Like any major intellectual contribution, Keynes's ideas were bitterly criticized. To many people it seems obvious that massive economic slumps must … - Paul Krugman

Were the Asian economies more vulnerable to financial panic in 1997 than they had been, say, five or ten years before? Yes, surely—but not because of crony capitalism, or indeed what would usually be considered bad government policies. Rather, they had become more vulnerable partly because they had opened up their financial markets—because they had, in fact, become better free-market economies, not worse. And they had also grown vulnerable because they had taken advantage of their new popularity with international lenders to run up substantial debts to the outside world. These debts intensified the feedback from loss of confidence to financial collapse and back again, making the vicious circle of crisis more intense. It wasn’t that the money was badly spent; some of it was, some of it wasn’t. It was that the new debts, unlike the old ones, were in dollars—and that turned out to be the economies’ undoing.

Many of those who reject the idea of economic models are ill-informed or even (perhaps unconsciously) intellectually dishonest. Still, there are highly intelligent and objective thinkers who are repelled by simplistic models for a much better reason: they are very aware that the act of building a involves loss as well as gain.

The irony... is that high development theory was right. By this I do not mean that the Big Push is really the right story of how development takes place, or even that the issues raised in high development theory are necessarily the key ones for making poor countries rich. What I do mean is that the unconventional themes put forth by the high development theorists—their emphasis on strategic complementarity in investment decisions and on the problem of coordination failure—did... identify important possibilities that are neglected in models. But the high development theorists failed to convince their colleagues of the importance of those possibilities. Worse, they failed even to communicate clearly what they were talking about. And so good ideas, important ideas, were ignored for a generation...