A PITFALL OF ARGUING WITH FRIENDS.

A PITFALL OF ARGUING WITH FRIENDS. Dick and Chris Weisfelder visited recently and after dinner Dick and I sat down to argue about politics. To our consternation, we kept stumbling into areas where we were in agreement. I think if we saw each other more often, we would be able to avoid subjects where we agree. Joe Foley and I used to argue regularly about whether inflation was good. He would point out that overly ambitious inflation-fighting policies increased unemployment and reduced growth over an economic cycle. I would argue that inflationary expectations were long lasting and that inflation interfered with the workings of the price system. Then one day we discovered that if we quantified our opinions, he would be willing to live with inflation of four per cent a year, whereas I would look to three per cent as the maximum (the discovery was over ten years ago and I imagine our numbers might be different today). This discovery brought an end to our arguments. Every so often, one of us would bring up the subject and the other would sadly point out that basically we were in agreement.