A little over a week ago, I tried to make the case for a more relaxed view of the current inflation situation than might be gleaned from the alarmist analyses emanating from top Fed officials and some prominent commentators — not least Jason Furman, former chief economist in the Obama administration and a notable voice of inflation hawkery. Responding to new data released late last month showing a sizable jump in the core inflation rate in January, Furman published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “To Fight Inflation, Fed Tightening Should Go Faster and Further.”

My basic argument, as Eric Levitz of New York Magazine efficiently summed it up in a tweet, was that, “looking beyond a month-to-month time horizon, wage growth more or less determines price growth [and] wage growth is rapidly decelerating.”

I showed, first, that the correlation between wage growth and inflation, though not very impressive within a one-month or three-month timespan, becomes extremely strong at longer time horizons: the R-squared (i.e. the strength of the correlation) rises to 0.63 at a one-year horizon and 0.78 by four years.