Crises in Economic Thought, Secular Stagnation, and Future Economic Research

摘要

I am very flattered by the invitation to be the dinner speaker at this conference-now celebrating its 30th anniversary. I was proud to coauthor the lead article in the inaugural volume of this series on hysteresis and European unemployment with Olivier Blanchard (Blanchard and Summers 1986). Less successful in its original incarnation was a paper I presented a couple of years later on "The Scientific Illusion in Empirical Macroeconomics" that did not get published in this forum, but was published a few years later as Summers (1991). In ways I certainly did not expect, both these papers contain ideas that I believe are relevant to current policy dilemmas.