When you have market dominance, you don't need to demonstrate a way in which you can sustainably

and fairly, well, like in capitalist terms, generate profit.

You can just squeeze consumers, squeeze workers and extract economic rent.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Seamus. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Grace Blakely.

Grace is a staff writer at Tribune Magazine and the host of a World to Win podcast. She's also the author of a number of books, including Stolen, How to Save the World from Financialization and the Corona Crash, How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism. In a recent

article for Tribune magazine, Grace wrote about the inflation crisis of the 1970s, how interest

rates were used to respond to that and what that meant for workers at the time. In telling that tale,

she illustrates how the story that we're often told about inflation in the 1970s is not correct,

and that by replicating that today, we would effectively be attacking workers and ensuring that

they bear the brunt of this inflation instead of capital having to pay that cost.

Now, I think that this is an important conversation for a number of reasons. First of all,

obviously, this is a topic that is incredibly relevant for everything that we're going through

as a global society right now as we discuss what the response to this growing inflation should be. But at the same time,

when we think about interest rates and quantitative easing and monetary policy, that has also

had an impact on the tech industry and making the existing tech industry what it is today,

through encouraging the degree of investment that has happened in particular startups and companies

by encouraging a particular model of development in the tech sector, and even by encouraging in

some ways the creation of these really speculative tech products like cryptocurrencies and

NFTs and things like that. And we get into all of those topics in this conversation.

And so I think that you're really going to like it. And I think that hopefully you're going to

learn a lot from it. And I would just say that before we get into it, the first about 10 minutes

of the conversation is about monetary policy more generally and what came out of the 2008 crisis, you know, what the response

...