We Can Beat the Right With a Left-Wing Affordability Agenda

For Weber, many of the Left’s twentieth-century darlings should be understood as the founders of anti-fascist economics: from the world of theory, Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, Michał Kalecki; from the world of policy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his pricing czar, John Kenneth Galbraith.

As she reflects on the 1930s and ’40s, the contemporary relevance of their perspective becomes clear. The Great Depression was instigated by a frenzy of speculation that ended in financial calamity; from there it spread to the international system as a result of misguided adherence to the gold standard. In Germany, the centrist chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, adopted a textbook policy of austerity, exacerbating the crises of unaffordability and unemployment while “business elites and orthodox economists cheered him on,” writes Weber.

Several important lessons emerge from this episode. For Polanyi, observing the crisis unfold from nearby Vienna, “The victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control.”

Second, countercyclical expansionary policies may boost employment as well as profits, but many capitalists nonetheless oppose such interventions because these threaten their power. On this point, Weber draws from Kalecki’s incisive that business elites typically oppose government programs that would generate full employment and thus strengthen workers’ bargaining power. The business community therefore seeks to retain its control over “the state of confidence” in the economy and accepts the cyclical volatility this entails. Often their cause is championed in the public sphere by “prominent so-called ‘economic experts’ closely connected with banking and industry.” In this light, authoritarianism can be especially appealing to elites, as the state actively stokes industry — especially in weapons production — yet at the same time keeps wages down by force.politicalargument

Third, the Left can also contribute to crisis when it puts doctrine ahead of observation. On this point, Weber observes that the German Social Democrats sustained an ideological commitment to the gold standard because their dominant in-house economist, Rudolf Hilferding, it vindicated the Marxian labor theory of value.believed

Fourth, economists’ promises that short-term suffering is necessary for long-run stabilization should be dismissed as millenarian superstition. As Keynes put it, “In the long run we are all dead.” Indeed, he added, “Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” Short-term crises — such as Germany’s 1923 hyperinflation or its 1931 fiscal and banking crisis — can have irreversible consequences when we account for human behavior in the real world. Even brief periods of deprivation can give rise to a political logic of sadistic authoritarianism that soon takes on a life of its own.

The present moment is more of a rhyme with, rather than a repetition of, the 1930s. But it is hard to ignore the parallel behaviors of a political establishment that lacks courage, ignores evidence, and disingenuously takes advice from business elites.

In some ways, the waves of crises have been slower moving, but there are more of them, and they will persist for a long while. The 2008 financial crisis spread from Wall Street throughout the global economy, and this time was approached with some degree of countercyclical stabilization — but that was followed by austerity. Consequently, inequality surged across many Northern economies, affordability declined in many areas, and a new wave of political bigotry arose to critique the Brüning-esque centrists who claimed there was no other option.

The pandemic and subsequent war in Ukraine brought a whole new round of crisis: a wave of inflation that hit several economies at once. In response, economists working from textbook theories of inflation called for a new round of austerity. Those theories, the Phillips curve and the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” (or NAIRU), insist that when employment rates are too high, spendthrift workers will push prices up to a self-defeating extent. Hence the appropriate solution, they claim, is to raise unemployment through fiscal austerity and monetary tightening (i.e., high interest rates).

As Weber notes, the evidence for these ideas is . Despite multiple attempts, economists have never actually identified the NAIRU; it is something “like a unicorn, a recurring reference in the literature but never observed in real life.”weak

The underlying problem, she wrote in a series of and during the inflationary episode, was not excess demand but sellers’ inflation. Her central argument is that when supply shocks occur in “systemically significant” sectors like oil, they can cause uneven ripple effects across the rest of the market. Because oil is an input in countless other goods, many producers passed on the price shock by raising their sale prices — an echo of the 1970s inflation wave that followed from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo. In these moments when businesses concurrently boost prices, a secondary logic can take hold. In concentrated markets, the price signal allows sellers to effectively collude by hiking prices in tandem, “without anything so direct as a ‘conversation.’” This allows them to overcompensate for their losses and secure windfall profits at the expense of the broader public. (That this is a real and deliberate phenomenon is clear; of Weber’s many papers surveys transcripts from 138,962 corporate earnings calls and finds that top managers tend to speak positively about inflation because it enables profit-enhancing price hikes.)papersop-edsone

