NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Peasant blouses and inflation; hip-hugging jeans and high prices at the pump. An increasingly unpopular war and a president with an ability to make his detractors see red (or perhaps blue).

Yes, sometimes it does look like the 1970s. That, at least, is the gist of a recent sketch from Comedy Central, a shrewd interpreter of the American zeitgeist.

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But before whisking out those WIN buttons (Whip Inflation Now, a Gerald Ford brainstorm, circa 1974), it's worth thinking about the many ways in which this is not the 1970s - and why.

Take the misery index: This is a figure that combines the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. Right now it is 8.77 (4.6 percent unemployment, 4.17 percent inflation).

In the 1970s, the misery index averaged 13.3 over the course of the decade and peaked at a truly miserable 21.98 in June 1980. In that figure is all you need to know about why Jimmy Carter was a one-term president.

If misery loves company, that came in the 1970s in the form of stagflation. A combination of the words "stagnation" and "inflation," the term refers to a state of affairs when an adverse shock (say, rising oil prices) hammers a poorly performing economy, with little growth, rising unemployment and surging prices.

Keynesians believed that stagflation was impossible because high unemployment would lower prices. The 1970s proved otherwise.

And therein lies the big difference between now and then. One of the lessons of the '70s was that a strong link existed between inflation and the money supply. And the latter of course, is a matter that is very much in the control of governments, in the form of central banks.

In the 1970s, the Fed Chairman was a gentleman named Arthur Burns, impeccably connected in conservative circles and as Keynesian as any member of FDR's braintrust. He cannot be blamed for all the rotten economic decisions of that era, but he was certainly no help, either.

Called the "Pope of Economics" by German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, it was in large part Burns's idea to impose wage-and-price controls on sweeping portions of the U.S. economy. This kind of meddling was hardly unique - much of Europe was doing the same - but it was a cure that made the disease worse. And it became a habit.

In 1979, during another oil shock, the federal government imposed a price control of $1 a gallon. Immediate result: shortages, gas lines and a larger economic toll on the economy.

Could the current economic thinking be more different? Paul Volcker, Fed Chairman, reversed Burns's expansionist policy and imposed a monetary tightening that squeezed out inflation; Ronald Reagan got rid of the last price controls. Alan Greenspan (Fed chairman 1987-2006) also kept inflation bottled up.

The new chairman, Ben Bernanke, made his academic bones as an inflation hawk, and has even endorsed the idea of inflation targeting. Absolutely no one is talking about wage and price controls; the idea that the role of government is to manage the day-to-day workings of the economy simply does not exist in polite company anymore. Even with a fill-up costing more than $50, you'd have to go off the ideological map into fantasy land to find someone advocating a price cap.

Sure, there is more than enough economic news to worry about - a massive current account deficit, undisciplined federal spending, and, yes, creeping inflation. But the unemployment outlook is pretty good (down a full percentage point in the last year); growth hit 5.3 percent in the first quarter; and productivity growth is brisk. This is not stagflation as we once knew it.

The most striking difference between now and the 1970s, though, is the modesty of the tools U.S. policy makers are willing to deploy - an interest rate rise here, a tweak to the money supply there, and (of course) some stupid subsidies and silly rhetoric.

It's been a hard-won restraint. Still, like the leisure suit, the fashion for government microeconomic meddling seems to have gone permanently out of style.