The Unbearable Lightness of the Phillips Curve

Abstract This chapter asks how wages have remained the specter of inflation in central bank monetary policy. Unpacking the relations inscribed within economic models, I trace how labor and capital emerge or are eclipsed as objects of concern and as subject positions from which monetary policy is assembled. By positing an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation, the Phillips Curve has given traction to concerns with wages and employment as threats to price stability, targeting inflation through the tempering of wages while placing profit margins at the margins of concern in monetary policy. Yet the Phillips Curve has not remained a singular device. Charting how iterations of the Phillips Curve have shifted, I argue that this multiplicity is generative, as equivocation between categories—particularly wages and prices, and employment and slack—has enabled a preoccupation with wages in price stabilization to endure despite the demise of organized labor.