Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Feldstein

“Inflation is lower and more stable” is Feldstein doing what elite macroeconomists learned to do in the late 20th century: narrate history as technocratic progress. The sentence is built like a victory lap, but it’s a careful one. No swagger, no policy chest-thumping, just a pair of calm comparatives that suggest the world has been tamed by better institutions, smarter central banking, and the intellectual confidence of the post-Volcker era.

The subtext is the Great Moderation story: that the chaos of the 1970s gave way to a cleaner, more manageable economy in which recessions still happen, but in softer, more “modest” forms. “Real business cycle fluctuations” is a term that quietly stakes out an ideological and methodological preference. It frames booms and busts as largely efficient responses to real shocks (technology, productivity, oil), not as failures of finance, politics, or distribution. In that phrasing, unemployment becomes “fluctuations,” pain becomes a data series, and responsibility diffuses into “the cycle.”

Context matters because Feldstein sat at the crossroads of academia and policy, shaping how the Reagan era and its successors justified their choices. A claim about stability isn’t just descriptive; it’s permission-giving. If inflation is conquered and cycles are modest, then the urgency for aggressive regulation, redistribution, or full-employment experimentation fades. The line works because it sounds like neutral measurement while smuggling in a worldview: the economy is behaving, the stewards are competent, and whatever turbulence remains is simply the weather.