Inflation, Politics, and Social Change.

The article discusses issues related to inflation, politics and social change. Inflation at a very high rate, or even at a moderate rate for a long period of time, is closely linked to sociopolitical crisis. This paper stems from a long-term, comparative and multi-disciplinary project to investigate inflation as well as stagnation processes in several industrialized countries. The games societal actors play, and the ways in which they play these games reflect the constraints and loop-holes, the reward and penalty structures into which the social system locks them. The complex, modern system of institutionalized income distribution games--at the sector, national, and international levels--tends to produce inflation and unstable development. At the same time, it limits the capacity of most societal actors--to understand the nature of the social system and the games they are locked into playing and to develop means or strategies to intelligently restructure the social system and the "rules of the game" whereby social decisions and transactions are carried out.