Pat,

You say that stagflation was caused by a "complex of forces that made the US 
economy
less competitive in the global economy."  Excuse me, but stagflation in the 
mid-1970s was
a global phenomenon that hit pretty much all market capitalist, 
oil-importing economies,
not just the US.  Looking at it as a shock to the AS curve for any of those 
economies
remains a mighty powerful way of explaining what happened, even if one 
thinks that the
sustained inflations that followed were due to overly expansionary monetary 
policy or
something else.  There is a very good reason why it was the 1970s oil price 
shocks that
led Baumol and Blinder and other textbook writers to introduce the AS/AD 
analysis, for
better or for worse.

Barkley Rosser