Because I contributed a chapter. The book is the Routledge Handbook of Major Events in Economic History, edited by Randall E. Parker and Robert Whaples. The handbook tends to be U.S.-centric, with some surprising exceptions, such as a brief, fascinating chapter on World War I. The chapters are predominantly about events in the twentieth century. The book is priced out of your range, unless you are a library.

My chapter is called The 1970’s: The decade the Phillips Curve died. My main point is that except for the 1970’s, the Phillips Curve has performed really well. However, because of the 1970’s, macroeconomics went through great contortions from which it has not recovered.

This is not to say that we should go back to the macroeconomic consensus as it existed in 1970 (although that is where I see Paul Krugman coming out). But I do not think that the macroeconomic consensus as it existed in 2007 was any better. Hence PSST.

There is another chapter on the 1970’s by Robert Hetzel, which covers much of the same ground as my chapter. And he got to use graphs, which makes me jealous (my chapter would have worked better with graphs).

He and I would differ in our interpretation of the 1980-1983 period. Hetzel writes,

The Volcker-Greenspan FOMCs succeeded in controlling inflation without the need to engineer periodic bouts of high unemployment.

But we had the highest spike in the unemployment rate since the Great Depression–higher than the peak unemployment rate in 2009.