Inflation

“Inflation,” written by Earnest Jackson and recorded by him with Sugar Daddy and the Gumbo Roux at Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans in 1975; unreleased until 2022.

Earnest Jackson, the song’s writer and lead singer, wrote “Inflation” in the music room of Southern University and A & M College in his native Baton Rouge. Band members included guitarist Freddie Wall, bassist Randy Jackson, and keyboard player Kinny Landrum. The song never found an outlet.

Some background: Inflation in 1975 was 9%, and then-president Gerald Ford tried to fight it with a much-mocked and ineffective PR campaign called WIN (“Whip Inflation Now”).

In 2022, NPR’s Planet Money economics podcast learned of this unreleased 1975 recording, was understandably interested, and formed a record label to finally release it.

More:

“Unreleased Earnest Jackson song ‘Inflation’ becomes sensation, resonating with modern woes,” Anna Kaufman, USA Today

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Hitting the Debt Ceiling: Catastrophic for the U.S. Economy

Hitting the debt limit would be a catastrophe for the US economy, and the world. The Wall Street Journal, that radical leftist rag, explains.

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How Did Everything Get So Expensive?

Around the world, everything is more expensive. Why? Monetary factors, supply shocks, market concentration, and corporate price gouging. A Vox video by Liz Scheltens.

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The Language of Power

Ha-Joon Chang explains why economics — the language of power — is too important to be left to economists. A video from the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

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Debunking Minimum Wage Myths

Your tax dollars are subsidizing corporations that don’t pay emplotees a living wage. Robert Reich explains why raising the minimum wage is good business, and good for the economy.

Robert Reich website

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12 Myths About Taxing the Rich

Robert Reich debunks a dozen common myths about taxing the rich.

Robert Reich website

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Dollar Stores

There are more than 34,000 Dollar General, Dollar Store, and Family Dollar stores across the country, more locations than Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, and Target combined. A new one opens every 6 hours, usually in a lower-income area. Dollar General is a Fortune 500 company, worth more than Coca Cola. Dollar stores did it the old-fashioned way: scamming poor people.

More:

“The economics of dollar stores,” Zachary Crockett, The Hustle

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Do High Heels Mean an Elevated Economy?

“Trevor Davis, a former consumer products expert at IBM, came up with a theory that matched heel length with economic upturns. ‘The index worked by analysing social media and other online sources for influencer and consumer references to shoes and boots where there was either a specific height of heel mentioned, like ‘four inches’ or a phrase that could be equated easily to a height,’ he says. ‘We then correlated that with a variety of indicators of economic performance to get the index.’ He says the data revealed that when economic indicators turned down the heel height initially went up, but if the economy remained in a recession state for more than a few months then heel heights went down.”

— “Can the ‘high heel index’ predict economic growth?” Priya Elan, The Guardian

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The Mustang and the Volvo

Political Economist Mark Blyth explains how the structural underpinnings of economies affect their abilities to respond to crisis, like the Covid-19 pandemic

Mark  Blyth, Watson Institute

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We’re In the Pandemic Depression

“What’s clear is that the Pandemic Depression resembles the Great Depression of the 1930s more than it does the typical post-World War II recession. To simplify slightly: The typical postwar slump occurred when the Fed raised interest rates to reduce consumer price inflation. They lowered rates to stimulate growth.

By contrast, both the Great Recession and the Pandemic Depression had other causes. The Great Recession reflected runaway real estate and financial speculation and their adverse effects on the banking system. The Pandemic Depression occurred when infection fears and government mandates led to layoffs and an implosion of consumer spending.”

— “Let’s call it what it is. We’re in a Pandemic Depression.” Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post

 

“The shared nature of this shock—the novel coronavirus does not respect national borders—has put a larger proportion of the global community in recession than at any other time since the Great Depression. As a result, the recovery will not be as robust or rapid as the downturn. And ultimately, the fiscal and monetary policies used to combat the contraction will mitigate, rather than eliminate, the economic losses, leaving an extended stretch of time before the global economy claws back to where it was at the start of 2020.”

“The Pandemic Depression: The Global Economy Will Never Be the Same,” Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart, Foreign Affairs

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Image (based on a WPA photo by John E. Allen) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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