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Aug. 12th, 2008 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eiriasAfter a heated discussion last night about tipping points and the choice/need of women to work for pay, I decided to look at data on inflation. One person had asked whether there was an uptick in inflation during the years that women began to enter the workforce en masse (I'm talking middle-class women here; I know that poor women in cities have never actually had much choice).
Anyway. That's just backstory; the point is, I found a site that lets you graph a bunch of different US economic indices back to the earliest days of the republic. I figured the consumer price index would show me what I wanted to see, so I generated this graph (1800-2007).
The graph shows a few things I expected -- war related upticks, relatively higher growth in the fifties and sixties compared to what preceded it; and then it also shows this inflection point circa 1970, where you start seeing massive inflation that is never reversed. (You can see it in charts of yearly inflation, too; before 1970 there were years with positive and negative inflation; afterward, it's always been positive.) Yes, yes, the stagflation of the seventies is legendary, but why has the CPI continued to increase substantially every single year since then, when it didn't before? Did the rules of the economy change in some fundamental way? What's going on and what am I missing?
Anyway. That's just backstory; the point is, I found a site that lets you graph a bunch of different US economic indices back to the earliest days of the republic. I figured the consumer price index would show me what I wanted to see, so I generated this graph (1800-2007).
The graph shows a few things I expected -- war related upticks, relatively higher growth in the fifties and sixties compared to what preceded it; and then it also shows this inflection point circa 1970, where you start seeing massive inflation that is never reversed. (You can see it in charts of yearly inflation, too; before 1970 there were years with positive and negative inflation; afterward, it's always been positive.) Yes, yes, the stagflation of the seventies is legendary, but why has the CPI continued to increase substantially every single year since then, when it didn't before? Did the rules of the economy change in some fundamental way? What's going on and what am I missing?
