Inflation is inflation is inflation, right? And consumers do not like inflation.

The Trump administration says the government shutdown means the cancellation of the main inflation report for October. The September inflation report, however, showed that tariffs were pushing up consumer prices; furniture prices were up 0.4% and clothing prices were up 0.7%. 

But could it be that the present inflation we’re experiencing — brought on, in part, by President Donald Trump’s import duties — feels different? That people are less reactive to climbing prices when there’s a sense that other countries are paying a cost too?

Alex Imas is a University of Chicago economist and co-author of a newly updated edition of a noted primer on behavioral economics called "The Winner's Curse." Imas recently joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio to discuss. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: People hated — hated! — the inflation we saw during the pandemic, supply chain snafus, and the stimulus payments from the government to households during those years. You'd think prices are prices, inflation is inflation. If we hated 2022 inflation, we'll hate 2026 tariff inflation in the very same way. What is your understanding about how humans really work tell you about my proposition that inflation is inflation.

Alex Imas: You would think that price increases are price increases. You know, money is fungible. If I have less money in my wallet, I don't like it, and it doesn't matter why it happened. So my research shows that tariffs are special, because tariffs are a specific policy tool. People have this attitude where they like consuming things that other people want but can't have. We call this "superiority seeking." We have a lot of data basically implicating this attitude as being held by a large, large portion of the population, and the price increase that you're paying for this consumption could actually be kind of the price of entry into this new regime. So, you know, "Prices are going up, but I'm willing to take the brunt of it, as long as I know, you know, countries that have taken advantage of America now don't have access to U.S. goods." Maybe, given the narrative around the tariffs, it's going to take more than that to make them unpopular.

Brancaccio: I mean, another word for "narrative" is "spin," right? I mean, policymakers and how they talk about something like this is crucial to building the narrative.

Imas: Yeah, precisely. And something like tariffs, because they have such a policy component on top of the whole tax revenue component, they're very prone to spinning it because of theoretically — as they've been discussed in the past, as they're being discussed now — this is a move to improve the economy for generations. Now, my guess is that's not going to be the case. Again, looking back at the last round of tariffs, they increased prices quite a bit, and they did not move to domestic manufacturing almost at all. So the data suggests that's not going to be borne out.

Brancaccio: Now, consumers who are OK with tariffs because they see a long-term plan here that might bring back American jobs may not be less in favor of the price increases if they start to detect greedflation, gouging on the part of companies raising their prices, not because of tariffs, but because they can get away with it in an inflationary environment.

Imas: And that goes right into this idea of "fairness." If firms are seen as taking advantage of the circumstances. And for example, let's say there's a firm that isn't really, you know, exposed to tariffs, but it's also kind of keeping up with inflation that it sees out there just to get a higher profit, if this is well known, that firm is going to be punished. At least, that's what the data suggests.