Back during the print era, we used to say you don’t read your publicity, you weigh it. Reading Adam Tooze’s recent Substack post, “The return of TINA & the impasse of 2022 inflation politics,” made me think we need some digital equivalent. The piece is in part a response to my long Jacobin screed on inflation, but I barely recognize myself in anything he wrote.

It’s hard to reduce 6,800 words to a paragraph or two, but let me recount some of my main points. Historically, the Left has been reluctant to talk about inflation — it’s seen as an elite concern, not one of the working class. When this current round of inflation took hold in the spring of 2021, both liberals and leftists largely dismissed it as temporary, yet another side effect of COVID-19. Inflation denialism has receded, but there’s still a serious reticence on the topic.

The standard left class analysis of inflation, that it’s a concern of elites and not the masses, couldn’t be more wrong. Periods of high inflation in the US — notably the late 1970s and early 1980s and the last eighteen months — have been times of real wage decline (that is, pay just doesn’t keep up with price increases). And inflation hits poorer households harder than rich ones.