Economists have put together a dataset of trends in long-run real interest rates among advanced economies since the 1950s, showing that rates have been lower before.

Kei-Mu Yi and Jing Zhang set out their results in an “economic perspectives” paper, published recently by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. They note the rates were actually lower than their present depressed levels in many countries in the mid-1970s and subsequently recovered, “which suggests that the current long-run pattern