Nobel laureate and well-known economist Paul Krugman believes that controlling inflation by forcing a recession is like stopping the action on the field until everyone sits back down. “It works, but at a cost,” Krugman tweeted.

What happened: Krugman responded to the French economist in a series of tweets Oliver Blanchard who is also a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Blanchard tweeted that in discussions of inflation and central bank policy, it is often forgotten that inflation is fundamentally the result of the distributional conflict between companies, workers and taxpayers.

“It only stops when the different players are forced to accept the result,” he explained.

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Blanchard elaborated that the source of the conflict could be an economy that is too hot – “In the labor market, workers may be in a stronger position to negotiate higher wages given prices. But in the goods market, firms may also be in a stronger position to raise prices given wages, and so on,” Blanchard wrote.

Answer to Blanchard’s Take on inflation, Krugman repliedand said: “One way to think about inflation is that it’s like a sporting event where everyone gets up to get a better view of what’s happening – which is collectively self-defeating.”

Krugman provided an analogy that says controlling inflation by forcing a recession is like “stopping the action on the field until everyone sits down,” and while it works, it comes at a cost. “Much better if we could get a collective agreement from everyone to sit down without interrupting the game. That’s hard to achieve, but not always impossible,” Krugman tweeted.

Israel’s strategy: Krugman cited the harsh disinflation strategy adopted by the Israeli government in 1985 to reduce inflation by a whopping 500% a year. “The more or less painless Bruno disinflation of 1985 in Israel was pretty much just that: all major parties agreed to stop trying…