One day last June, my eye fell upon the headline to a New York Times column by Paul Krugman—as sometimes happens in spite of my best efforts, for the sake of my blood pressure, to prevent it. “The Week Inflation Panic Died,” it read.

Might it, said I to myself, be just a trifle premature for Mr. Krugman to be proclaiming victory over “inflation panic” less than six months from the inauguration of President Biden and the beginning of the potentially inflationary spending program that his administration had at that time only just embarked upon? True, in the article itself the famously Nobel Prize–winning economist was a bit more circumspect, but only a bit. Did it not occur to him that these dismissive words about inflation might come back to haunt him—perhaps even before Mr. Biden had completed his first year in office?

With climate change, the predictions are of the blackest pessimism, but with inflation they are resolutely optimistic.

And then it struck me that that must be the point. Professor Krugman needed to claim vindication for his airy dismissal of “inflation panic” while he could still do so with some degree of plausibility. He knew his own words would never be quoted against him, at least not by anybody whose opinion he would need to care about, or even to notice, six months down the road when they might have been—as in fact they now are—proven to be patently false.