The talking heads who use the 1970s as a guide are dangerously stuck in the past. Instead, we must face the present moment with its challenges and advantages.
You present data from the long-running UM consumer survey with respect to the impact of inflationary expectations on advance purchases of large durable goods. The data suggest that the peak period for "buy it now 'cause the price is going up soon" was 1975-1980.
I'm trying to reconcile that with my own memories of the period ... but as a graduate student who never was employed full-time/year-round before late 1980, I was too poor to buy any consumer durable goods during that period! And for many people the biggest inflationary impact came in food and gasoline prices, which by definition are not durable goods.
The Fed histories you cite frame the years 1965 to 1982 as one period. That's hindsight. I suspect that for most working-class people this was less one period than a series of shocks: Nixon's wage-price controls in 1971, then the two oil embargoes in 1973 and 1979. It was the impact of these shocks that wore people down to the point they were willing to accept Volcker's medicine, which was in essence an assault on the power of organized labor to keep up with inflation.
It's true that reality then and now is far more complex than one time series. And grouping many years together is complicated. The full document that I linked to https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-inflation does go through some of the policies. But I agree it's brief. And I do not agree with all of its framing.
You present data from the long-running UM consumer survey with respect to the impact of inflationary expectations on advance purchases of large durable goods. The data suggest that the peak period for "buy it now 'cause the price is going up soon" was 1975-1980.
I'm trying to reconcile that with my own memories of the period ... but as a graduate student who never was employed full-time/year-round before late 1980, I was too poor to buy any consumer durable goods during that period! And for many people the biggest inflationary impact came in food and gasoline prices, which by definition are not durable goods.
The Fed histories you cite frame the years 1965 to 1982 as one period. That's hindsight. I suspect that for most working-class people this was less one period than a series of shocks: Nixon's wage-price controls in 1971, then the two oil embargoes in 1973 and 1979. It was the impact of these shocks that wore people down to the point they were willing to accept Volcker's medicine, which was in essence an assault on the power of organized labor to keep up with inflation.
It's true that reality then and now is far more complex than one time series. And grouping many years together is complicated. The full document that I linked to https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-inflation does go through some of the policies. But I agree it's brief. And I do not agree with all of its framing.