Clearly something drastic happened in the core Keynesian economies (the United States, Britain, etc.) during the late 1960s and 1970s. Basically, productivity (the amount of output per working hour) declined while inflation (the money prices charged for that output) increased. Productivity is the basis for economic growth, so this decline in productivity brought about a crisis in economic thought. The decade of the 1970s came to be characterized by “stagflation”—economic stagnation, marked by low growth rates and high unemployment, combined with high inflation. Stagflation is difficult (but not impossible) for Keynesian policies to deal with because boosting the economy through low interest rates or deficit spending causes runaway inflation, whereas damping down inflation reduces growth rates and causes unemployment. But “crisis” can be interpreted in several ways. This particular “interpretive moment” was seized on by neoliberal theorists like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman (discussed later), who managed to persuade the broader discipline of economics, or at least a good part of it, and through them a significant part of the policymaking elite, that there were fundamental structural deficiencies in Keynesian economics and economic policy. This persuasion was made possible by massive changes in political thinking. Many people, especially in the elite, were disturbed by the revolutionary events of the 1960s and early 1970s—the massive antiwar mobilizations, radical black power movements, and hippies decrying everything that smacked of consumerism. Right-wing and even centrist sections of the elite blamed “all this radicalism” on a soft-hearted Keynsianism manifested in the “nanny state” (that is, a state that looked after people, no matter what their own preferences). They wanted to reestablish law and order and revert to a more conservative political-economic regime. Hence, a movement to the right was manifested in an attack on Keynesianism.