ABSTRACT
Events have been unkind to the economy, and unkinder still to economists. Twenty years ago the age-old problem of boom and bust seemed to have been solved; the ideological schisms that had long plagued economics had been melded into a "Neoclassical synthesis" that reconciled the classical economics of the invisible hand with the inspired heresies of John Maynard Keynes. In the 1961 edition of his famous textbook Paul Samuelson could write with some confidence that the body of Neoclassical theory "is accepted in its broad outlines by all but a few extreme left-wing and right-wing writers."
