Macroegonomics
Economic policy makers thought they had tamed the business cycle. Not quite. Let's hope their hubris doesn't get in the way of our economic recovery.
The Atlantic , April 2009
CHRISTINA ROMER, the head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, is a liberal economist. The LBJ Presidential Library in Austin is a Democratic shrine. But on a September evening in 2007, Romer used that venue to deliver a bluntly negative assessment of the economic policies that began in the Kennedy and Johnson years. What macroeconomists had believed and done in the heady liberal hour of the 1960s, she declared, was simply wrong—a “mistaken revolution” that hurt the country. “Far from being the high point of economic policymaking in the postwar era, the 1960s represented the beginning of a long dark period for macroeconomic policy,” she said.