D. CONCLUDING REMARKS Even though the Porter Commission had some remarkable insights, there is no doubt that there has been a major change in views since the 1960s with respect to the objective of monetary policy and the mechanisms through which policy works. Two factors stand out in trying to understand the change.
The first is the simple accumulation of experience that has exposed some of the shortcomings in earlier thinking about macroeconomic policy. The second is the advances in the analytic framework available to policy-makers to help them analyze the workings of the economy and of monetary policy. These are not independent factors, of course, since economic analysis does change in response to experience.