The consequent price rises are generally represented, even by sympathetic commentators, as evidence of the government's economic incompetence. It is true that the government was unable to fulfill its earlier Keynesian hopes that higher wages and public spending would stimulate demand without serious inflation. In 1973, a government member of the Central Bank laid out the following options: 'reduce the speed of societal change; detain the redistribution of income; lower the level of employment; reduce the growth rate; decrease the level of capital accumulation – or increase inflation'. By 1972, he noted, the Allende government, 'with much regret, had to opt for sacrificing monetary stability'. Chile's inflation was the consequence not of economic ignorance in the context of a basic unanimity of values, but of a political commitment to Chile's poorest people in dramatically constrained circumstances. The Chicago Boys would make precisely the opposite choice. Pinochet's economic miracle was to preserve monetary stability by sacrificing Chile's poor.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 340