From 1950 to 1973 the Western European economic product had nearly tripled, and the US GDP had more than doubled in that single generation. Between 1973 and 1975 the global economic growth rate dropped by about 90 percent, and as soon as the economies affected by higher oil prices began to adjust to these new realities—above all by impressive improvements in industrial energy efficiency—the fall of the Iranian monarchy and the takeover of Iran by a fundamentalist theocracy led to a second wave of oil price rises, from about $13 in 1978 to $34 in 1981, and to another 90 percent decline in the
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