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Hey everyone, welcome back to the Jacobin Show. As always, I'm your host, Jen Pan. On today's show, I am very excited to be talking to our friend Jared Abbott. He has a piece in the new Jacobin issue with Elizabeth Henderson on American public transportation and basically why it's so awful.

He and Elizabeth make some great points, so definitely stick around for that. Also from the new issue of Jacobin is appeased by Samir Saunty. I will be talking to Samir about inflation. We have obviously covered inflation a few different times on this channel before. But Samir, I think really sort of takes us through basically March when the fed raised interest rates to what could possibly happen in terms of stagflation or a coming recession.

So stay tuned for that talk as well. For my own part, I will be making some comments on a new concept I came across called anti capitalist investing. I have some thoughts, so stick around and you'll hear them.

And I also want to quickly shout out the new issue of Jacobin. If you're a subscriber, you might have gotten it in the mail already. Jacobin basically just had a big new redesign. The new magazine looks great. And I think the website is undergoing some facelifts and revamps as well. So definitely check that out. It's a great issue. It's all about the politics of infrastructure.

So I encourage you to subscribe to the magazine if you haven't already or pick it up on new stands. And before I launch into today's show, I also want to quickly shout out a video that recently appeared on this channel.

It's a talk between Matt Carp, our friend Matt Carp and Paul Prescott. You know him as labor Paul. You probably also know that he recently ran for a state senate seat in Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately, he did not win, but he and Matt sort of break down a post-mortem of how Paul ran his campaign, what worked and what didn't, what kinds of structural factors Paul was able to overcome, where he felt short.

I really enjoyed the talk. I think that it's a really useful look at how working class socialist campaign is run.

And I think it has some pretty important lessons for any leftist or socialist who is interested in kind of electoral work and running a campaign.

And of course, Paul has some interesting thoughts about messaging, which I think is really important. We talk a lot about messaging on this show.

And you know, with the caveat that obviously messaging isn't everything, it is one of the few things that we can control when we're running campaigns. So I think it's really important to pay attention to.

All right. So let's now dive into today's show. Here is Samir Santi. All right. So I'm now here with Samir Santi. He is an assistant professor of urban studies at CUNY's School of Labor and Urban Studies.

He also has a new piece in the latest issue of Jacobin on inflation. Samir, good to see you.

Thanks for having me, John. It's a pleasure.

So inflation, obviously, an ongoing problem in the US, I think concerns about inflation have sort of dominated public opinion polls over the course of this year, maybe even a little before.

We've covered inflation a little bit on the show before, but just to dive into your piece, I was wondering if maybe you could sort of talk about the causes of inflation.

What exactly is going on right now?

Sure. I mean, I think if you're going to talk about inflation right now, you have to start with the pandemic a couple of years ago.

Supply chains as a term that maybe wasn't in the popular discourse a few years ago, but now everyone knows what they are.

You got disrupted during the pandemic, and that was bound to create a lot of problems.

And shutting down a global economy is an unprecedented event, and restarting it's not going to be smooth.

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