Inflation is mentally taxing

See Americans Really, Really Hate Inflation—and That’s a Big Problem for the Fed by Justin Lahart of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Recent survey work conducted by Harvard University economist Stefanie Stantcheva and fellow researchers has underscored how much people dislike inflation. They found, for example, that people on average view a one percentage-point increase in the inflation rate as twice as bad as a one percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate. (The Labor Department on Friday reported that the May unemployment rate was 4%. Were that to rise to 5%, the ranks of the unemployed would swell by 1.7 million.)

Survey respondents’ reasons for disliking inflation weren’t just based on worries about rising prices eating into their buying power, but by a view that inflation is mentally taxing. Dealing with a straitened budget exacts a psychological toll as well as a financial one.

“It’s also an issue of complexity,” said Stantcheva. “Even if you didn’t tighten budget standards, inflation still requires you to rethink things all the time, to rebudget things, and it is basically a big cognitive load.”"

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When workers were paid twice a day and given half-hour shopping breaks (Germany, 1923) 

By mid-1923 workers were being paid as often as three times a day. Their wives would meet them, take the money and rush to the shops to exchange it for goods. However, by this time, more and more often, shops were empty. Storekeepers could not obtain goods or could not do business fast enough to protect their cash receipts. Farmers refused to bring produce into the city in return for worthless paper. The requirements to calculate and recalculate commercial transactions in the billions and trillions made it practically impossible to do business in paper Marks