Lecture |

Dr. Isabella M. Weber

In recent years inflation has become a key challenge of the global economy. Consequently, the following questions have re-emerged: What causes inflation, and how should it be dealt with? In her lecture, the economist Isabella Weber, the author of the prize-winning book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (2021), will present her recent research findings, which dramatically reverse the accepted wisdom on these questions.

Her new work has made waves worldwide, showing that the source of inflation is not an increase in consumer demand but rather supply-side problems, which derive from the COVID-19 crisis, the war in Ukraine, and monopolistic companies that are riding the wave of inflation in order to increase their profits. In light of that, the solution that Weber proposes reverses the standard logic as well. She represents an important voice in the economics discipline, that calls for abandoning interest-rate hikes—a policy aimed at reducing demand by cutting the employment rate—and dealing with supply-side problems, for example, by means of focused and precise price control.

The lecture will take place as part of the inter-institutional Workshop on Political Economy and the Study of Neoliberalism, and in conjunction with The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Buber Society of Fellows at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Participants

Dr. Isabella M. Weber, Economics Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst