Inflation erased U.S. income gains last year

Do people in the U.S. have a good understanding of the causes of inflation?

Not even most economists do, by analogy to how opaque the questions of lifting bodies and rayleigh scattering are to physicists.

Yeah no, economists and a lot of people understand the the causes of inflation. There are economists who are paid very well to not understand it though, and such positions are often high in the government and financial sector hierarchies.

The only people certain about economics are the kind of folks who run around on HN talking about "printing money". Too lazy to look up your post history to see which camp you belong in.

But no, macroeconomics is understood from sound general principles, but it is not a robust predictive theory. The analogy upthread to Navier-Stokes is apt.