In a 1970s framework where you have powerful organized labor, inflation can actually be to the

benefit of working people because their wages are protected. They don't have very many savings,

certainly not savings in the form of nominal assets, which are subject to price erosion. And so

historically speaking, all the way back to the great inflation, say the Bima Republic,

inflations are a progressive

in the sense of the technical sense of progressive redistributive mechanism handling a very big

bill. So if you ask who paid for World War I, in the end, it was overwhelmingly middle class

and other middle class Germans who did not working class Germans because the inflation burns

off those people's

assets. That's one way of thinking about it so long as you do have large scale organized labor

to protect people's nominal incomes. If you don't, then of course the balance is much more difficult

to figure out and it's really a gamble on the possibility of indexing various types of income

streams so that those who are most vulnerable

are not profoundly damaged by rapidly rising costs of living, basically.

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

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What's going on, guys? It is Monday, August 24th, and today I am thrilled to share an interview with Adam 2's. Adam holds the Shelby Column

Davis Chair of History at Columbia University, where he also serves as the director of the

European Institute. He is an absolutely prolific writer constantly in the op-ed pages of

The Guardian and Foreign Policy, as well as being known

for his books The Deluge, The Great War, America, and the remaking of the Global Order,

...