Mark Blyth
speaker
294 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 3 Jul
Mark Blyth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And we're not even noticing it because we're focused on the Mag7 and what Trump did this week.
No, I mean, again, I'll give an example.
Folks, if they're listening, can go to the Johns Hopkins Climate Lab and look up the data on this.
There's a research study that they did recently that basically shows that Chinese hard FDI, that is putting factories on the ground, making things in different countries in Malaysia and in Indonesia and Vietnam over the past several years has been of the scale of the Marshall Plan in World War Two.
There's huge projects that are going on in the global south, like the ASEAN Interconnector Project and a whole bunch of other things, which are all about putting down renewable power sources at a scale that Europe can barely imagine.
I mean, every year, China adopts and renewables the equivalent of the French electricity system into its stock.
I mean, there's stuff going on that's transformative in a way we can't understand.
And we're not paying any attention to it because we care about Mach 7, AI, and Trump.
Always a pleasure.
I'm just playing a guitar.
Oh, God, no. I fucking hate Oasis. Basically, it's a Beatles tribute band through two monkeys.
Right.
First of all, I just want to say that really makes me trust you. And to think, I just wrote a book about the damn thing. So, you know, I must be into boring myself.
This is a really good question. Some of it was pretty boring to write, I have to be honest. Why write a book about something you think you understand, right? Now, why do we, as in sort of people in my job, I'm a political economist, we talk about this sort of stuff all day. Why do we think we understood inflation? Because we were all raised on a story about the 70s.
We'll talk about that story in the 1970s. I began to doubt the story of the 1970s. And once you begin to doubt the story of the 1970s, a lot of the stuff that we do when we talk about inflation and the stuff that we do doesn't make much sense. That's why the book became more interesting.
What is inflation? Inflation is a rise in the general level of all prices. It's everything going up. When people talk about house inflation, there's no such thing. That's just houses going up because we didn't build enough of them, right? And inflation is all prices in the economy going up at once. Now, wait. Hold on. It gets better. Hold on.
That makes sense to everybody, because it totally makes sense, right? Now, imagine you're looking at a glass of water, and you're looking at the top, and you've got that little line of silver at the top called the surface tension. When economists talk about inflation, they're actually looking at the surface tension.
Because what they talk about when they talk about inflation is the rate of change in that growth of prices. So let's take a simple example. I went to dinner on Sunday with my family. I ordered a short rib. I nearly fell off the seat because the damn thing cost $45. I was like, what?
And this is an effect that's happened in inflation. You know that stuff used to be $30, and then it went up to $40, and now it's stuck at $45, and it's never going to be $30 again. Now, when an economist tells you, ah, but inflation's been falling for the past six months, what they mean by that is the rate of change in how fast it's going up has been coming down. Ah. So, right?
This is it. It's the rate of change in the increase in prices. That's the inflation rate. Inflation as a phenomena is the general level of all prices going up.
Showing 141–160 of 294 · page 8 of 15
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