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It's rare that I disagree with James Surowiecki, and it's not exactly like we're in a fight, but his column "In Praise of Inflation" (Sept. 27 New Yorker) kind of misses some stuff:

So why is inflation unpopular? The biggest reason, Shiller found, was simply that people believe higher prices reduce their standard of living and make them “poorer.” This is obviously true for people living on fixed incomes or off their savings, but for everyone else, as many studies have shown, inflation translates into higher incomes as well as higher prices, and it typically doesn’t have much of an effect either way on people’s standard of living. (After all, we’ve had sixty years of inflation in the postwar era, yet we’re much more prosperous than we were in 1950.) That’s not how it feels, though: myopia leads us to focus on how much more we have to pay, rather than on how much more we earn. Inflation also sets off other alarm bells. It often increases uncertainty, which most people are averse to, and, because it can be described as “weakening” a country’s currency, it affects morale. Shiller found that people associated rising inflation with dwindling social cohesion. There’s also a moral dimension: we connect inflation to a lack of discipline and failure to live within our means. The most striking thing about Shiller’s study was that no one surveyed mentioned any possible benefits of inflation, even though to Americans currently besieged by debts it would be a lifesaver.

He's half right, or maybe even more than that, but does inflation really still translate into higher incomes? Has crazy inflation in health-care costs increased anyone's salary but those who work in that industry? Or have you just felt a bigger and bigger bite of your paycheck gone? Banking on getting a raise is what's out of date, yo, which makes any inflation (delivery charges on pizza included) feel outrageous. Some of it's psychological and some of it's real.

Also, in the same issue, you can't read Schjeldahl on Pipilotti Rist, but it is one of the more beautiful pieces he's written lately. Witness:

Rist regularly invites appreciate contemplation of the body's nether regions sensuously but without overt sexuality, which would disrupt her work's socially inclusive, cordial charm. She diffuses eroticism to the separate senses and the thinking mind--not that thought is allowed much traction. There's a steady state of wonderment at having a body right here, right now, in a world of bodies and of things that bodies enjoy (water, flowers and fruit, other bodies, mud). Imagine, as Rist makes easy in the show's main room, being a sheep in a lush meadow entirely surrounded, as far as you can see, by what you like to eat. Life surely vitiates such sublime contentment most of the time, but numbness to it seems an optional tragedy.

This is sort of how I feel every time the tea olives start blooming and all I want to do is walk around with my nose wide open and smell like Ferdinand.