Many, if not the majority, thought that getting inflation down again would not be worth the price, because it would result in permanently lower growth. The short-term trade-off (the Phillips Curve) was incorrectly interpreted as being a summary of our medium-term choices. Now when we look back (Table 4), nothing could be further from the truth.
The low inflation decades - 1950s, 1960s and now the 1990s - are the ones where we did well on growth in absolute terms, or in relative terms. The high inflation decades - the 1970s and 1980s - were the ones where our growth performance was at its poorest.