Wealth & Money Quote by Martin Feldstein

Feldstein’s line lands like a cleanly aimed rebuke: not just to a past policy consensus, but to the profession’s tendency to treat yesterday’s blind spots as quaint history rather than a cautionary tale. “Thirty years ago” is doing quiet rhetorical work. It shrinks a whole era of macroeconomic complacency into a single, almost embarrassing timestamp, inviting the reader to hear how recently “serious people” minimized inflation as tolerable background noise. The phrase “minor inconvenience” is faintly scornful; it frames that older view as a kind of bourgeois underreaction to a phenomenon that erodes wages, destabilizes planning, and punishes people who can’t hedge.

The real knife is the second sentence. “No one would make those arguments today” sounds like a victory lap for hard-earned wisdom, but it also functions as boundary enforcement: certain positions are now disqualifying, beyond the pale of respectable economics. Feldstein isn’t merely describing intellectual progress; he’s reminding you that reputations in economics are often retroactively cleaned up, with everyone claiming they were always on the right side of the tradeoff.

Context matters. Feldstein came of age professionally in the aftermath of 1970s stagflation, when inflation stopped looking like a manageable annoyance and started looking like a political and institutional solvent. His broader project, aligned with the Volcker-era turn, treated disinflation as costly but necessary. The subtext is pragmatic and moral at once: policy that tolerates inflation tends to outsource its pain to the least protected, and the “price” of fighting it can’t be debated honestly if you pretend the alternative is trivial.