Linkage

Pure inflation is the theoretical concept. It may be defined as the undifferentiated devaluation of the monetary unit in relation to all goods and services in the economy, on a continuing or sustained basis. This is the type known to acolytes of Milton Friedman as being “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” (Henderson 2021) It is rarely (if ever) encountered in real life. Possibly in 16th-century Europe the influx of silver and gold from the Americas and their effect on the value of metallic monetary units then in use provides an approximate example. The modern hyperinflations and currency collapses of (among others) Germany and Zimbabwe conventionally fall into the same category, even though these undoubtedly had differential effects on exports, imports, and non-tradables. But by contrast, a single once-for-all devaluation (say, Mexico 1995) would not count, if the national money then stabilized, and the price shock passed through the domestic economy within a limited time.

The opposite case, everyday inflation, is of a once-for-all increase in the price of a core commodity – a price shock, typically in energy – that propagates through the general price structure in rough alignment with the factor-intensity of that commodity in different sectors. In the cases of oil and natural gas, direct derivatives such as fertilizer, plastics, and transportation would be hit hard, more remote sectors (such as housing and services) less so. In this case, an increase in the general price level is always observed, because almost all prices of produced goods and services, and especially wages, are sticky downward, so there is never a full offset of increased prices in one sector by decreases in another. However, the net effect is always a shift in the distribution of incomes toward the sectors experiencing the largest price and profit gains, which is why inflation of this type cannot be qualified as “pure.” Further, the shock to the general price level usually dissipates after a certain interval – perhaps normally a few months. It may persist in the data and headlines for longer, as discussed below.

Having identified the two polar cases, “pure” and “everyday” inflation, we may admit the possibility of an intermediate case. This could be called “hybrid” or “persistent everyday” inflation. It would be marked by a sequence of knock-on or ratchet effects (Wood 1978), in which relative price impulses are passed from one sector to another without major damping. A structure of staggered wage contracts across different powerful trade unions could have this quality, with wage and then price increases ricocheting from one industrial sector or public service to the next. The US and UK inflations of the 1950s through the 1970s were more-than-possibly of this type.

With this typology in mind, the US price increases of 2021-2022 were certainly an everyday inflation.

In the overlapping global emergencies of the pandemic, climate change and geopolitical confrontations, supply shocks have become frequent and inflation has returned. This raises the question of how sector-specific shocks are related to overall price stability. This paper simulates price shocks in an input–output model to identify sectors which present systemic vulnerabilities for monetary stability in the United States. We call these prices systemically significant. We find that in our simulations the pre-pandemic average price volatilities and the price shocks in the COVID-19 and Ukraine war inflation yield an almost identical set of systemically significant prices. The sectors with systemically significant prices fall into four groups: energy, basic production inputs other than energy, basic necessities, and commercial infrastructure. Specifically, they are “Petroleum and coal products,” “Oil and gas extraction,” “Utilities,” “Chemical products,” “Farms,” “Food and beverage and tobacco products,” “Housing,” and “Wholesale trade.” We argue that in times of overlapping emergencies, economic stabilization needs to go beyond monetary policy and requires institutions and policies that can target these systemically significant sectors.

In the UK one can barely turn the page of a newspaper without coming across some article written about transgender people. Such articles rarely tend to be trans‐supportive. Sensational stories about trans women invading women's spaces, appropriating female “sex‐based rights”, and trans women dominating women's sports can be found in print, online, and on television. What is happening in the UK is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, the country has strong protections for trans people, but, on the other, hostility toward trans people is becoming more common. We seek to find out why. By using an online survey of UK residents, we found that anti‐transgender views tended to be held most strongly by those people who scored highly on a scale of authoritarianism. What these results mean in a country currently in the grip of an anti‐trans moral panic has yet to be fully determined.

Senator Eric Schmitt took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference this past weekend and declared that America is “a nation and a people.” With those five words he threw aside the pluralism that has defined this country since before its founding and embraced an ideology rooted in blood and soil, in exclusion and hierarchy. He put it in context:

   “That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests…

   “When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us.”

It’s not new to hear Republicans peddling this kind of racialized “us versus them” rhetoric, but it’s still shocking to see a sitting United States senator parrot phrases that would be more at home in the speeches of European fascists or Confederates in the years leading up to the Civil War than in the halls of Congress.

Wow. This is powerful stuff. Much of it is applicable to US law but Part III, which is  more general, is absolutely required reading:

This Article has shown how the conventional reading of constitutional sex equality jurisprudence as grounded in the biology of sex is wrong and harmful to the cause of transgender equality and to the cause of sex equality writ large. It has argued instead for a reading of constitutional sex equality based in sex as a subordinated social class that could unite the class of women and the class of men, whether cisgender or transgender, and considered how this understanding of sex would stand up to scrutiny.

