What economists have learnt from the post-pandemic business cycle

Science advances one funeral at a time, to paraphrase Max Planck. The Nobel prize-winning physicist was arguing that new ideas in his field would only catch on once the advocates of older ones died off. With a little adaptation he could have been describing the dismal science, too: economics advances one crisis at a time. The Depression provided fertile soil in which John Maynard Keynes’s theories could grow; the Great Inflation of the 1970s spread Milton Friedman’s monetarist ideas; the global financial crisis of 2007-09 spurred interest in credit and banking.

Sure enough, the recovery from the covid-19 pandemic has given economists another chance to learn from their mistakes. Papers presented at the recent conference of the American Economic Association (AEA) offer clues as to the theories that might eventually become the received wisdom of the next generation.