Since the end of the pandemic, there has been scarcely a topic more unpopular in American society than inflation. Unaccustomed to large price level increases, Americans were thrown metaphorically back into the 1970s, when inflation ran rampant. Inflation, Americans began to feel, has many negative consequences, but its cause is often overlooked and misinterpreted. Worse yet, this confusion leads to terrible policies that further hinder Americans’ bottom lines. On August 7, 2024, current vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris stated in a campaign rally: “When I am president, it will be my day-one priority to fight to bring down prices. I will take on the big corporations that engage in illegal price gouging. I will take on corporate landlords that unfairly raise rents on working families. I will take on Big Pharma and cap the cost of prescription drugs for all Americans” (posted on X social media account @KamalaHQ). All her proposals (and implicit claims) are tackled in this book. The War on Prices is a great remedy against the mistakes of the public and of public officials when they think about and act on inflation.

The War on Prices is a compilation of essays that address inflation and its consequences from three perspectives: the macroeconomic, the microeconomic and what one might call the PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) perspective. With one section dedicated to each perspective, theory and reality meet in each of the twenty-four chapters to provide a near complete picture of the recent American experiment with inflation. Moreover, several chapters are dedicated to tackling economic myths, such as discrimination and the gender gap in wages (chapter 21), a “pink tax” on women-targeted products (chapter 22) and the claim that minimum wages are powerful tools towards poverty reduction (chapter 16).

A key contribution of Ryan Bourne’s edited book is that the “logic” on inflation is taken to completion, to paraphrase Oliver Williamson. The reader will develop an appreciation for three things: first, that inflation continues to be, as Milton Friedman frequently stated, “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”; second, that the cause—an increase in the money supply—rather than the symptoms of inflation need be addressed; and third, that public and political perceptions of inflation and the role of prices is often in direct conflict with what economists think. This is not to say that economists are always right, but that understanding economic arguments, both in theory and application, will make for better policy outcomes. The chapters in this book do just that. They allow the reader to learn how economists think about inflation and prices.

This work is most timely. Readers will find almost every chapter addresses a concern or topic they have recently seen in the media. The first chapter of each section provides an introduction to the perspectives and theories found in each section. Part 1 deals with inflation from the macroeconomic perspective. Expect a few, easy to follow equations (though members of the Federal Reserve might struggle with them on occasion). Part 2 takes on a microeconomic approach to our understanding of how prices work, what they are and their role in a well-functioning market economy. If you don’t know yet, you will learn why economists across the board not only appreciate but defend a free pricing system. Part 3 then handles some complex questions about prices: what prices truly reflect and what and how to value things (really, anything). Nothing in the book will feel outdated, except the ideas of Karl Marx which Deirdre Nansen McCloskey so aptly refutes in chapter 18.

A reoccurring theme throughout the chapters and sections is the use of price controls to fight inflation. The first chapter, written by Pierre Lemieux, makes clear that targeted price controls can lower inflation simply by forcing prices to remain the same. He then develops a more subtle, but just as important point: that price controls distort relative prices and thus market allocation mechanisms. It can be difficult to disentangle absolute from relative price changes and so inflation indexes are imperfect measures of changes to the overall price level. And since price controls mess with relative prices and monetary policy with aggregate demand, even academics and policy experts have a hard time separating short-term shocks (“transitory inflation”) from long-term inflation, which is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

Other chapters address common misperceptions about the historical successes of price controls, such as during World War II (chapter 5) and from ancient times (oh, how long can a bad idea persist) (chapter 7). Since World War II’s price controls are often invoked as proof that freezing prices can work, the reader will gain significantly because by learning that even when the trade-offs appear to be largely in favor of such a wartime sacrifice, the subsequent sacrifices make the analysis at best unclear. Rationing, loss of product quality and time, and a move towards non-monetary compensation for labor that persists to this day in America, such as employer-provided benefits, were all consequences of World War II’s price controls that do not show up in the (frozen) inflation numbers.

In several chapters, the work of a particular group of scholars, spearheaded by University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Isabella Weber, is discussed and never in a good light, for the right reasons. In 2021, the Guardian published an op-ed by the German professor in which she defends “strategic price controls” to fight inflation. Whether firms are behaving collusively or because of supply issues, worry not, she argues, “strategic price controls” worked in World War II and can work to ameliorate post-COVID inflation worries. Yet, as Brian Albrecht shows in chapter 3, greedflation cannot explain nor cause inflation. Aggregate supply-and-demand changes explain price-level movements, and higher profits are an accounting consequence of higher prices. While supply chain issues were severe for some industries during the pandemic, they, too, cannot explain the rise of inflation we saw in its aftermath (again, always and everywhere a monetary you-know-what), which David Beckworth addresses in chapter 4.

The whole second section of the book (chapters 7 through 17) painstakingly reviews the outcomes of different forms of price controls, both theoretically and practically. At best, price controls make a useful statistic, the price level, meaningless or are a zero-sum redistribution game controlled by bureaucrats. At worst (and as usual), price controls generate faster inflation rates after they are lifted as frozen prices catch up (chapter 5, on how prices rose faster after price controls were lifted after World War II than they otherwise would have). They also create black markets (chapter 17, on black markets for organs), lower product and service quality and quantity (chapter 8, on the effects of rent control in housing markets), raise prices in unregulated markets (chapter 12, on the effects of Medicare pricing and private insurance costs), discourage innovation (chapter 17, on the role of dynamic pricing in ride-sharing apps), lower consumer and producer surplus (chapters 9, 10 and 11, on 1970s oil controls, payday-loan prohibitions and junk fees, respectively), worsen shortages (chapters 13 and 14, on the effects of anti-price gouging laws and on the lack of tradable water rights in parts of the American West) and let people die (chapter 17, on the prohibition of kidney sales).

The entire book is worth a read, though the reader can easily target chapters. If they are interested in specific markets, they will benefit immensely from Bourne’s discussion of junk fees in chapter 11, Michael Cannon’s investigation into the effects of Medicare price fixing in chapter 12 and Liya Palagashvili’s analysis of dynamic pricing in chapter 24. Undoubtedly, the reader will come out with a better understanding of the benefits of free pricing systems, which take advantage of F. A. Hayek’s “spontaneous order” to transmit information and incentivize behavior, and the costs of restricting price mobility. Again, the book is timely because it tackles how real pricing policies are enacted in America today: policies now tend to restrict large movements in particular prices rather than freeze prices across the board. What an indictment that is, that price control proponents themselves know that their policies do not work. If they were to take the logic to completion (or perhaps read The War on Prices), they would be hard pressed to conclude anything different than what these twenty-four chapters demonstrate.

This is not to say that the reader need agree with every conclusion in the book. There were a few instances in which the evidence provided in certain chapters felt insufficient to fully convince a skeptic. And that is fine; at a minimum, the skeptic will be better equipped with theory and evidence that go against their mode of thinking. To most, and that is the book’s greatest achievement, it sheds light (from multiple directions) on a major economic problem of recent years, not yet fully solved, as the news today and undoubtedly tomorrow will be filled with stories about prices.