To see central bankers as congenitally inclined to administer “inflation surprises” does not seem to capture their true character.3 If there is a problem here, it seems more likely to lie in the political interaction of policy-making between governments and central banks and it is best addressed by greater independence, not by imposing a single objective on the central bank.
What about the role of a simple single price objective in anchoring price expectations? A decade or so ago, there was a realistic hope that the clear enunciation of a target for prices would stabilise price expectations. It would have to be said that the experience of the last decade would suggest that expectations are to a very large degree backward-looking.