Phillips Curve Explorer: Inflation vs. Unemployment

This simulator renders the expectations-augmented Phillips curve as a real 3D trajectory: unemployment along one axis, inflation along another, and elapsed quarters receding into depth. Push the demand-stimulus slider and unemployment falls below its natural rate — inflation rises above what people expected, sliding the economy down the current blue short-run curve. But adaptive expectations mean people revise what they expect next quarter based on what inflation just did, which shifts that blue curve upward each tick. Hold the stimulus and the amber trajectory spirals outward toward ever-higher inflation for the same unemployment rate; release it and the economy drifts back toward the vertical red long-run curve at the natural rate. A supply-shock slider reproduces 1970s-style stagflation, where unemployment and inflation rise together.