Even if I was only the ironic twist.
Past and Present
DENVER – Perhaps this year the event acquired a name that at last will stick. The World Financial Crisis? The Great Recession? Why not call it The Long Slump, said Robert Hall, of Stanford University, in his presidential address at the meeting here of the American Economic Association.A slump describes the time that passes, once a recession begins, before employment returns to its normal level – an average since 1948 of jobs for 95.5 percent of the labor force aged 25 to 54. This slump, which began in the autumn of 2007, is expected to last most of a decade, he said, before the unemployment rate returns to its post-World War II trend. By no means as deep as the Great Depression, it would be almost as long.
The most interesting sessions at the meetings this year were those concerned with what has been learned about the sources of the crisis, and about measures that might be taken to prevent it from happening again. It has become a commonplace that economics had grown overspecialized, that macroeconomists, monetary theorists and finance experts had paid too little attention to each others’ work. That plenty of progress had been made in the borderlands was clear. That no consensus as yet exists about what happened was equally apparent. That “they are working on it” is about all that can be said with certainty.
Interesting, too, was the undercurrent to be found in many conversations of interest in the history of economics itself. History of economic thought – or history of science, if you prefer – is a subject that has all but disappeared in the last thirty years as a topic of major research interest or as a subject of courses in top graduate schools – precisely the period of economic triumphalism.
