Would you be really scared of very high future inflation? I would be. Would you be saying that central banks should stop printing so much money, even if it did mean that aggregate demand is too low right now? I think I would be.

And suppose you knew that central banks had been printing very large amounts of money recently, because of special circumstances. Which they have. And suppose you thought that those special circumstances wouldn't last forever. Which they probably won't.

Suppose, just suppose, that you believed that printing money was irreversible, or just very hard to reverse. So central banks could increase the supply of base money by printing money, but could not (or could not easily) reduce the supply of base money again by burning money.

Now macroeconomists know that my original premise is very probably false. Central banks have been printing money and using it to buy bonds. And if they want to they can easily sell those bonds again and burn the money they get in exchange for those bonds.

But most people are not macroeconomists. Normal people, even intelligent educated people, don't understand very much about monetary policy. So they might not know that. "Printing money" sounds like "helicopter money", and helicopter money really is hard to reverse, especially if you want to reverse it quickly. Normal people may be very unclear on the distinction between open market purchases of bonds (which is what central banks have been doing, and which is easily reversible by open market sales of bonds), and helicopter money (which can only be reversed by raising taxes to take money away from people).

"Printing money" is easy to understand, even though it sounds like a decidely suspect thing to do. But how the hell do central banks put the printing presses into reverse gear? That might not be at all obvious to any normal person. And any normal person, who thinks that printing presses don't have a reverse gear, might very reasonably be very concerned about the very large amounts of money central banks have been printing recently.

Of course, if printing presses really didn't have a reverse gear, and everyone knew that, then the rational expectations equilibrium would mean that central banks wouldn't have needed to have printed anywhere near as much money. But normal people might not know that either.

The assumption of strong-form rational expectations is a dodgy assumption. It is an especially dodgy assumption when applied to explaining why normal people want the macroeconomic policies that they do. Because normal people don't understand much about macro. (If they did, I would be unemployed.)

How well does this very simple theory work empirically to explain why some normal people are opposed to printing money? How many is "some"? How much empirical "oomph" does this theory have? I have no idea. But it does fit the facts that people would be especially concerned about inflation now, and less concerned about inflation in the past, even though actual inflation was higher in the past than it is now. Because central banks weren't printing so much money in the past.

What do you think? (And, for once, the less economics you know, the better qualified you are to answer that question!)