The big inflation spikes are always extremely multi-variate and difficult to turn into simple stories. Whereas ordinary inflation tends to be a somewhat simple story of demand running excess of supply, both of the big inflation spikes had large elements of supply side limitations. Indeed, possibly great inflation becomes "great" because it is the supply side problems riding on top of the normal demand pressures, and the two sometimes multiply each other in complex ways.<p>The Great Inflation of 1965 to 1982 came in the second half of the era when the great European empires were coming to an end (1947-1986). The most obvious event of the Great Inflation is the OPEC crisis, which obviously would not have been possible if the MidEast had still been owned by Britain. The independence of the Third World was a necessary pre-condition for the Great Inflation. One possible angle to explore is the extent to which independence allowed the nations of the Third World to demand better prices for their goods -- obviously in the case of oil, but possibly in the case of many other commodities -- and then possibly the way to break the power of the Third World nations wanting better prices for their commodities was for the developed nations to inflict a brutal period of austerity on themselves, cheating themselves so as to cheat the commodity-supplying nations.<p>This was an era in which the number of nations increased, dramatically, as the world transformed from a few big empires to 212 independent nations. Therefore, there was also a dramatic increase in the number of currencies that existed in the world. And so, there is another avenue of research that needs more exploration: whether the increase in the number of currencies that existed in the world lead to a kind of chaotic interference in the markets for currencies -- a world with just 11 currencies is a world where one can almost model the interactions in one's head, whereas a world with 212 currencies is far too complex for anyone to model it in their head. Did the sudden increase in the total number of independent currencies make it difficult, even temporarily, for the markets to send a rational signal about the value of those currencies?<p>Given such a complex situation, it is almost impossible to develop a properly multi-variate model, unless one is willing to devote one's life to the study of the subject, but as a method of getting traction on such complex subjects, it can be instructive, and even fun, to go through a single-variable account of the history, to see what impact a single variable might have had, for instance, in this case, the currency valuations of the various nations:<p><a href="https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-did-the-west-deindustrialize" rel="nofollow">https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-did-the-west-deindustri...</a><p>Such single-variable explanations always need to be taken with a grain of salt, but they do provide a way into a subject, without demanding 10 years of study.