The distributional effects of sellers’ inflation have been especially pernicious, because it hit essential goods harder than luxury goods. This occurred partly because the market is highly concentrated in certain essential sectors — especially but also like diapers — and partly because of the inelastic nature of essentials; you can’t do without them.foodhousehold staples

In this context, monetary tightening does more harm than good, by elevating unemployment as well as debt servicing costs. It also disrespects precarious individuals in ways that stoke a politics of resentment. Consider, writes Weber, what it must be like to be laid off in this context and then see someone like Larry Summers on TV “saying that people like you should lose their jobs so that prices would come back down. The natural response is rage.” The far right, she adds, has cannily exploited that rage: “They have tapped into it, fueled it, and abused it with false promises.”

For many reasons, then, sellers’ inflation calls for a completely different set of policy responses. The first is a steep tax on windfall profits to disincentivize collusive price gouging. (Something like this, Weber notes, was vaguely floated by Kamala Harris early in her campaign and then meekly .)buried

Second, because fossil fuels are the most systemically significant commodities, the transition to renewable energy is easily among the most important stabilization strategies. Here she cites Brett Christophers’s important that a green transition cannot be expected to occur just because the price of renewable energy has declined below that of fossil fuels. Renewables are fundamentally different in that they are “a stock of capital goods” and “not a flow of inputs.” They do not yield short-term profits, and indeed they are financially riskier, especially in moments of monetary tightening. Private capital therefore cannot be expected to build the renewable infrastructure we need. In this context, even carbon pricing policies (like cap-and-trade or carbon taxes) are bound to fail. Absent renewable infrastructure, these costs are simply passed on to frustrated consumers.point

Third, Weber calls for active government policies that would “steer, manage or provision essentials.” On the provisioning side, she defends a revitalization of public education, transportation, and health care under a framework of “universal basic services.” However, it is on the steering and management side that Weber makes her central intervention.

Her flagship policy proposal is the use of buffer stocks to smooth out supply shocks when they occur. Contrary to the neoliberal story, Weber’s work reveals that the state can in fact regulate prices by creating substantial reserves of nonperishable goods — especially food and fossil fuels — by buying en masse when they are cheap and selling when prices rise. While the production of these goods can fluctuate, demand for them remains relatively stable and predictable because of their essential nature. Price controls can therefore be entirely viable if they are implemented through supply management, rather than mere fiat. In the present book, an exemplary case study is the FDR-Galbraith administration during World War II, which sustained effective price controls despite limited institutional experience with them.

Weber also highlights China’s much deeper history of price management, which was the central focus of her dissertation and , . She shows that Chinese governments have been engaged in price controls for centuries, and a major factor in the Communist Party’s victory in the 1940s was its success in taming inflation through supply management in the areas that it captured.first bookHow China Escaped Shock Therapy

In the post–Mao Zedong era, China maintained economic sovereignty in ways that many other countries did not and invited policy proposals from a community of economists who were practically minded, empirically informed, and arguably more intellectually diverse than their counterparts in the West. The resulting compromises delivered a policy approach of “crossing the river by feeling for stones.” For instance, the state experimented with price liberalization in areas where the party wanted fast growth and reined it in when inflation started to surge — a policy machinery that would respond proactively to volatility.

Returning to the present decade, Weber discusses the pandemic response in Mexico, which “offers perhaps the most impressive recent example of a creative and ambitious inflation policy.” Under Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the government constrained prices on an essential basket of goods (including corn, beans, and rice) with partnering grocers, who in turn were rewarded with reduced transport fees and relaxed regulatory requirements. At the same time, AMLO’s government stoked domestic production through a program that allowed small farmers to sell to the government reserves at a guaranteed minimum price.

The success of these policies carries an important lesson: It is better to be prepared, because buffer stocks cannot be magically conjured when a crisis strikes; yet at the same time, active management of price and supply can be achieved on relatively short notice. In either case, the implementation of these progressive policies can offer major gains for politicians who are courageous enough to put government capacity to work in defiance of corporate elites.

