The lessons from the ghosts of inflations past are clear: no matter the cause, societies which let inflation set in should expect more than just their living standards to be debased
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe root of the chaos was a wholly unexpected, and wholly unfamiliar, surge in inflation. For at least the 300 years leading up to the 1500s, western Europe made modern-day Japan look like Zimbabwe. In England in 1500 the price of a standard basket of goods facing consumers was no higher than it had been in 1275, suggests work by Gregory Clark, a historian, and researchers at the Bank of England.
Like Messrs Summers and Krugman today, both Malestroit and Bodin had a point. Excess demand certainly played a role. The population had grown fast after the Black Death; many of those people had moved to cities. This raised demand for food even as it cut the number of farmers producing it. And some monarchs goosed the economy by manipulating the currency.
In about 1545 people discovered vast silver deposits in Bolivia. Potosí, the centre of this lucrative new industry, became perhaps the fifth-largest city in the Christian world by population . In the first quarter of the 1500s just ten tonnes of silver had arrived on Europe’s shores. By the third quarter of the century Europe imported 173 tonnes.
In a paper published in 1986 Jack Goldstone, now of George Mason University, asked why from 1550 to 1650 “states broke down on a wide scale”. In France in 1572 the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre involved Catholic-on-Protestant assassinations, resulting in thousands of deaths. The 1590s were years of revolt in Austria, Finland, Hungary and Ukraine. Russia experienced its “time of troubles”, a 15-year period of lawlessness from 1598.
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