The long swings in economic understanding

The worldview of a representative macroeconomist has changed repeatedly and drastically over the century from which we have just escaped. With the Αnew classics≅, it may indeed seem to have come full circle. But that, on closer inspection, turns out to be largely an illusion. True enough, economists a hundred years ago generally believed that the economy always tended towards equilibrium. Today, Αtendencies≅ do not enter into it one way or another. The modern macroeconomist believes the economy is in equilibrium. True enough, the main policy objective of economists a hundred years ago was to stabilize the price level and today low inflation has become the overriding goal of macropolicy. But in seeking to understand how the price level could be controlled, Wicksell and Fisher were motivated by a passionate concern with the distributive injustices arising from inflations and deflations. Distributive justice figures nowhere in the leading school of modern macroeconomics and certainly not in the muddled Αshoeleather≅ arguments marshalled in support of this exclusive concern with eliminating inflation.