2024-06-03
1 小时 0 分钟Welcome to Macro musings, where each week we pull back the curtain and take a closer look at the most important macroeconomic issues of the past, present and future.
I am your host, David Beckwourth, a senior research fellow at the Mercator center at George Mason University.
And I'm glad you decided to join us.
Our guest today is Ryan Bourne.
Ryan is the R.
Evans Scharf chair for public understanding of economics at the Cato Institute and is also the editor and contributor to a new book titled the war on prices.
Ryan joins us today to discuss his new book.
Ryan, welcome to the program.
Great to be with you, David.
Well, it's great to have you on.
And full disclosure, I have a chapter in this book, so I kind of know what to expect.
But this is a great book because it's a collection of essays from multiple authors.
You yourself contributed as well and have a good sense of the overall volume.
Maybe give us the background, the motivation for this book.
Why did you want to put it together?
Well, evidently, as a result of the recent inflation that we've lived through that you talk about most weeks on your podcasts, we've seen a reemergence of lots of terrible ideas about where inflation comes from, what we should do in terms of dealing with inflation, the underlying causes of inflation.
We've had the greedflation arguments, wage price spirals been talked about again in the UK.
And as your chapter documents this idea that all of the inflation so far has just been driven by supply shocks like the pandemic and Ukraine war.
And I think inevitably, when you get an unexpected inflation, it's in politicians interest, to a lesser extent central bankers interest, to kind of deflect blame for any role that macroeconomic excessive stimulus has played towards malevolent actors in the economy or perhaps external factors.
So that kind of explains the greedflation, the pandemic, the supply shocks and everything else.