Economic commentators always reach for historical analogies, and with good reason. For example, those who had studied past banking crises had a much better grasp of what was happening in 2008 than those who hadn’t. But there’s always the question of which analogy to choose.
Right now, many people are harking back to the stagflation of the 1970s. I’ve argued at some length that this is a bad parallel; our current inflation looks very different from what we saw in 1979-80, and probably much easier to end.
There are, however, good reasons to worry that we’re seeing an economic replay of 1914 — the year that ended what some economists call the
