walter heller left the council in 1964.1985, the man in this office rejected the idea that the government could fine-tune the economy. we cannot do it now, and we couldn't do it then. some of my predecessors believed they could. so far as the reagan administration is concerned, we recognize that. we try not to fine-tune because it would be a road toward disaster. what happened between the sixties and the eighties? the seventies happened, bad years for theory and practice of macro-economics. monthly fine-tuning of monetary policy created havoc in the economy, as martin feldstein explains. i think the 1970s, in particular, was a decade in which monetary policy pursued the wrong goals, was based on the wrong premises, and got us into terrible trouble. it was money's excessive growth, more than anything else, that brought us to the double-digit inflation rates. in the seventies, fiscal policy was not much better. by the time congress got around to changing fiscal policy, a tax cut or an increase in spending, it was too late. in