I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Tuesday, January 4th.

Now to the continuing discussion on inflation and what to do about it, you've seen the rising prices in your own life. You may have

heard the 6.8% annual inflation rate stat at the end of last year, which hasn't been seen since

1982, exactly 40 years to get back to this point. You also might have seen warnings of a recession

and an otherwise

worsening economy. So what to do about it? Well, according to my next guest, the economic

landscape of 1981 and 82, the last time there was inflation this bad, is in some ways

the mirror image of 2021 looking ahead to 2022. So what can we learn from that era long ago when Ronald Reagan was president that could be applied today? Here to explain is Neil Irwin. This comes from one of his last pieces in the New York Times. He just changed jobs and left the times called how the 2020's economy could resemble the 1980s.

He has since started a new job at Axios as their chief economics correspondent.

Neil, welcome to WNYC and congrats on your new role.

Thank you, Brian.

So how is the U.S. economy today a mirror image of where it was in the 1980s?

We will talk what's going on today, of course, because that's our central focus.

But we'll also explore some history in this conversation, which I think will be interesting for some folks who live through it,

and really interesting for some folks who didn't.

So why do you use the term mirror image for today's economy compared to the early 1980s?

So, you know, people forget just how bad the employment situation, how bad the recession in the early 1980s really was.

If you look back to December, 1981, January, 1982, that's 40 years ago right now, you had extremely high unemployment and rising.

You also had high inflation, but inflation was coming down.

The reason I believe this is kind of the opposite situation, we have inflation that's high and rising, and you have unemployment that's been coming

down very rapidly. You have a very strong labor market right now. So essentially it's the mirror

image in the sense that if things change quickly like they did in the early 1980s, then you do

...