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456 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1981)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0456 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE The theme of this Annual Meeting is Social Effects of Inflation. We recognize the economics involved in inflation, the integral, inherent issues that include supply, demand, production, imports, exports, and money. The economic causes of inflation are manifold. Although comments are made throughout these articles about these economic intricacies, our attention is focused on the social, political, psychological, and other behavioral effects of inflation. People are required to change many of their living habits-the food they eat, where they live, the cars they drive, how they educate their children, the games they play, and the crimes they commit. Whole institu- tions can be affected-education, medicine, architecture, transportation, museums, theaters, orchestras, marriage and the family, welfare services, and criminal justice systems. There are many different social psychological reactions to these rippling individual and institutional alterations that follow from the heavy fallen stone of the economy on the waters of our total society. Some of these re- actions may be viewed as negative and dysfunctional: frustration and a sense of powerlessness that the mammoth macrocosm of complex organiza- tions holds us chained to a condition that worsens our quality of life; and anxiety about the future for our later years and for our children. Some of us move to less expensive quarters, reduce our purchases, deplete our sav- ings, and feel we are slipping on the uphill struggle to cope with rising costs. We are required to review the priorities in our lives. But there may also be some positive features in some reactions to inflation. Some of us learn how to be more frugal, efficient, and wiser as consumers be- cause we have had to learn more about, and be more sensitive to, faulty production of goods and services. Some eat less expensive fatty foods, walk more than ride, stay home and read more, learn how to mend clothes we would have previously thrown away, to conserve energy, and to repair our own cars and possessions. An increase in money and credit relative to the amount of available goods may also have some salutary broader institutional consequences. The careful investigative work of the General Accounting Office (GAO), under the leadership of Elmer B. Staats, was increased to ferret out waste and ex- cessive spending. The GAO recently informed us that $4 billion could be saved by 1985 in 15 areas of Defense Department operations. In my own discipline of criminology, many of my colleagues argue, with good reason and statistics, against most political urgings for the massive con- struction of new maximum security prisons. Governors and legislators reap some benefit of public opinion when they claim that more maximum security prisons are needed to help reduce crime, although historical and current research data held by penalogists do not support their claims. Yet it is less likely that the politics and language of reason than the economics of vii

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