If you are an 18-year-old college freshman in the United States, inflation in your lifetime has averaged less than 2 percent. If you are a 30-year-old millennial, you experienced inflation above 5 percent for only one year — when you were in kindergarten, perhaps in the form of the coins in a piggy bank buying fewer pieces of candy the longer they sat unspent.

If, by contrast, you are one of the 17 people who set monetary policy for the United States, you have had a rather different experience. The median age of the Federal Reserve System’s policy-making committee members is 58, meaning all of them were fully formed adults during the double-digit inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s. They know firsthand how it feels when mortgage rates are astronomical and a dollar buys substantially less every year.

The Fed, which this week will weigh whether it is time to raise interest rates after seven years of keeping them near zero, is motivated by a desire to keep inflation around 2 percent. But any decision it makes will follow decades in which inflation has been quiescent and, in the last few years, consistently below that 2 percent target.