Including data from the 1980's sharply weakens the postwar time-series evidence indicating significant relationships between money (however defined) and nominal income or between money and either real income or prices separately. Focusing on data from 1970 onward destroys this evidence altogether. Evidence indicating cointegration of real income and real money balances, with due allowance for the effect of interest rates, also deteriorates when the sample extends through the 1980's. A positive finding is that the spread between the commercial paper rate and the Treasury bill rate consistently contains highly significant information about future movements in real income.

The fact that actual economic advance over time normally means producing and consuming different things is usually left implicit in modern models of economic growth. By contrast, qualitative change--new goods and services, and better versions of what already existed--is central to Robert Gordon's history of the improvement of American living standards since 1870. A major contribution of his fine-grained account of this experience is to make clear what this improvement has meant, and why it has mattered to ordinary citizens.

In contrast to the standard interpretation of the origins of economics out of the secular European Enlightenment of the 18th century, the transition in thinking that we rightly identify with Adam Smith and his contemporaries and followers, which gave us economics as we now know it, was powerfully influenced by then-controversial changes in religious belief in the English-speaking Protestant world in which they lived: in particular, key aspects of the movement away from orthodox Calvinism. Further, those at-the-outset influences of religious thinking not only fostered the subsequent spread of Smithian thinking, especially in America, but shaped the course of its reception. The ultimate result was a variety of fundamental resonances between economic thinking and religious thinking that continue to influence our public discussion of economic issues, and our public debate over economic policy, today.

What stands out in retrospect about U.S. monetary policy during the Greenspan Era is the ongoing movement away from mechanistic restrictions on the conduct of policy, together with a willingness on occasion to depart even from what more flexible guidelines dictated by contemporary conventional wisdom would imply, in the interest of carrying out the Federal Reserve System's dual mandate to pursue both stable prices and maximum employment. Part of this change was procedural -for example, the elimination of money growth targets. The most substantive demonstration of policy flexibility came in the latter half of the 1990s, as unemployment fell below 6% (in 1994), then below 5% (in 1997), and then remained below 5% for more than four years, yet the Federal Reserve did not tighten monetary policy. This policy stance was consistent with a view of the economy, including faster productivity growth and increased exposure to international competition, that Chairman Greenspan had articulated nearly a decade before.

Including data from the 1980s sharply weakens the postwar time-series evidence indicating significant relationships between money (however defined) and nominal income or between money and either real income or prices separately. Focusing on data from 1970 onward destroys this evidence altogether. Evidence indicating cointegration of real income and real money balances, with due allowance for the effect of interest rates, also deteriorates when the sample extends through the 1980s. A positive finding is that the spread between the commercial paper rate and the Treasury bill rate consistently contains highly significant information about future movements in real income.