>In the common telling, the Great Inflation of the 1970s got going because people came to believe inflation would keep spiraling. The surge in gasoline prices wasn’t simply a frustrating development, but a harbinger of things to come, so people needed to demand higher raises, and businesses could feel confident charging higher prices for most everything.

This has always been spoken like it's from someone who was not present at all during the Nixon destruction of the US dollar.

Or not observant in the least.

But that's when people started saying things like this, and after influential people start believing it without thorough questioning, well here we are.

The only significant demographic that could demand raises of any kind were unionized workers, who were shortly kneecapped by the Wage & Price Freeze.

Businesses at the time almost never felt confident about anything, and only raised prices out of desperation for survival. At least they were allowed a little head start ahead of consumers & workers, and the Wage & Price Freeze was delayed as long as possible (ie prices were allowed to skyrocket) before being strategically kicked in right before workers' pay would have had a chance to drift toward parity.

It always takes a lot longer for workers to share in any economic benefits, if at all, with great delay & lag when it does occasionally come to pass.

Since it appeared mathematically as if half the wealth in the pockets of a nation's workers had been lost forever in only a few years, yes people believed that inflation would keep spiraling, but nobody thought there was anything that could be done about it since the regime in power was not only crooked to the bone, but working for a corrupt political party which was already too big to fail. There was only one alternative party and they were not math wizards either, and equally untrustworthy.

By the time Reagan came along no one with good mathematical recognition could have come close to leadership advisory positions any more because it actually had been too late for a while.

They're not betting with their own money anyway, and people already had to accept that the chance of any winnings had become infintesimal by then.

Reagan did turn out to be a better actor than people thought at first.

But even George Bush Sr. was able to recognize what he called "Voodoo Economics" of the Reagan years because it was not based on reality or things that can be good to actually have faith in.

Not that he had a better plan, but at least his hindsight came into focus for a bit. Even the most excellent plan would have had no chance of deployment with the type of economists monopolizing worldwide influential positions by then.

So the Bush I Recession ended up based on somewhat different types of superstitions than the Reagan Recession.

And here we still are.

The problem a decade ago was not fundamentally that the banks had grown too big to fail, but rather the political parties which have proven their economic incompetence had already been too big to fail for longer than most voters have been alive.

And neither economists nor the voters can do the math since it is far too complicated for most, plus it doesn't matter anyway since the more powerful are going to extract as much as possible from the financially weakest before it's even more too late for them both.

And then there's the pessimistic narratives, but just trying to keep it as positive as possible right now.