Sorry Popper, but inflation and deflation are most emphatically NOT the same thing. In fact they are polar opposites. Inflation is an increase in the supply of money over and above the growth of productivity in the economy. You have that right. This comes about by debasement of the currency, as in Roman times when they alloyed lead and tin into the silver and gold coinage, or comes about by
increases in the amount of debt, as happens in modern economies that depend on foat money. Debt is money, to an economist. The borrower has the money, and the lender
thinks that he too has the money, because he
thinks he can demand it back from you at any time. So the both go their merry way, until suddenly the lender realizes, "Oh, $@&x!, that loan ain't ever gonna be paid back!" The value the lender
thought he had, i.e. the "money" created by his half of that loan, simply vanishes. THAT is deflation - a
shrinkage of the money supply, usually due to debt bubbles bursting. In that scenario, prices for material goods fall because nobody has the money to buy them. After the Revolutionary war is an excellent case in point. The economy had been blown up by the issuance of paper money, which suddenly became worthless as colony after colony repudiated it, when they found that they could not tax the farmers enough to pay it off. The amount of gold and silver in circulation was small. Farmers could not get their hands on any, so many of them were forced into bankruptcy, and when the sheriffs went to auction off their goods, the prices were pitiful, because nobody had any gold or silver to buy with. And THAT, by the way, was the primary reason that we got a Constitutional Convention, and our beloved Consitution.
Sorry for the long response, but before I became an enjineer, I was an economist