Is It Time to Panic About Inflation? Ask These 5 Questions First.

Focus on exactly how and why prices are changing over time, and how these shifts might affect you.

To understand why inflation is so worrying to so many people, you could look at price charts for lumber or used cars or New York strip steaks. There is no doubt that the prices of many of the things people buy are rising at an uncomfortably rapid rate. But to really understand why there is a persistent longer-term buzz of inflation concern, you have to wrestle with the ways in which money itself is fundamentally ephemeral. Ultimately, most money is a mere electronic entry in the ledger of a bank. It is worth only what it will buy, and what it will buy changes all the time. Or as the humor publication The Onion once wrote, money is “just a symbolic, mutually shared illusion.”