Seth Ackerman is an editor at Jacobin.
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.
If Democrats survived this week’s midterms because they increased their share of wealthier voters, it’s a bad omen for building a working-class coalition around left-wing politics. Something needs to change.
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.
From chiefs and kings to billionaires today, a small handful of humans over thousands of years have figured out how to amass tremendous power and wealth. We talked to an anthropologist about how the ruling class got started.
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.
What will decide the fate of neoliberalism today is not the extent of the economic damage the virus wreaks — it is the extent to which the virus transforms popular expectations.
For decades, America’s “flexible” labor markets have been celebrated by economists and favorably compared to Europe’s “sclerotic” labor institutions — the products of a century of militant worker struggle. Now, thanks to that very flexibility, the US stands on the brink of an economic disaster.
A big new study came out last week arguing that Bernie Sanders’s electability could be a “mirage.” There’s just one problem: the report is nonsense.
What makes Bernie Sanders so threatening to the Democratic establishment is that he stands for what millions of Democrats thought their party stood for all along.
Last night’s UK elections results point to a deep problem in world politics today: the gravitational pull of privileging cultural over economic combat — an outcome that consistently divides the Left and hands victory to the Right.