I noted yesterday that back in 2009 there was a real division of opinion among leading Republicans: would Obama and Bernanke deliver Weimar-level inflation, or merely 70s-type stagflation?

One thing I neglected to mention, however, is that the 1970s the right predicted would come back bore little resemblance to the actual decade. Yes, the US economy was troubled in that era. But the performance wasn’t nearly as bad as later legend had it, especially when we consider the incomes of middle-class families. Furthermore, the preferred right-wing narrative about why the 70s were worse than the 60s has absolutely no empirical support.

So, about the 70s in perspective: here’s real family incomes since World War II:

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There was, obviously, a major deterioration after 1973. First came the worst recession since the 1930s — I’m old enough to remember when people called 1974-5, not 2007-9, the Great Recession. Then a recovery that did produce gains, and did eventually raise incomes above their pre-recession level, but not by much.

What you can see, however, is that this pattern of recessions followed by disappointing recoveries has been the norm for the past 40 years; it began in the 1970s, but it didn’t end then. Here’s median income changes from business cycle peak to business cycle peak:

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The 73-79 cycle was lousy by pre-73 standards, but real median income did end up notably higher despite sharply rising oil prices. Perhaps surprisingly given the legend, “morning in America” didn’t do much better, despite a sharp fall in oil prices — in fact, the annual growth rate was almost exactly the same. And the “Bush boom” was much worse, with essentially no gain in incomes even before the financial crisis struck. The only halfway convincing boom, at least as far as middle-class families are concerned, took place in the 1990s.

So whence the impression that the 70s were completely horrible, while Reaganomics was a triumph? Part of the answer is inflation, which did feel out of control even if it was largely matched by wage increases. But one suspects that the trashing of the 70s also reflects the reality that those doing the trashing don’t really care about ordinary families; what they care about is this:

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But perhaps at a deeper level, the depiction of the 70s as the epitome of a bad economy is about selling an ideology. The 70s were the final years before the great right turn in American politics, so they must become an object lesson in how liberal governance is a disaster. You constantly hear assertions that stagflation was caused by an excessively large welfare state — as opposed to oil shocks and bad judgement by the Fed. Actually, it’s even stranger, when you read Paul Ryan’s linked piece, to see his insinuation that budget deficits are what cause stagflation — in the 70s public debt was low and falling as a share of GDP. It only started rising after the Reagan tax cuts.

So we’re not going back to the 70s — and we’re definitely not going back to the 70s of right-wing fantasy, a dystopia that never really happened.