An unexpected burst of inflation like the one we’re currently experiencing benefits debtors, at least in the short term, because their interest payments are fixed, while their pay tends to rise in line with prices. Homeowners tend to do well when inflation rises. Inflation is neutral for Social Security recipients because those payments are automatically adjusted for inflation. Unexpected inflation is a clear negative for people who earn a lot of income from bonds. That group tends to be well above average in income, but does include some people who are just getting by.To economists, the worst thing about inflation is not the high prices, but the uncertainty. “The higher the rate, the more variable it is likely to be,” the economist Milton Friedman said in his 1976 Nobel lecture. Businesses are more reluctant to borrow, and banks to lend to them, when neither party knows what will happen to prices. Unfortunately, fighting inflation with aggressive monetary policy can increase, not decrease, uncertainty about the economic outlook.Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, is aware of the risk of inadvertently triggering a recession. He has argued that keeping a lid on inflation prevents it from getting so high that extreme measures are required to stop it. As he knows, the longer today’s high inflation lasts, the greater the risk that people will start to think of it as the new normal.What dismayed economists about the January inflation figure was not just the big price change from a year earlier, but the bigger-than-expected change from December. In the previous two months there were signs that monthly price increases were decelerating. “I was kind of hoping in January it would continue on its decline,” said David Andolfatto, an economist and senior vice president at the St. Louis Fed. “Instead it ticked up a bit.”But Andolfatto said he’s still confident that inflation will trend down in the coming months. How far down, he said, will depend on how much companies are able to pass along higher costs to consumers, how much buying power consumers have, what happens to fiscal policy and whether cheap imports return to holding down goods prices, among other factors.What happens with inflation will also depend on whether workers manage to win higher pay to make up for ground lost to inflation, Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told me. Low unemployment puts workers in a stronger position but isn’t enough, she said. To extract higher pay from their employers they also need a higher minimum wage, protections for organizing labor unions and stronger on-the-job protections, she said.