Assuming Direct Control: The Beguiling Allure of Incomes Policies in Postwar America

Abstract

Abstract:Histories of American economic policymaking after World War II often describe a “Fiscal Revolution,” in which Keynesian macroeconomic tools replaced the microeconomic regulations and reforms of the New Deal. This article challenges that narrative by demonstrating how the Keynesian economists responsible for the Fiscal Revolution relied upon incomes policies to ensure that inflation would not sabotage efforts to achieve full employment. In the 1960s, the White House Council of Economic Advisers pressed the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to enforce “wage-price guideposts” in order to realize the potential of the Fiscal Revolution. Yet incomes policies also encouraged policymakers to deflect responsibility for inflation onto the private sector’s behavior as an alternative to adopting the painful but necessary fiscal and monetary restraint. As a reliance on the microeconomic control of inflation persisted into the late 1970s, this approach ultimately undercut the Keynesians’ macroeconomic promises and prolonged the misery of stagflation.