You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking with

the sociologist and political economist William Davis, who teaches at Goldsmiths,

and whose books include the happiness industry and nervous states how feeling took over the world.

He has a piece in the latest issue of the LRV on inflation, interest rates, and how, as he puts

it, efforts to depoliticize the economy to distance politics from economics no longer seem to work. Hello, Will,

and thank you very much for joining me again. Hello, great to be here. So as anyone who has a mortgage

or who pays rent to a landlord who has a mortgage or who has credit card debt or a student loan or who

owes money for any other reason knows all too well, interest rates just

keep going up. The reason we're told is to get inflation under control. How does that work?

Or how is it supposed to work? Well, the idea of this is that by the interest rates are the

price of money, the price of borrowing, and that by pushing interest

rates up, this means that people are going to borrow less money in order to purchase

goods. There'll be less money in circulation, less money chasing the same number of goods,

and that inflation has come about because there's been too much money in circulation and

enough goods in circulation.

So the theory is that effectively you make the cost of money more expensive, you mean that

this results in people borrowing less of it, spending less of it.

The economy effectively slows down.

So it's a kind of artificially

generated attempt to withdraw money from circulation in the economy. And ultimately, it can lead

to a recession, which can be necessary under some circumstances in order to bring inflation down.

And one of the reasons why the Bank of England, which has responsibility for setting

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