Poor People Are Driving This Recovery

That's why inflation is falling and a soft landing looks ever-more plausible. We should try giving Oliver Twist more gruel ALL THE TIME rather than just under freakish Covid conditions.

The Economic Policy Institute is the only Washington think tank that focuses entirely on the problems of working people. I find this pretty remarkable. You would think that many other think tanks would like a piece of this action, but they don’t, because the sort of rich people who give money to policy shops, even when they’re liberal, don’t typically give much of a crap about working people.

I bring up the EPI because last month it published an interesting paper about the leading role that low-wage workers have taken in the economic recovery from Covid. Low-wage workers seldom take a leading role in the larger economy, but the Covid recovery is an exception. My latest New Republic piece looks at the EPI’s data and concludes that ten months of inflation steadily moderating didn’t just happen; it came about because economic growth was concentrated at the low end. Of course, the Fed raising interest rates did a lot of the work too, but that didn’t take as much work as many feared. Anyway, you can read my piece here.