Paper effectively makes the point that class warfare is a significant factor in why inflation persists.

Here’s another blurb about the paper from https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/07/why-inflation-sticks-around-the-role-of-class-warfare-in-price-persistence.html

This post makes an extremely useful observation, even though it is a bit more in economese than is ideal, despite it being aimed at generalist readers. It effectively makes the point that class warfare is a significant factor in why inflation persists. But oddly the author is loath to use the phrase “class warfare” even though he describes a struggle between labor and business owners/operators.

There is ample historical and recent proof of his view. In the 1970s stagflation, cost of living adjustments to worker pay, which for most enterprises is their biggest single expense, kept those costs increasing at the same clip as inflation, which meant they would typically seek to preserve margins by then increasing prices to a similar degree. Even though white collar workers generally did not have formal COLA, it had become a widespread practice to also increase their compensation in line with inflation so as to preserve their status relative to union/factory personnel. This is one reason that economists who have done granular analysis of the much-derided Nixon wage/price freeze says the Administration threw in the towel just as it was beginning to work…if nothing else, by resetting the inflation level used in the COLAs.

In the current iteration of how class warfare works at a time when corporations have greatly reduced labor bargaining power, we have repeatedly pointed out that in the US, corporate profits are nearly twice the level they were at as a percent of GDP in the early 2000s….a level Warren Buffett had deemed at the time to be unsustainably high. In the sticky Covid-induced inflation, many commentators have accused companies of engaging in “greedflation,” as in putting through price increases that were not necessary to cover cost rises, under the cover of general inflation. We’ve confirmed that behavior recently in the case of Kraft Heinz, where their price gouging accelerated the inroads made by more modestly priced store brands.