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Seth Ackerman is an editor at Jacobin.
Over the past year, the sources of inflation have shifted dramatically: rather than rapid income growth, the main driver now is a lull in productivity growth — a problem the Fed’s interest rate hikes can’t do anything to solve and that is probably temporary anyway.
The tendency of some modern-day Marxists to pit reform against revolution is diametrically opposed to the vision of Karl Marx himself.
Since Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, some commentators have been waking up to the need for a socialization of deposit-taking banking. They’re right — but the same logic leads to a more radical conclusion: a fully socialized capital market, with no private banks.
After stripping out mismeasured housing prices, core inflation had its biggest 12-month drop since the massive disinflation of the early 1980s. Larry Summers continues to be wrong about inflation.
In the 2002–3 run-up to war, mainstream media outlets systematically suppressed evidence that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They couldn’t have gotten away with it in the age of Twitter.
Wage growth has been experiencing a historic slowdown. If that trend holds up, inflation is on track to get within half a percentage point of the Fed’s 2% target level by this time next year. But will inflation hawks be willing to take yes for an answer?
Last week’s inflation data prompted an outpouring of alarmism and calls for the Fed to squeeze the economy even harder. Here’s why the doomsaying is wrong.
During the ’50s-to-’70s debate on inflation, left Keynesians like Joan Robinson, who strongly supported trade unionism, saw it as a key cause of high inflation, while Milton Friedman and the monetarists, who hated unions, insisted they weren’t to blame for it.
We tend to associate the inflation problem with the 1970s. But it was years earlier, in the era of Sputnik and Elvis, that the world first woke up to the reality of chronically rising prices. We’re still coping with that episode’s wrongheaded “lessons” today.
The “wage-price spiral” was the distinctively destructive form that inflation took in the 20th century. It’s unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon.
In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes built a new theory of inflation that sought to reckon with the proletariat’s recent and explosive entry onto the stage of history.
With price growth trending down over the past year despite a strong labor market, it’s looking more and more like Larry Summers was wrong about inflation after all. It’s time to revisit the great inflation debate of 2021–2022.
The Fed is now considering moves to tamp down inflation that risk spiking unemployment. Supporters of the idea are claiming that inflation itself is bad for workers because it "eats away at real wages." They're wrong.
Throughout the inflationary years of the 1970s, nearly half of Americans saw rising prices as the most important problem facing the country. Today, despite the best efforts of inflation alarmists, only 5 percent of Americans think it is.
A venerable theory about people’s political values is making a comeback: the theory of “postmaterialism.” But despite what you may have heard, the theory doesn’t say class politics is doomed in rich countries — and neither did the scholar who created it.
Enraged at the rise of an "intransigent" left, Larry Summers put his credibility on the line with wild predictions of runaway inflation in the wake of Joe Biden's stimulus package last January. It's looking like his predictions were wrong.
The marginal tax bracket at the heart of our income tax system obfuscates the key question about taxes in a democratic society: Who pays what? In the 1930s, France's Popular Front government had a solution — until it was dismantled by the right-wing Vichy regime.
The Biden administration is selling its COVID relief bill as a historic milestone in the war on poverty. In reality, it's a temporary measure whose anti-poverty impact is roughly the same as last year's CARES Act signed by Trump. For Biden to claim an anti-poverty legacy, he needs to make the child benefit permanent.
Haunted by the specter of democracy, the Constitution’s framers blundered into a historic miscalculation. We’re still living with the consequences.
Bernie critics seem to think they dodged a bullet. They haven’t — the bullet is still on its way.