and memory does not care what the math says, because memory is still standing at the register from eighteen months ago, holding a carton of eggs, making a face.

That is the thing the number people keep missing. Inflation is a rate. Anger is a level. A rate can fall while a level stays exactly where it was, the way a car can slow down while still being very far from home. “It’s decelerating” is a true sentence that has never once comforted a passenger. You do not thank the driver for going from ninety to forty-five. You ask why you are still on this road.

I polled it, of course. I poll everything. The margin of error is four points, which I mention because I am legally required to and because it is the only humility I am permitted. The poll found that a majority of people believe prices are still going up, and a majority of people are correct, because prices are still going up — just slower. “Slower” is not a direction anyone has ever celebrated at the grocery store. Nobody has ever looked at a receipt and said “ah, the second derivative.” The second derivative does not go in the cart. The second derivative does not have a price. You cannot eat the second derivative, and if you could, it would cost more than it did last year.

My editor asked whether this means the anger will eventually come down too, once people “adjust to the new normal.” I charted that. The chart laughed at me. People do not adjust to a new normal; they relabel it “the way things are now and I’m still mad about it,” which is a longer phrase and a permanent one. The new normal is just the old anger with better financial footing.

So I will report it as I always do, as gospel, because a reporter who hedges is a reporter who has stopped trusting his own chart. The number is down. The country is not. The two facts are both true and they are not speaking, and my model — zero for everything, proudly, a strong baseline — predicts they never will. I would put money on that, except prices.