Inflation and unemployment are two key elements when evaluating an entire economy and it is also easy to obtain such data from the Office for National Statistics when you want to evaluate it. However, the relationship between them is a controversial topic, which economists have been debating for decades. By some famous economists like Paul Samuelson, Milton Freidman etc. to some infamous economists, this topic has received a lot of attention. However, it is this debate that is evolving thinking on the matter. In this essay, the controversial topic will be discussed by examining the opinions of different economists about it based on the timeline. But before we get started, it's worth understanding the terms inflation and unemployment better. Inflation refers to an increase in the general price level within an economy. In simple words, it means that you have to pay more money to get the same amount of goods or services purchased previously. In contrast, the term unemployment is easier to understand. It generally refers to those people who are available to work but cannot find work. And the unemployment rate, which is the percentage of the labor force that is unemployed, is usually used to measure unemployment (Mankiw 1992). The debate on the relationship between inflation and unemployment is mainly based on the famous “Phillips curve”. This curve was first discovered by a New Zealand-born economist called Allan William Phillips. In 1958, AW Phillips published an article “The relation between unemployment and the rate of change of money wages in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957”, in which he showed a negative correlation between inflation and unemployment (Phillips 1958). As shown in Figure 1, when the unemployment rate is low, the inflation rate tends to be high, while when unemployment is high, the inflation rate tends to be low, even negative. Figure 1Phillips CurveTwo years later, economists Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, who is the most influential representative of the Keynesian school, published an article in which he shows the same negative correlation between inflation and unemployment, based on economic data from the United States (Samuelson and Solow 1960).