Which is worse, inflation or recession?
And other economic topics from this week and last.
Sorry to be out of touch. I got locked out of my Substack account for awhile (hacked I think). Now I’m back with a new password and four recent New Republic pieces to hawk. They’re all about the economy.
The next recession will make inequality a lot worse. Here’s why.
The press is covering the next recession like it’s already started, which it hasn’t. Indeed, this week’s conventional wisdom, for what it’s worth, is that we won’t have one even though we need one to get inflation under control. Anyway, here’s my piece from last week, when the conventional wisdom was that a recession was inevitable.
I interview Larry Summers about how progressive taxation can help curb inflation. “It’s always been in the textbook,” he told me. Indeed, I found it in his famous uncle Paul Samuelson’s economics textbook (pictured above).
We’re imposing all sorts of economic sanctions on Russia, but we aren’t shutting down the cartel that sets the price for Russia’s most valuable export, oil. That would be OPEC.
If I were Sam Sifton, author of the New York Times Cooking newsletter, I’d finish by recommending a Petrarchan sonnet in the Ostrich Review, or a new podcast about perturbation theory, or a glock rock song by an edgy new band from Burkina Faso. But it’s Friday evening, I’m tired, and anyway I don’t have that kind of panache. You’ll just have to take me as the dull fellow I am.