From the beginning, the thing that puzzled me was the way the experts talked past each other, or, more frequently, didn’t talk at all. I explained last autumn how a magazine assignment in 1975 immersed me in the Seventies debate about inflation and led me to 700-year index of wages and prices in England. An unreversed “price revolution” in the sixteenth century was its central feature. Immediately I had turned to rival experts on the period, both emeritus professors at the University of Chicago. As I wrote in November, It turned out that the facts of the price revolution were well-established, and…