Inflation and the Family

Jeffrey Degner brings monetary economics to a subject economists rarely touch: the family. Surveying the global retreat from marriage and childbearing, he notes that the standard explanations — job instability, financialization, rising inequality, weakened contracts — all point back to inflationary monetary policy. Drawing on his book Inflation and the Family, he traces how persistent money growth builds an “inflation culture” of debt, short-termism, and Cantillon-effect inequality, then extends the analysis to fiscal and regulatory intervention. His conclusion: all intervention is family intervention, and civil society cannot be restored by the state that eroded it.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.

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