ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book reviews a third kind of evidence tending to contradict the standard sociological account. It illustrates a second hazard—a tendency to greatly exaggerate the importance of social classes, both as bases for the politically relevant distribution of power and as sources of norms. The book suggests quite strongly that the account of the postwar inflation most usually favored by sociologists and political scientists is generally incorrect and adds little to what we already know from orthodox economic accounts. The rise and fall of inflation in the postwar period, then, to some extent rest on the changing preferences of the electorate. The book argues that the norms that are most relevant in the explanation of shifts in postwar macroeconomic policy are not the class-based ones identified in sociological theories of the postwar inflation.
