Your blog just has a bunch of charts showing that high interest rates are correlated with high inflation and gets the direction of causality wrong. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the correlation exists because governments respond to high inflation with high interest rates? Not because the latter causes the former?
Is there a name for this general type of fallacy where defect A results in mitigating response B, but people see the correlation and wrongly conclude that B causes A instead? Examples:
You claim without argument that Blair Fix gets the direction of the causality wrong. In fact he talks about both directions and argues for his interpretation.
Nope, he has correctly identified that the author has committed the fallacy of confusing cause and effect. Countries literally have formal policies of raising interest rates when inflation rises, ergo interest rates tend to be high when inflation is high. Why do they do this? Because higher interest rates are prescribed as a cure for inflation. And because it has repeatedly succeeded, over time, in bringing inflation back down again.
So his cargo cult "experiment" proves absolutely nothing because his results are exactly what is expected, just as a doctor would also be unsurprised to discover that a someone with a snide tone about medicine and a middle school grasp of statistics had reached the remarkable conclusion that patients with prescriptions tended to be less healthy than those without.
That blog's not exactly an improvement to his argument. He tries to dismiss the evidence that [nominal] interest rate changes have a lagged effect on inflation by positing that the interest rate drops are instead caused by a secular "inflation cycle"[1]
Trouble is, there hasn't been any secular "inflation cycle" in the last 30ish years in developed countries that have adopted the policy of managing inflation by downregulating it with interest rate changes. Either you accept that the orthodox policy of announcing that inflation will be managed with interest rate rises has been remarkably successful at containing inflation, or you're scrambling for an alternative explanation for why it appears to have been so successful that doesn't use "inflation cycles". It's certainly telling that he uses hypothetical data to illustrate this theory, and then since the real world time series are so unhelpful to his argument he has to chuck hundreds of data points from different countries, years and interest rate policy regimes into a graph where most of the data points sit near the origin[2] and draw conclusions from the outliers!
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Blair Fix hasn't disproved pretty much the one thing economists who fiercely hate each others' theoretical models and policy recommendations came to consensus on as established fact with a graph which showed exactly the results people familiar with the literature - which Fix clearly isn't - would all expect to see.
As the patient group all went into remission for three decades, it's not even as persuasive a statistical argument as the one for drugs being the cause of terminal illness
[1]ironically, the most plausible explanation for a tendency towards inflation being cyclical as opposed to steady or tending to accelerate would be countercyclical downward pressure on money supply from the Fisher Effect on market credit prices
[2]the key bit being that most of the points sit near the origin because the policy has been so successful...
So they have deliberately decided to pay out interest by creating money in an attempt to reduce inflation.
Still think putting up interest rates stops prices rising?[0]
[0]: https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/02/04/do-high-inter...