Results

I have come to use the Google Ngram Viewer as a thesaurus for preferences -- for example, to see whether "thus spake" or "thus spoke" is more commonly used.

Another technique I use is to search for different versions of a concept, partly in quotes, and then just check the number of search results found.

Recently I set up some benchmark searches, in quotes:

About 531,000 results: "demand-pull"

About 426,000 results: "cost-push"

Then I added the word "inflation" to the quoted phrase, and the result-counts fell by more than half:

About 200,000 results: "demand-pull inflation"

About 205,000 results: "cost-push inflation"

I was a little surprised by that. But it guided my decision to omit the word "inflation" from my four search phrases:

About 179,000 results: increase in the cost of production "cost-push"

About 110,000 results: left shift in aggregate supply "cost-push"

About 73,200 results: decrease in aggregate supply "cost-push"

About 31,800 results: maintaining profit margins "cost-push"

The way I learned cost-push -- maintaining profit margins -- is the least observed explanation, only 7½% of the 426,000 results. I was more than a little surprised by that.

 
I couldn't resist reviewing the results. One line caught my eye immediately:

What we have now is clearly cost-push inflation.

That turned out to be from The 1977 Economic Report of the President: Hearings Before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First Session. Part 4: Invited Comments

The line that caught my eye was part of a response from George Terborgh: "Unwinding the Present Inflation".