What inflation disrupts?

Jeanne Lazarus (1)

1 CSO - Centre de sociologie des organisations (Sciences Po, CNRS)

Talking about money means talking about practices, morals, policies, the banking system, the social system, families, inequalities, poverty, wealth, measure, excess, or lack. However, most often, money is approached as a fixed point around which individuals, societies, banks, or policies move. Inflation jeopardizes this fixity in several ways: the value of saved money decreases or even collapses when the value of goods and services rises. Old price scales are no longer valid: everything increases, but not everything increases at the same speed, so that the relationships between things, between goods, and even between people, are in flux. Two attitudes then coexist: on the one hand, clinging to the old landscape of currency and prices, trying to make sense of what is happening; on the other, attempting to understand the new landscape and navigate with these new rules that have not yet been mastered.

Mots clés: inflation; money; justice; monetary landscape

Domaines: Sociologie; Economies et finances

Jeanne Lazarus. What inflation disrupts?: A comment on “Inflation – Pragmatics of money and inflationary sensoria” by Federico Neiburg. Economic Sociology (European Electronic Newsletter), 2023, 24 (3), pp.18-22. ⟨hal-04272688⟩