The story I have told is mostly one of law. But the ends this Article seeks to achieve in reframing our understanding of sex cannot be attained through law alone. This must also be a political project. We have work to do to strive for broader acceptance of sex as a social class. Public approval of this new concept of sex will require a social movement whose goal is to promote solidarity between transgender women and cisgender women by emphasizing the social rather than the biological dimensions of sex. This movement could be forged through the shared interests of at least some strands of feminism and transfeminism: bringing an end to the sex binary — the division of the sexes into two classes — and the sex hierarchy — the superiority of masculine over feminine. Such a movement can seek to demonstrate how combatting discrimination against transgender women pushes back against limiting notions of femininity that constrain all women. Only when we recognize how the categories of male and female limit us all will we reach true sex equality.

This paper constitutes a first detailed institutional analysis of the UK Government’s expenditure, revenue collection and debt issuance processes. We find, first, that the UK Government creates new money and purchasing power when it undertakes expenditure, rather than spending being financed by taxation from, or debt issuance to, the private sector. The spending process is initiated by the government drawing on a sovereign line of credit from the core legal and accounting structure known as the Consolidated Fund (CF). Under directions from the UK finance ministry, the Bank of England debits the CF’s account at the Bank and credits other accounts at the Bank held by government entities; a practice mandated in law. This creates new public deposits which are used to settle spending by government departments into the economy via the commercial banking sector. Parliament, rather than the Treasury or central bank, is the sole authority under which expenditures from the Consolidated Fund arise. Revenue collection, including taxation, involves the reverse process, crediting the CF’s account at the Bank. With regard to debt issuance, under the current conditions of excess reserve liquidity, the function of debt issuance is best understood as a way of providing safe assets and a reliable source of collateral to the non-bank private sector, insofar as these are not withdrawn by the state via quantitative easing by the Bank of England. The findings support neo-chartalist accounts of the workings of sovereign currency-issuing nations and provide additional institutional detail regarding the apex of the monetary hierarchy in the UK case. The findings also suggest recent debates in the UK around monetary financing and central bank independence need to be reconsidered given the central role of the Consolidated Fund.

Despite the widespread harm caused by cars and automobility, governments, corporations, and individuals
continue to facilitate it by expanding roads, manufacturing larger vehicles, and subsidising parking, electric cars,
and resource extraction. This literature review synthesises the negative consequences of automobility, or car
harm, which we have grouped into four categories: violence, ill health, social injustice, and environmental
damage. We find that, since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured
at least 2 billion. Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility. Cars have exacerbated social inequities
and damaged ecosystems in every global region, including in remote car-free places. While some people benefit
from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it. Slowing automobility’s
violence and pollution will be impracticable without the replacement of policies that encourage car harm with
policies that reduce it. To that end, the paper briefly summarises interventions that are ready for implementation.

This guy's pretty funny. And I endorse the message:

A nice little restatement of some basic facts:

I often hear progressives say that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is all very well, but given the real politic, within which these debates are contested, it is better to rely on mainstream understandings to make the case for more government spending on progressive goals.

I remind these economists of the way that John Maynard Keynes used the (erroneous) neoclassical concept of marginal productivity theory for labour demand in The General Theory, to allow him to concentrate on the supply side, where he believed the differences between his approach and the orthodoxy could best be highlighted.

It was a decision that he regretted when it became obvious that the orthodoxy manipulated the debate to categorise Keynes’ quibbles as the special rather than the general case.

And the result was the neoclassical synthesis which dominated macroeconomics for the next several decades and allowed Monetarism an easier path and then the current New Keynesian paradigm to emerge.

The essential message of Keynes was quickly lost because he made that sort of strategic error – using neoclassical framing.

There’s a story about being trans that you’ve definitely heard, whether you’re cis or trans: such-and-so loudly protested that they were a girl from their youngest days—three or four or five. She—because The Story is always and exclusively about trans women, isn’t it?—played dress-up with Mom’s clothes and high heels, always knew she’d been born in the wrong body, fought for transition from as soon as they knew it existed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The Story is so pervasive, so overwhelming that its mere existence keeps many of us from even imagining that we might be trans until we’re well into our lives. Even then, it’s held over our heads through every step of our transitions. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” “But you like beer and trucks and building things!” “But there were no signs!”

As if our identities were written in the stars, to be foretold by blind seers in a Greek tragedy. 

The Story is profoundly toxic to the foundations of trans existence at every level. […] The Story demands that extremely young children invent language to describe a thing that their parents don’t even know exists.

[…]

The real problem with The Story is more nuanced. Not having the words to describe a feeling you’re feeling doesn’t mean you don’t feel it—but also—not having those words dramatically changes your understanding of the feeling itself.