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I'm Christopher Lighten. This is Open Source.

What we're talking about is money and power, meaning the political economy we all live in with some anxiety.

Mark Blythe is our authority, professor of political economy at Brown University.

And he's the noisy know-it-all with the working-class Scottish accent in our virtual pub conversation on Open Source.

Mark is revered around here for his mastery of A, markets, and B, the vernacular that makes money and power a plausible story for the rest of us.

Mark brings an understudy this time, our sometime colleague Brendan Greeley, who has just stepped away from finance journalism to pursue his PhD in economics at Princeton.

The news, so-called this 4th of July week, is not encouraging.

Consumer sentiment, according to the Wall Street Journal, is as low as it's been since the recovery from World War II.

The world's biggest economy is slowing down, inflation spiking to a 40-year peak,

interest rates on mortgages heading up, sure to slow construction, and home sales.

Those are the headlines. The mood in the pub is something else.

Welcome back to the pub, Mark Blythe, with your sidekick Brendan Greeley.

But first a note about the pub.

The funny thing in this dark time is that almost everybody in the pub is working, and spending, and living pretty good lives. There's a paradox there.

Why so glum? We seem to be doing okay, and vice versa.

Chris, who the hell's we? It's simply not true that we are all doing fine. We haven't been doing fine as a collective for a very long time.

The collective is the problem. The pub is okay though.

But that's part of the problem is that we feel that we are okay looking at our own incomes.

...