Inflation Politics with Tim Barker

The Dig

Daniel Denvir

News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2021

⏱️ 127 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Inflation is once again at the center of political debate. Dan interviews Tim Barker to put monetary policy in its historical and class war context. Reading: Preferred Shares by Tim Barker phenomenalworld.org/analysis/wage-share email [email protected] for PDFs of the following two articles: The Vietnam War and the Political Economy of Full Employment by Dean Baker, Robert Pollin and Elizabeth Zahrt Class Conflict and the "Natural Rate of Unemployment" by Robert Pollin Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig...and join The Dig's brand new Discord!

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of the Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by Haymarket Books.
0:07.6	2021 marks 20 years of radical independent publishing at Haymarket Books. To celebrate two decades of
0:14.8	publishing books for changing the world, all Haymarket titles are currently 40% off at haymarketbooks.org.
0:24.7	Founded in 2001 with a mission to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic
0:30.2	justice, Haymarket has now published over 1,000 titles. Ranging from bestselling books about
0:37.2	current events to urgent interventions about activist strategy, to indispensable histories of past
0:43.0	struggles, to republications of out-of-print classics, Haymarket strives to publish books and
0:49.0	contribute to the development of a critical, engaged, international left. Browse Haymarket's
0:55.6	extensive catalog all 40% off through August 15th at haymarketbooks.org. That's haymarketbooks.org.
1:06.0	Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting
1:21.2	from Providence, Rhode Island. Republicans and out-of-style economists warn that the Biden
1:27.5	administration is leading the economy into runaway inflation. The Biden administration in federal
1:33.3	reserve, by contrast, point to the major disruptions caused by the pandemic, arguing that the inflation
1:39.8	we've seen is caused by sector-specific supply chain bottlenecks. My guest today is historian Tim
1:46.0	Barker. According to Barker, both sides of this debate share the same and rarely examined premises.
1:53.6	And those premises are staunchly anti-worker. The first premise is how to interpret inflation.
2:02.0	They're shared conventional wisdom being that problematic inflation is typically caused
2:08.0	by worker wages rising too much, which thus forces businesses to raise prices.
2:16.4	The second premise is how to deal with inflation. Their conventional wisdom being that problematic
2:22.9	inflation can only be solved by tightening the money supply to push unemployment up and wages down.
2:30.7	Both sides of the debate, in other words, agree that raising the share of the national income taken
2:36.5	by workers and decreasing inequality is impossible without causing inflation. What they disagree
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