tionary causes that fed into wages, prices, rent, and lease contracts at every stage of production. Even before Schultze, "cost-push" inflation theories had been developed by Okun, Weintraub, and others. "Conflict theories" of inflation as a process involving the straggle over income shares in a world of structural change had been developed in the early 1950s by A.J. Brown and Joan Robinson. There were theories based on "rational expectations" (Guttmann, 1994). Some conservative Republican economists were acutely concerned about attacking the new inflation of the 1970s. Arthur F. Burns, after completing his tenure as Federal Reserve Board Chairman (February 1970 to March 1978), advised in his 1979 Per Jacobsson Lecture that central banks "will be able to cope only marginally with the inflation of our times" (p. 22). But years earlier, at the beginning of his chairmanship, Burns had already outlined a broad anti-inflationary program in his well-known speech at Pepperdine College (December 7, 1970) for a society that properly "values full employment, monetary and fiscal tools are inadequate for dealing with sources of price inflation ... from excessive wage increases." Burns came to the conclusion, that it is "desirable to supplement our monetary and fiscal policies with an incomes policy," and even advocated "a high-level price and wage review board" (Burns, 1978, pp. 113-114). Mandatory wage-price controls were part of President Nixon's New Economic Policy (August 15, 1971). In 1974, when inflation accelerated after the first oil price shock, Burns urged President Ford to adopt some form of wage-price controls. In that instance, the CEA chairman, Alan Greenspan, persuaded the president that wage-price controls were out of the question. Though Burns had unquestioned credibility as a consistent conservative, he frequently and wisely approached anti-inflationary policy in a pragmatic way, supporting bipartisan efforts to hold down the co...
