William Davies · Pain, No Gain: Inflation Fixation · LRB 13 July 2023

Weber’s argument, supported since with empirical analysis, was that profits were responsible for rising prices, not wages. In politically sensitive areas such as energy, her view has become the new common sense. The IMF has accepted that rising profits have made a larger contribution to inflation in the Eurozone over the past two years than wages, and that ‘companies may have to accept a smaller profit share’ if inflation is to fall.

Today, despite the media’s focus on rail strikes and the RMT, the most radicalised workers in Britain are doctors. What technology or overseas supplier is expected to replace them? London, once the oversized heart of this ‘aspiration nation’, is slowly emptying out of young people and children, as the most basic expectations – of home, family and money for a holiday – become all but impossible to meet. The gap between housing costs and wages has rendered the British economic model socially unsustainable, not just on the cultural or geographical margins, long brutalised by conservative politicians, but at its very core.