Conventional wisdom

Next time someone tells you that conserving even one drop of oil will plunge the world economy into a deep recession, thereby bringing the poor into a state of dismal destitution and making the baby Jesus weep, remember this:

It's conventional wisdom that big increases in oil prices usually trigger a recession -- or at least a sharp slowdown....The conventional wisdom is wrong .

Big oil price increases in the past (1973-74, 1979-80 and 1990-91) did not cause recessions, though recessions occurred at roughly the same time. The connection has been repeated so often that most people probably accept it as gospel. But much economic research has concluded that it's a myth. These recessions resulted mainly from rising inflation -- inflation that preceded higher oil prices -- and the Federal Reserve's efforts to suppress it. Higher oil prices merely made matters slightly worse. In 1980, for example, consumer prices rose 12.5 percent; excluding energy prices, they increased 11.7 percent.
--Samuelson

Indeed.