So Japan needs to make a decisive break with its deflationary past. You might think this would be easy. But it isn’t: Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, has been making a real effort, but he has yet to achieve decisive success. And the main reason, I’d argue, is the great difficulty policy makers have in breaking with conventional notions of responsibility.

Respectability, it turns out, can be an economy-killer, and Japan isn’t the only place where this happens.

As I said, you might think that ending deflation is easy. Can’t you just print money? But the question is what do you do with the newly printed money (or, more usually, the bank reserves you’ve just conjured into existence, but let’s call that money-printing for convenience). And that’s where respectability becomes such a problem.

When central banks like the Federal Reserve or the Bank of Japan print money, they generally use it to buy government debt. In normal times this starts a chain reaction in the financial system: The sellers of that government debt don’t want to sit on idle cash, so they lend it out, stimulating spending and boosting the real economy. And as the economy heats up, wages and prices should eventually start to rise, solving the problem of deflation.

These days, however, interest rates are very low in most major economies, reflecting the weakness of investment demand. What this means is that there’s no real penalty for sitting on cash, and that’s what people and institutions do. The Fed has bought more than $3 trillion in assets since 2008; most of the cash it has pumped out there has ended up just sitting in bank reserves.