Milton Friedman was wrong. Inflation is always and everywhere a social phenomenon, not a m

onetary one. At least, that is how Robert Samuelson sees it. The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath dwells little on the economics of inflation; the main text does not mention the Federal Reserve until page 31. Instead, it examines the intellectual and political currents that let inflation rise from 1% in the early 1960s to nearly 15% in 1980 and then brought it down again.

This is a laudable(值得称赞的) enterprise. Historians have devoted lots of scholarship to the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement but almost nothing to the parallel rise in inflation, whose impact on society has been arguably great.

Mr. Samuelson, an economics columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek, graphically recounts the futile efforts of various presidents to contain inflation, and the toll they exacted. Inflation began, Mr. Samuelson writes, because the followers of John Maynard Keynes who dominated economics after the Second World War convinced John Kennedy that reducing unemployment would cause only a small rise in inflation. But as inflation increased, it became politically impossible to bring it down. In 1968 Richard Nixon asked Herbert Stein, a nominee for Iris Council of Economic Advisers, what the president-elect's biggest economic challenge would be. When Stein replied inflation, Nixon "immediately warned me that we must not raise unemployment," Stein later wrote.

The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath is readable, but often frustrating. Rather than proceeding chronologically, it hopscotches (像玩“跳房子”游戏) back and forth between decades, repeatedly bringing home the points it wants to make. Despite the forward-looking subtitle, Mr. Samuelson does not demonstrate that the great inflation has much bearing on America's future. He spends much of two chapters, 73 pages in all, choosing a list of contemporary economic problems, from excessive entitlement spending to global imbalances that have little to do with inflation. Meanwhile, he devotes just a few paragraphs to inflation's most crucial impact at the present. The decline in interest rates that followed inflation's defeat created bubbles in stocks and houses and fuelled a" reach for yield" whose undoing is at the heart of the current crisis.

More puzzling is the fact that, in a year in which inflation and deflation have both repeatedly hit the headlines, Mr. Samuelson devotes little time to speculating on the future course of inflation and the political pressures that will affect it. That is a pity because it is a ripe subject.

The author commented the book as a" laudable enterprise" (Para.2), mainly because ______.

A．it pointed out inflation is always a social phenomenon

B．it has been focusing on the economics of inflation

C．it contributed to the longly-neglected topic -- inflation

D．it does not mention the Federal Reserve until page 31