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Inflation in the 70s was caused by oil price shocks. Much of the physical economy relies on oil in an unhealthy way. If you're looking for a culprit, I'd sugge

Inflation in the 70s was caused by oil price shocks. Much of the physical economy relies on oil in an unhealthy way. If you're looking for a culprit, I'd suggest a closer look at that. Meanwhile industrialisation has been off-shored to China, which is now the tech and industrial powerhouse the US was in the 50s and 60s. The former industrial centres in the US and UK were largely left to rot, because the people doing the offshoring simply didn't care about former workers. (In fact - in Thatcher's case, and probably Reagan's too - they actively hated them.) Once you lose an industrial culture it's very hard to rebuild it. It's not just the factories, it's the investment, infrastructure, and education pipelines that feed them at all levels.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
>relies on oil in an unhealthy way You've got me there. That's what I started doing in the late 1970's :) >I'd suggest a closer look at that. That's one thing I have been doing in real-time since the 1960's, you should have seen how bad it already was before the oil shock. Oil shock was just the nail in the coffin. I made sure I could do a lot of unique things with oil & gas ever since. Would never have done that if things hadn't gotten so bad, I was into alternative energy. Still spent most of my time with chemicals anyway, for one thing they aren't cheap enough to burn for fuel and that makes a big difference, even if many of them are more toxic than petroleum itself. There's always been more money in oil though, because there's so god damned much of it :\