Our research, published in June 2024, used data on the racial composition of drivers on every street in Chicago. We then compared who is driving on roads with who is being ticketed by the city’s speed cameras and who is being stopped by the Chicago police.

Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.

For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54% of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70% of police stops.

On roadways where half of the drivers are white, white drivers account for around half of automated citations – and less than 20% of police stops.

One can’t really blame a politician for lying about a fundamental fact, any more than one can punish a dog for drinking out of the toilet. It’s what they do.

But Vance’s misstatements point to an important feature of Americans’ thinking about inflation in recent years: We haven’t understood it from the moment it first appeared in early 2021. We still don’t. But no one should feel ashamed, because economists and policymakers have gotten it wrong too.

Let’s start with the most fundamental debate among the policymakers: whether inflation would be “transitory” or long-lasting. The Federal Reserve first used the term in a policy statement in April 2021, after the annualized inflation rate had climbed to 2.6%. (“Inflation has risen, largely reflecting transitory factors.”)

As Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell recollected in a speech last month, “the good ship Transitory was a crowded one, with most mainstream analysts and advanced-economy central bankers on board.” Beginning in October 2021, however, “the data turned hard against the transitory hypothesis. Inflation rose and broadened out from goods into services. It became clear that the high inflation was not transitory, and that it would require a strong policy response.”

The “transitory” camp was ridiculed as Pollyannaish. The “strong policy response” Powell referred to was the Fed’s raising of short-term interest rates 11 times, a total of 5.25 percentage points, from March 2022 through July 2023.

Yet in retrospect, team transitory was right.