The history of prices offers many examples. No economic forecaster could have predicted (or even imagined) that a president as conservative as Richard Nixon would become a convert to Keynesian economics in 1971, or that a president as liberal as Jimmy Carter would adopt conservative fiscal policies in 1978, or that any president in his right mind would have embraced the “supply-side” nostrums called Reaganomics in 1981. Each of these individual choices made a difference in the history of prices. All of them were freely made—sometimes defiantly against reason, interest and the economic odds. As
...more
