It’s hard to remember that little more than a year ago, it was held that the greatest threat to the U.S. economy was not the risk of a slowdown but, rather, rising inflation. Nasty recessions were thought to be yesterday’s problem, and the Federal Reserve was mostly concerned with restraining the economy from veering toward the other extreme.

Whether Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made a mistake by being too vigilant about preventing the economy from overheating (even while a recession was brewing) stands as an unexplored but intriguing subtext to Robert Samuelson’s history of the economic malaise of the 1970s and early ’80s, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath.

Bernanke, it may be recalled, was raising interest rates—restraining inflation but also curbing economic activity—until as late as June 2006. And during the ensuing year, even as subprime-mortgage defaults rose alarmingly, the Fed maintained its official position that inflation, not recession, was the primary threat. Bernanke was not seeing ghosts—inflation did rise from 2.6 percent in June 2007 to just below 5 percent a year later, largely because of then-surging food and energy prices.

Samuelson, a contributing editor at Newsweek, must have hoped, as he prepared this work, that rising inflation would put Americans in a mind to revisit the 1970s. Instead, the 20th century’s other economic calamity, the Great Depression, is what’s on everyone’s lips. Still, if inflation seems little more than an afterthought, it buttresses Samuelson’s central point: Runaway inflation, he maintains, was just as significant, just as destabilizing, as the Depression or Watergate. And yet, Samuelson notes, while images of those debacles are indelibly stamped on our psyche, “inflation has mostly vanished.” Thus he offers us what he terms America’s “lost history.”

From 1960 to its peak in 1979, inflation—the rate at which consumer prices go up—rose from 1.4 percent to a staggering 13.3 percent. It fell during the ’80s and has been mostly quiescent since, but restraining inflation remains a fundamental part of the Fed’s mandate. Samuelson views the rip-roaring inflation of the ’70s as a social, as well as an economic, phenomenon. It shook the confidence of wage earners; it impoverished retirees; and by weakening the dollar, it undermined the U.S.’s image overseas. In short, dealing with the period’s rising inflation was, according to Samuelson, “a deeply disturbing and disillusioning experience that eroded Americans’ confidence in their future and their leaders.”

By making planning impossible, inflation chilled investment and stunted growth. One telling set of figures shows that General Motors, during a five-year span, recorded a 77 percent rise in sales, but corrected for inflation, the gain was only 20 percent. What was a manager to do?

In a dandy bit of analysis, Samuelson traces the roots of the inflation crisis not to OPEC or Vietnam War expenditures but to the increasingly self-confident mind-set of the ’60s. That decade saw a bull market in Americans’ belief in their ability to improve—even to perfect—society. In the same way that the best and brightest minds in foreign policy led us to Vietnam, the leading economists believed they could steer the country to full employment without overheating the economy. In 1965, Time noted that the U.S. had “discovered the secret of steady, stable, noninflationary growth.” Inflation took off from there.

Bowing to presidents who were more anxious about job growth than inflation, the Fed let the printing presses hum. Samuelson generally endorses Milton Friedman’s now-standard diagnosis of inflation: too much money chasing too few goods. However, he occasionally seems to support the alternative and somewhat inconsistent view that fiscal policy—specifically government spending—rather than monetary policy was to blame.

Of the five presidents from John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter, Samuelson says all underestimated inflation except for Gerald Ford. Samuelson’s portrait of Lyndon Johnson trying to jawbone executives into lowering prices is amusing, a postcard from a quaint, bygone era. But if the “great inflation” was truly, as Samuelson maintains, a trauma comparable with the Depression and the Civil War, he should have told us more about its effects, especially on ordinary people.

Samuelson rightly promotes former Fed chief (and current Obama adviser) Paul Volcker as a hero for administering the tough medicine (two recessions in three years) that licked inflation in the early 1980s. But he is overly harsh on Carter, who, after all, tolerated Volcker’s rate-tightening. And he is far too kind to Ronald Reagan: “Of all Reagan’s economic achievements,” Samuelson gushes, taming inflation “was the most definitive.” But that achievement was Volcker’s, not Reagan’s.

Samuelson is an essayist, not a chronological storyteller. But at 336 pages, The Great Inflation is more essay than we need. This becomes a serious problem in the book’s second half, which covers what Samuelson deems inflation’s aftermath. And that, he maintains, includes just about every economic trend of the past 30 years. He argues that disinflation (that is, falling inflation) changed investment patterns, promoted higher stock prices, abetted the internet bubble, and even encouraged the development of the mortgage securities that ultimately brought about the current crisis. The great inflation surely led to such things. But then, Valley Forge may be said to have led to Watergate; it hardly caused it.

Samuelson seems to believe that the absence of inflation was a primary cause of the economic success of the Reagan and Clinton years. That’s like saying the absence of terror caused Manhattan to thrive after 9/11. Viewed through this lens, inflation’s “aftermath” can be seen as causing everything, and Samuelson embarks on a dubious survey of issues such as income inequality, skyrocketing health-care costs, and even global warming. This is rather unnecessary, given the richness of his central topic. Samuelson is trying to convince us that his subject is relevant, but by refusing to let it stand on its own, he sadly belittles it.