"The dollar went up some eighty percent in real terms as I recall now or something like that - from '80 to '85"
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“The dollar went up some eighty percent in real terms as I recall now or something like that - from '80 to '85” is the kind of offhand statistic that’s doing two jobs at once: pointing to a real historical jolt while quietly confessing how slippery economic memory can be.
On the surface, Solomon is flagging the early Reagan-era surge in the U.S. dollar, a period when tight monetary policy, high interest rates, and global capital inflows made the currency soar. In practical terms, that appreciation made imports cheaper, hammered exporters, and widened the trade deficit; it also helped set the stage for the 1985 Plaza Accord, when major economies coordinated to push the dollar back down. If you lived through it in business, manufacturing, or policy, you felt it.
The subtext sits in the hedges: “as I recall” and “or something like that.” An educator (and, more broadly, a public intellectual) is signaling a classroom mode of authority that’s intentionally non-dogmatic. He’s not performing the economist’s priesthood of exact figures; he’s modeling how people actually think with numbers: approximate, contextual, aware that precision is sometimes less important than the direction and magnitude of change. That casualness also inoculates him against pedantry, inviting the listener to focus on consequences rather than trivia.
The intent, then, isn’t to win a spreadsheet contest. It’s to smuggle in a sense of scale - eighty percent is a shock - while reminding you that economic facts arrive to most of us as remembered impressions, argued over and revised, not as pristine data tables.
On the surface, Solomon is flagging the early Reagan-era surge in the U.S. dollar, a period when tight monetary policy, high interest rates, and global capital inflows made the currency soar. In practical terms, that appreciation made imports cheaper, hammered exporters, and widened the trade deficit; it also helped set the stage for the 1985 Plaza Accord, when major economies coordinated to push the dollar back down. If you lived through it in business, manufacturing, or policy, you felt it.
The subtext sits in the hedges: “as I recall” and “or something like that.” An educator (and, more broadly, a public intellectual) is signaling a classroom mode of authority that’s intentionally non-dogmatic. He’s not performing the economist’s priesthood of exact figures; he’s modeling how people actually think with numbers: approximate, contextual, aware that precision is sometimes less important than the direction and magnitude of change. That casualness also inoculates him against pedantry, inviting the listener to focus on consequences rather than trivia.
The intent, then, isn’t to win a spreadsheet contest. It’s to smuggle in a sense of scale - eighty percent is a shock - while reminding you that economic facts arrive to most of us as remembered impressions, argued over and revised, not as pristine data tables.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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