Many of the stories economists tell take the form of models—for whatever else they are, economic models are stories about how the world works. - Paul Krugman

We’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn’t the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.

The idea that a country's economic fortunes are largely determined by its success on world markets is a hypothesis, not a necessary truth; and as a practical, empirical matter, that hypothesis is flatly wrong. That is, it is simply not the case that the world's leading nations are to any important degree in economic competition with each other, or that any of their major economic problems can be attributed to failures to compete on world markets.

In the world of politics, however, the actual content of an academic movement may be less important than the way it affects the tone of the discussion. During the 1970s there was a growing public sense of disillusionment with government, which first fed grass-roots tax revolts in California and , then helped elect Ronald Reagan. And there was also a determined effort by a few extremely conservative journalists and politicians to promote radical tax-cutting plans. No matter how careful the research of conservative public finance theorists like Martin Feldstein might be, in that political climate it was inevitable that it would be widely seen as basically confirming popular prejudices. There was a huge intellectual gulf between Feldstein or Boskin and the sweeping claims of Arthur Laffer; but in the public mind, they were in effect allies.