This is Rumble Strip. I'm Erica Halman. After the last class series, the What Class Are You series, I received a lot of excellent comments, and I kept trying to think of ways to bring this commentary into the conversation, which is kind of just like a pretentious way of saying, I want people to hear each other's commentary because it seems like

that is part of the point of doing the series. I think we need to talk more about class

divides and tensions and where they come from. I got a couple particularly interesting comments

from an investment manager in Scotland. we will call her E.M.

Because she would rather not be named.

She's Norwegian by birth, which explains her excellent kind of hybrid Norwegian Scottish accent.

She also lived and worked in the United States for about eight years.

EM wrote in response to two of the last class shows. One featured a woman called Trudy, who is

retired and lives in Burlington. Trudy worked all kinds of jobs in her life, some of them reasonably

paid. But toward the end of her working years, she realized that she was not going to have enough money for a comfortable retirement, but she would have a little too much to qualify for services that would make her retirement more comfortable. So she shot the moon for the bottom and made sure that she retired with little enough money that she

could qualify for services. The other story that EM responded to was a story about Kay,

who works at a grocery store in Montpelier, Vermont. In Kay's story, she talks about how not

having money makes her feel like a child, and all the people with money seem like the adults.

So I asked EM if she would talk to me, and we ended up recording a very long conversation about money and how it works,

and how it works better for some people than other people, and some of the reasons why.

In this conversation, we talk about inflation,

which admittedly is not something I've ever discussed with anyone, but more interestingly, we

talk about something called debasement, which is this invisible force that runs underneath

inflation, like an undertow, which no one I know has ever heard of, but which seems

to be pretty important. I just, I'm going to say up front, I ask a lot of really dumb questions

in this interview. I don't know anything about economics, but I, or whether to pronounce it

economics, but I figure that maybe some of you are like me.

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