Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. What's more, tariffs and trade wars threaten to accelerate inflation again. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fightin ... Show More
Oct 28
The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable with Justin de Benedictis-Kessner (U Chicago Press, 2026)
In the United States, hundreds of thousands of elected and appointed officials serve more than 50,000 subnational governments, making important decisions about services ranging from education to infrastructure to policing. The provision of critical city services shapes citizens’ ... Show More
47m 48s
Oct 26
Carceral Utopia: A Global History of Model Prisons with Gregory Salle (Polity, 2026)
What underpins the legitimacy of the prison system in the twenty-first century? Despite numerous challenges and setbacks, there is still a widespread belief that prisons can be improved in a socially progressive way. Even today, 'model prisons' are being built that seek to fix th ... Show More
46m 38s
Oct 23
Outed: LBJ’s Confidant and the Arrest that Transformed a Presidency with Timothy Stewart-Winter (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Timothy Stewart-Winter joins Michael Stauch to discuss the arrest that transformed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scan ... Show More
53m 50s
Mar 2025
The Truth about Tariffs: The Ultimate Guide to Busting Inflation Myths
Notes from James: I’ve been seeing a ton of misinformation lately about tariffs and inflation, so I had to set the record straight. People assume tariffs drive prices up across the board, but that’s just not how economics works. Inflation happens when money is printed, not when c ... Show More
25m 27s
Nov 2021
187 - The return of inflation
It’s no secret that we’ve been living in inflationary times, but inflation is always the harbinger of higher interest rates and if they were to go up, what happens? Lessons from Zillow, the problem of tomorrow's big data, yesterday's invented barter, and the amount of debt out th ... Show More
29m 47s