Word: 1970s
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Following student demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1969, administrators banned ROTC from campus. (Harvard students have participated in ROTC through MIT since the early 1970s...
...will focus my remarks today on two economic issues that challenged us in the 1970s and that still do so today--energy and productivity. These, obviously, are not the kind of topics chosen by many recent Class Day speakers--Will Farrell, Ali G, or Seth MacFarlane, to name a few. But, then, the Class Marshals presumably knew what they were getting when they invited an economist...
...Because the members of today's graduating class--and some of your professors--were not yet born in 1975, let me begin by briefly surveying the economic landscape in the mid-1970s. The economy had just gone through a severe recession, during which output, income, and employment fell sharply and the unemployment rate rose to 9 percent. Meanwhile, consumer price inflation, which had been around 3 percent to 4 percent earlier in the decade, soared to more than 10 percent during my senior year.1
...price shock of the 1970s began in October 1973 when, in response to the Yom Kippur War, Arab oil producers imposed an embargo on exports. Before the embargo, in 1972, the price of imported oil was about $3.20 per barrel; by 1975, the average price was nearly $14 per barrel, more than four times greater. President Nixon had imposed economy-wide controls on wages and prices in 1971, including prices of petroleum products; in November 1973, in the wake of the embargo, the President placed additional controls on petroleum prices.2
...Fast-forward now to 2003. In that year, crude oil cost a little more than $30 per barrel.3 Since then, crude oil prices have increased more than fourfold, proportionally about as much as in the 1970s. Now, as in 1975, adjusting to such high prices for crude oil has been painful. Gas prices around $4 a gallon are a huge burden for many households, as well as for truckers, manufacturers, farmers, and others. But, in many other ways, the economic consequences have been quite different from those of the 1970s. One obvious difference is what you don't see: drivers...