It is silly to make long-term comparsions of oil prices without adjusting for the inflation in the intervening years. When a NYT article tells us that oil prices in the 80s had settled at around $18 a barrel in the mid-eighties, it would be worth telling readers that this translates into about $32 a barrel in today's dollars. With prices now hovering in the range of $55 a barrel, they are still considerably higher than they were were in the 80s, but we are talking about a real increase on the order of 70 percent, not a tripling.
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