Andrew Elrod on the Politics of Inflation Control - a podcast by Robert Manduca and Nic Johnson

What's the responsible thing to do if inflation starts to rise? This week we talk with Andrew Elrod, who recently completed a dissertation on the history of wage and price controls in America between 1940 and 1980 at UC Santa Barbara. It turns out that mainstream American history offers a number of options for dealing with accelerating prices; monetary policy doesn't have to be the only game in town.

"When my new theory has been duly assimilated and mixed with the politics and feelings and passions, I can't predict what the final upshot will be in its effect on action and affairs. The task of keeping efficiency wages reasonably stable... is a political rather than economic problem. I do not doubt that a serious problem will arise as to how wages are to be restrained when we have a combination of collective bargaining and full employment. But I am not sure how much light the analytical method can throw on this essentially political problem." - JMK


****** LINKS ******

Follow Andrew on twitter: @andrewelrod

Check out more of his writing here: https://andrewelrod.net/

And the articles we discussed today here:

https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/andrew-elrod-specter-inflation

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/many-inflations

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/construction-labor-shortage


*** MENTIONED ***

Mark Erlich - https://lwp.law.harvard.edu/people/mark-erlich

David Weil - Fissured Workplace - https://www.fissuredworkplace.net/

Allen J. Matusow - The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s - https://ugapress.org/book/9780820334059/the-unraveling-of-america/

Further episodes of Reviving Growth Keynesianism

Further podcasts by Robert Manduca and Nic Johnson

Website of Robert Manduca and Nic Johnson