LOW oil prices in 2015 will benefit the consumers

US gasoline prices have dropped for more than 90 straight days. They now average $2.28 a gallon, which is remarkable considering that just a few months ago, some of us were routinely paying $4 and sometimes close to $5. Diesel prices are down in Europe, too, but not nearly as much as in the US because of taxes.Not so coincidentally, the US economy surged by 5% last quarter, and does not appear to be slowing down. South Korea’s economy will growat least 0.5% faster next year. India’s inflation is down by 3.5 percentage points from 2013. Such is the potency of lower fuel prices, which are churching through consumerist countries—Indonesia, India, Japan, and Turkey among them. When you average the impact over a year, it puts an extra $1.3 trillion in consumers’ pockets versus six months ago.

All of which makes it surprising that many linear-minded economists are sticking with pre-oil-plunge forecasts suggesting little or no economic boon from the fall in prices. Some have even argued that the plummet is possibly a negative dynamic because it may reflect something deeply awry with the global economy. That is twisted reasoning: In all the modern oil price collapses—in the mid-1980s, in the late 1990s and in the late 2000s—economies surged. As perhaps the most basic of the building blocks of economies, oil, when it is priced moderately, is a driver of broadly healthy micro- and macroeconomic growth.In short, economists: get real