This is prompted by the latest post by Steve Williamson, where he reiterates a view he's expressed a few times, that the Fed's [and other central banks'] efforts to keep interest rates pinned at the zero bound, in an effort to push inflation back up to its presumed target, is self-defeating, since low interest rates are typically associated with low inflation. If they want inflation to rise, he argues, the Fed should tighten policy. To illustrate his point, he imagines a hypothetical alien econometrician trying to figure out what happened when Volcker tamed inflation in the early 1980s in the US. Interest rates fell. Ergo, lower interest rates caused lower inflation.