You have to be fairly wizened to recall a time when people talked about inflation as much as they have over the last few months. And, being fairly wizened myself, I remember that time. Whenever you went shopping, prices were up. People got in line for gas. Though not everyone had the vocabulary to describe it, the real wage was falling hard. Rising energy and food costs hit the poorer half of the income distribution harder than the richer one. People on public assistance lived with “empty cupboards,” as a 1980 New York Times headline put it. Another Times story reported that middle-class families were applying for food stamps.

Of course, it took some time to get to that point. Although there was a brief burst of inflation in the years after World War II, as people celebrated the end of wartime austerity by going on a spending spree, price increases remained contained, averaging well under 2% a year from the early 1950s through the mid-1960s. As the 1970s approached, however, the pressures of financing the Vietnam War without squeezing the civilian economy pushed prices higher — trends intensified by two rounds of opec oil price hikes. Inflation approached 6% a year at the turn of the decade, hit 11% in 1974, and peaked at over 13% in 1980. The story was replicated around the world. The average inflation rate in the g7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the United States) broke 15% in 1974 and came close to 14% in 1980.

In the United States, what seemed like a relentless rise finally came to an end when Paul Volcker, then chair of the Federal Reserve, drove interest rates into the high teens, creating what was then the deepest recession since the 1930s. Unemployment spiked, unions were busted, social spending was cut, and by 1986, inflation was back below 2%. The working class, restive throughout the 1970s, was rendered passive and scared, a long-term result of the anti-inflation fight — one explicitly celebrated by former Fed chair Alan Greenspan in the 1990s.