Over many decades, mainstream economists have constructed an edifice in which progressive ideas can hardly be uttered. Yet the arguments behind this stifling decorum are weak, as many hard-nosed progressives have demonstrated. Keynes and his followers have the assumption that the savings of the rich are a precondition for growth-inducing investment. Similarly, contemporary economists like Joseph Stiglitz have that redistribution does not stymie growth, as neoliberals claim. Weber’s demonstration that price controls are not only viable but wise should be regarded as yet another embarrassment for the masters of the house. These and other of mainstream economics should signal to those of us who believe in economic justice that it is time to exit the castle, to a place where we can speak more freely.disprovenshownfailures

But where exactly would we go? That question is not fully answered by Weber, but she gives a sense of direction; readers of who seek either an overarching theoretical critique of capitalism or a detailed policy agenda will not find everything they’re looking for. Weber is explicit that what she offers “are not blueprints but starting points.” There is no detailed master plan for a revitalization of the welfare state, or concrete engagement with broader issues of taxes and transfers. Thorough analyses and ambitious reforms on this topic have, in any case, already been advanced by and his , and these proposals — especially the effective income ceiling — are complementary to Weber’s vision.Anti-Fascist EconomicsThomas Pikettycolleagues

Still, could have benefited from broader engagement with the core topic of inflation. It gives a strong analysis of commodity inflation, but it misses two other types of inflation: hyperinflation and housing inflation.Anti-Fascist Economics

Hyperinflation is relevant to Weber’s argument mostly because mainstream economists like to cite a few catastrophic episodes when the rate of inflation reached millions of percent — Germany in 1923, Hungary in 1946, or Zimbabwe in 2008 — as evidence of the necessity of monetary discipline. In fact, hyperinflation is from the more frequent dynamic of sellers’ inflation and usually occurs when an industrially fragile, import-dependent country runs out of foreign currency and cannot meet its foreign-denominated obligations. Governments facing such a crisis have occasionally chosen to break the rules of central banking by issuing new monetary assets without any expectation of repayment — and this is where true money printing can occur. When inflation sets in, residents are prone to sell their domestic currency in favor of a more stable foreign currency. This in turn devalues the domestic currency on foreign markets, so that imports become more expensive. At this point, the economy can easily slide into an “inflation-depreciation spiral” that is difficult to escape.qualitatively different

Weber gestures to this distinct dynamic by noting that the German hyperinflation was “not triggered by sectoral cost shocks but by the inability of the government to pay back [its] enormous debts.” If she had extended the point a little further, she could have demonstrated that hyperinflation is a rare event, and one that does not threaten countries in the Global North that borrow in their own currency and can safely finance their imports. The issue, then, is that Weber misses an opportunity to discredit conservative arguments that use the threat of hyperinflation as a cudgel to defend fiscal and monetary austerity.

The bigger lacuna is Weber’s light treatment of housing, which sits uncomfortably in her basket of essentials. It does not fit into her agenda of public provisioning quite as snugly as health care and education. At the same time, it is not the sort of good that lends itself to buffer stocks, like food and fuel.

In the Global North, housing now follows an asset logic rather than a commodity logic, which means that the standard price mechanism at the heart of Weber’s analysis does not really apply. This is evident in studies showing that in the , , and , the stock of housing has in fact risen relative to population at the same time as it has become more unaffordable. Moreover, episodes of housing inflation become especially intense when interest rates are low — a scenario that complicates the critique of monetary tightening.United StatesBritainCanada

We therefore require housing-specific policies that are qualitatively distinct from the buffer stock idea. To be clear, this does not represent a fatal flaw in Weber’s argument, and she does briefly address the problem by acknowledging the financialization of housing and calling for rent controls. My point, rather, is that we have yet to work out a holistic approach to inflation that covers both commodities and assets.

Though Weber does not address every aspect of affordability, these gaps also have an inviting character, because it is clear that she wants to contribute to a broader movement for economic justice. She and the many researchers with whom she collaborates have been uniquely effective in presenting their work to general audiences, promoting a broader understanding of macroeconomics while exposing neoliberal shibboleths. Certainly, her work helps to build the lines of communication between economics and the other social sciences — something that is sorely needed. Progressive political scientists have a habit of concluding their papers by blaming economic dynamics for the ills of the world, while progressive economists do the same but blame the government. Weber is one of very few left-wing economists who engages with the system as a whole and refuses to shrug off the work.Anti-Fascist Economics