The following unusual graphic is from today’s online Washington Post, as part of a guest opinion piece regarding the real reason for inflation. It was written by Peter Orzag, former director of the Office of Management and Budget and who is also the former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

See for yourself:

This graph is not unusual because it shows supply chain disruption; rather, it is unusual because the vertical axis is ‘number of standard deviations above or below the mean’. OMG!! It looks at first glance like it is showing delivery times of the US supply chain during the pandemic, but nope. I would love to have been in the Editorial conference room to overhear the discussion about whether to run the article with this chart in it or not. I am imagining that it might have gone something like this:

Editor 1: “We have to decide whether to run this one today, and I am in favor. It makes a counterintuitive argument that the Government’s economic stimulus had little to do with inflation. The only way to get people to believe this is to show how unusual the supply chain disruption was. What better way is there than to show the shift during and after the pandemic of the supply chain delivery time population mean, which naturally is expressed in units of standard deviations?”

More senior editor: “Whaaa the fraaack??? Are you kidding? What portion of American news consumers have even heard of standard deviations, no less would understand the point of this chart? I thought we had a bottle of Excedrin in this conference room; this chart is giving me a headache.” (There is a pause while a minion hands the boss the Excedrin, and he gulps two down.) “We all know Biden (or Trump if you prefer) caused the horrible inflation; that’s why there were so many votes for Trump. End of story.”

Editor 1: “But boss. Seriously, this chart is super compelling. Once you understand that a standard deviation is a measure of dispersion from the mean of a normally distributed population, and that 99.7% of the data points always lie within +/-3 standard deviation units regardless of how wide the tails are, you will be utterly convinced! You can see that the population average of the time required to deliver goods to consumers drifted so much longer during the pandemic, and stayed long, that there was statistically no intersection of the tails of the normal population and the pandemic one. It’s 9 sigma! I rest my case.”

More senior editor: “Well, alright then. How can I argue with 9 sigma? I like that there is a mountain peak towards the end of 2022. That’s exactly how I felt about those months. Like I couldn’t breathe the air, it was so thin. Then the excitement of the ride down. And I like that one axis of the chart is years (I know what those are! I have been alive for some of them!) and the other axis is made up of small, single digit numbers, like 1, 3, and 8.

Even better is that the line is a nice crimson-y red, like my alma mater Harvard’s color.”

Editor 1: “Yup, it shows that during the height of the pandemic, when we all shifted from buying services to buying goods, that the suppliers could not keep up with the resulting demand. There was a backlog of Himalayan proportions because shippers acted rationally by raising prices to slow the demand, in order that companies would be able to satisfy customers. Once people were released from the quarantine, things came back to normal, but only after some time. As effectively illustrated by the shift in population means, normalized to variance units.”

More senior editor: “Really? Are you sure it says that?”

Editor 1: “Of course it does.

I vote we print this story in today’s edition, and the sooner the better for the sake of an informed readership.”

More senior editor: “Fine, fine, fine. All in favor of running this piece, raise your hand.”

(Around the room everyone is looking at the senior editor, and as soon as he starts to seem less upset due to the Excedrin kicking in, most of the participants raise their hands about half way.)

More senior editor: “OK, then it runs. God help us all.”

Here is the entire article, for context: https://wapo.st/4hPTJmw. The author’s argument about the causes of inflation is more complex and nuanced that I am presenting, so you can read and decide for yourself. Disclaimer: I totally made up the conference room dialog. It would be fun, though, if it really happened this way.