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/