Fighting Inflation without Jeopardizing Jobs

What We Know about Today’s Inflation

The idea that unemployment must go up for inflation to come down just doesn’t add up, as Roosevelt fellow Justin Bloesch explains in a new blog post.

“There is . . . little reason to think that today’s 3.5 percent unemployment rate is inherently more inflationary than it was in 2019,” Bloesch writes.

“Instead, it looks increasingly possible that the labor market can return to a strong but not overheating equilibrium, giving time for supply-side issues to be resolved and bring inflation back down.”

Learn more in “Why Unemployment Can Stay Low While We Fight Inflation.”

An Immigration Plan for the Climate Change Era

Deepak Bhargava has a big idea: America should live up to the best parts of our national identity and become the most welcoming country on Earth for immigrants and refugees. 

To do that, and counter broader authoritarian appeals, we need a new narrative that’s rooted in progressive values and responsive to the threat of climate change.

On this week’s episode of How to Save a Country, Bhargava talks with hosts Felicia Wong and Michael Tomasky about what that new narrative could look like, the moral and economic imperatives behind a progressive vision for immigration, and the kind of civil society movement we need to see it through.

“There are millions and millions of people in this country who would participate in its renewal, who would participate in this fight if they are asked,” he says. “We can win this.”

Listen now, and follow for new podcast episodes every Thursday.

How Innovation Really Happens

Current antitrust law doesn’t promote innovation well, and may even undermine it. That’s because it misunderstands what innovation actually means.

In a new report, Ketan Ahuja offers a more holistic—and historically accurate—understanding.

Dispelling “the myth of a single heroic inventor driving economic success,” as Roosevelt’s Niko Lusiani put it, Ahuja shows that innovation “often arises from sharing information across firms and combining capabilities across the public and private domains in new ways.”

Read more.

What We’re Reading

Think Food Inflation Is Bad Now? Wait Till Kroger and Albertsons Merge [feat. Roosevelt’s Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani] – Los Angeles Times

Industrial Policy: Now Comes the Hard Part – The American Prospect

Will Gas Prices Doom Democracy? – New York Times