I've always found it baffling that 70s inflation was somehow magically blamed on progressive policy and pay rises and not on a far more obvious cause - oil price shocks.

In the 1973/4 crisis the price of crude quadrupled.

In the 1979 crisis it more than doubled.

On both occasions the price hikes were combined with physical shortages which did huge damage to economies which were - and largely still are - dependent on oil for everything from transport to energy to plastics to food production.

And yet... these economic cataclysms have been almost sidelined from the official economic narrative in both the UK and the US.

Ask a typical British voter about the history of the 70s and they'll tell you the UK was bankrupt because of excessive government spending, and not because the price of crude went through the roof.

It's one of the reasons I consider economics a branch of propaganda and not a real science. Clearly the oil shocks were an economic catastrophe and were directly responsible for very severe inflation. But somehow the effects are still blamed on wage growth and (in the UK) unionisation - both of which were far more credibly an effect than a primary cause.