Big economic storms are rare and usually end quickly, but they tend to have long-lasting effects. Today I want to talk about a storm 50 years ago that still affects us now. Important things happened in the 1970s. I personally remember that decade well. I was in my 20s and they were formative years. I met people and learned things that led me where I am now. The funny part is its larger events, important as they were in hindsight, didn’t get nearly as much attention at the time. Those events did not even register to me as important. We didn’t have social media and 24-hour news networks. The “well-informed” people read local newspapers and watched Uncle Walter (Cronkite) in the evening. Business people and bankers read The Wall Street Journal. Political junkies read The New Republic or National Review. But none of us really knew everything as it happened, with the one exception of the Vietnam War. Selected portions of that were played out on our TVs in the evening and in papers. For that matter, most business and national news was also only consumed in light detail. Even back then, there was too much to portray in 30 minutes or a short column. In any case, we are still dealing with the legacy of that time. But as I’ll show at the end, we may be starting to at least recognize some of the mistakes. That’s the first step to actually fixing them.

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