In the 1960s, and stretching back to the 1930s, it was felt by many economists that easy money is a reliable way to increase employment.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.
The 1930s had been a time of tremendous economic distress. And the unemployment rate was enormously high by any historic standard.
In the late 1960s, the New Classical economists saw the same weaknesses in the microfoundations of macroeconomics that have motivated me. They hated its lack of rigor. And they sacked it.
I grew up in an era when money was not readily available. We were into the post-Depression years and World War II.
In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.
My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.
Unemployment determination in a modern economy was the main subject area of my research from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s and again from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.
If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s.
It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.
The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.
No opposing quotes found.