Each decade drew its own inflation–unemployment cloud

Each decade drew its own inflation–unemployment cloud

Question. Is there one inflation–unemployment trade-off, or one per decade?

• Encoding. Individual quarterly observations are positioned by unemployment and inflation and colored by decade.
• Ordering. No connecting path: file order is not a trajectory through this two-variable space.
• Baseline. Inflation includes a zero reference in the domain; source initial placeholder remains identifiable in the table.
• Scale. Shared linear percentage scales for every decade.

What this design gives up

The graphic discards temporal adjacency. Pooled or grouped proximity is not a causal policy relationship.

Time ordering, policy regimes, revisions, and omitted factors limit a pooled scatter. The source’s initial inflation placeholder is excluded from the pooled calculation. Correlation is not a policy trade-off or causal estimate.