¹ See The Global Political Economy of Food, special issue of International Organization, xxxii (Summer 1978)Google Scholar, edited by Raymond Hopkins and Donald J. Puchala.

² These political decisions were due not merely to pressures for prosperity from the public, but also to active attempts by leaders to manipulate their economies in such a way as to assure their own reelection. See Tufte, Edward R., Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978)Google Scholar. Economists have also explored this question. Prominent examples include Nordhaus, William D., “The Political Business Cycle,” Review of Economics Studies xlii (April 1975), 169–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robert J. Gordon, “The Demand for and Supply of Inflation,” Journal of Law and Economics (December 1975); Lindbeck, Assar, “Business Cycles, Politics and International Economic Dependence,” Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken Quarterly, 11 (1975)Google Scholar; and Lindbeck, , “Stabilization Policy in Open Economies with Endogenous Politicians,” American Economic Review, Vol. 66 (May 1976)Google Scholar.

³ George L. Perry found that economic variables in his models did not successfully predict “wage explosions” in France and Japan in 1968, or in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom in 1970. Neither monetarist nor cost-push theories of inflation yielded strong results. He concluded that “conflict over income shares has been a source of wage inflation,” and that “institutions are important and can lead to a wage behavior that would be unpredictable from equations one could normally fit.” Perry, “Determinants of Wage Inflation Around the World,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Washington, D.C. 1975), 403–35Google Scholar. Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr. attributes wage inflation in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States to a considerable extent to trade-union militancy; see Hibbs, “Trade Union Power, Labor Militancy and Wage Inflation: A Comparative Analysis,” Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (April 1977).

⁴ Recent sociological and historical analyses of the origins of capitalism are suggestive, although their ambitions are only exceeded by the difficulty of carrying out similar undertakings for the contemporary world. See Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books 1974)Google Scholar, and Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press 1974)Google Scholar. For a brilliant critique of the latter, see Skocpol, Theda, “Wallerstein's World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical Critique,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 82 (March 1977), 1083 ffGoogle Scholar.

⁵ For a discussion of the behavior of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board during 1971–72, seeTufte (fn. 2).

⁶ Gordon, Robert Aaron, “Rigor and Relevance in a Changing Institutional Setting,” American Economic Review, Vol. 66 (March 1976)Google Scholar.

⁷ The report recognizes this possibility: “The continuation of excessively high rates of unemployment could call into question the market-oriented economic system” (p. 183).

⁸ The authors of Towards Full Employment and Price Stability do not seem to recognize this implication of their analysis, which remains largely unexplored in their report.

⁹ For two Marxist statements of this thesis, see O'Connor, James, The Fiscal Crisis oj the State (New York: St. Martin's Press 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Ofle, Claus, “The Theory of the Capitalist State and the Problem of Policy Formation,” in Lindberg, Leon N. and others, eds., Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism: Public Policy and the Theory of the State (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books 1975)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ For a recent exposition of a similar argument from another disillusioned liberal, see Lindblom, Charles E., Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books 1977)Google Scholar.

¹¹ For discussions, see Kindleberger, Charles, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1974), 305–7Google Scholar; and Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown 1977), 229–34Google Scholar.

¹² This criticism applies as strongly to the attempts of many political scientists to carry mt policy analysis as it does to those of economists. For an interesting discussion of related issues, see Tribe, Lawrence, “Policy Science: Analysis or Ideology?” Philosophy ind Public Affairs, 11 (Fall 1972)Google Scholar.

¹³ The idea of economics as a “thin science” is meant to contrast with Clifford Geertz's lotion of good anthropology as “thick description.” See Geertz's essay of that title in lis book of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books 1973)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Joseph Schumpeter, for instance, comments as follows: “When we succeed in finding a definite causal relation between two phenomena, our problem is solved if the one which plays the ‘causal' role is non-economic. We have then accomplished what we, as economists, are capable of in the case in question, and we must give place to other disciplines.” Schumpeter, , The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle, trans, by Opie, Redvers, 1934; (4th printing, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1951), 4–5Google Scholar. By contrast, the McCracken Report does not acknowledge the necessity to “give place to other disciplines,” which in this context would require serious professional treatment of political, sociological, and historical issues.

¹⁵ Hirsch, Fred and Goldthorpe, John have edited a volume, The Political Economy of Inflation (London: Martin Robertson 1978; Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1978)Google Scholar, based on a conference held at Warwick, U.K., in May 1977. Charles Maier and Leon Lindberg are leading a Hrookings project on “The Politics and Sociology of Global Inflation,” which is to yield a book that may appear in 1979.

¹⁶ Goldthorpe, “The Current Inflation: Towards a Sociological Account,” in Hirsch and Goldthorpe (fn. 15), 210–12.

¹⁷ Hirsch, “The Ideological Underlay of Inflation,” in Hirsch and Goldthorpe (fn. 15). See also Hirsch's brilliant book, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1976)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See Maier, Charles S., Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975)Google Scholar, and Maier's comments in Krause, Lawrence B. and Salant, Walter S., eds., Worldwide Inflation: Theory and Recent Experience (Washington, D.C.: The Brook-ings Institution 1977), 668Google Scholar.

¹⁹ For an interesting effort in this direction, see Hibbs (fn. 3).

²⁰ See in particular the work of Schmitter, Philippe, esp. “Still the Century of Cor-poratism?” in Pike, Frederick B. and Stritch, Thomas, eds., The New Corporatism (Notre Dame, Ind., and London: University of Notre Dame Press 1974), 85–131Google Scholar, and “Interest Intermediation and Regime Governability in Contemporary Western Europe,” paper prepared for the American Political Science Association convention, Washington, September 1977.

²¹ For an imaginative exploratory effort, see Goldthorpe (fn. 16).

²² A recent systematic analysis of international transmission of inflation from an economic viewpoint can be found in Walter S. Salant, “International Transmission of Inflation,” in Krause and Salant (fn. 18), 167–227.

²³ Hirsch, “The Ideological Underlay of Inflation” (fn. 17), attributes this accommodative stance to the high priority given by major capitalist governments and the International Monetary Fund to a liberal international economy. Inflation is thus seen, in part, as the price paid for liberalism.