Comment by frogamel

This is a really interesting perspective, and made me consider what pushed me to inflate my own prices (my salary) especially aggressively the last few years.

In 2020-2022 my input costs (housing, food) went up ~20%, so I also needed to increase the price of my labor. This means negotiating a promotion or switching jobs, which is a lot of effort. And since I'm putting in that effort anyways, I might as well optimize it and try to get every extra dime, which ended being more than a 20% increase.

In non-inflationary periods, it's not even worth the effort and stress to optimize my salary like this.

I imagine the same was true for a lot of businesses in the supply chain. If you're some SAAS company, raising prices 20% requires renegotiating contracts, dealing with angry clients, etc. So if you're going to do that anyways you might as well try to raise it even more.