event
Stagflation, 1970s
The simultaneous rise in inflation and unemployment in the United States and other industrial economies during the 1970s — the empirical episode that broke the Old Keynesian Phillips-Curve reading and made Monetarist and New Classical accounts ascendant.
Stub. Full Dossier — teaching front-porch, exhibits, testimony, cross-examination, retrospectives, unresolved questions — pending the 30-day reading plan.
Stagflation refers to the persistent co-occurrence of high inflation, high unemployment, and low or negative growth in the industrial economies through the 1970s. Two oil shocks (1973, 1979), the collapse of Bretton Woods (1971), and the political pressure on central banks to maintain low unemployment combined to produce conditions the postwar Phillips-Curve framework had described as theoretically scarce. The Volcker disinflation (1979–1982) ended the episode at the cost of a sharp recession.
The event is the central acid test of competing macroeconomic frameworks in the postwar era. Each tradition will speak to it on its own terms, in this Dossier, as primary-source Testimony lands.