this recession had got a lot worse, we would have seen two major changes: much more government intervention in the economy, and a lot more concentration in economics in trying to understand what went wrong.
Assuming I’m right and, fundamentally, the recession is over—a severe recession but maybe not much greater than the 1981 recession, or those in the nineteen-seventies—I think you are not going to see a huge increase in the role of government in the economy.…
Economists will be struggling to understand how this crisis happened and what you can do to head another one off in the future, but it will be nothing like the revolution in the role of government and in thinking that dominated the economics profession for decades after the Great Depression.
If the problems of economic life changed frequently and radically, and lacked a large measure of continuity in their essential nature, there could not be a science of economics.
An essential element of a science is the cumulative growth of knowledge, and that cumulative character could not arise if each generation of economists faced fundamentally new problems calling for entirely new methods of analysis…
[Economics] will continuously be confronted with new circumstances which call for more than a routine application of standard knowledge. Thus the energy crisis of the nineteen-seventies has provided much employment to economists, but it has not called for important changes in economic science…
The responsiveness of economics to environmental problems will naturally be more complete and more prompt, the more urgent the problems of the day. The response will also be more complete, the less developed the relevant body of economic analysis.
The responsiveness of macroeconomics to contemporary events is notorious. Keynes’s conquest in the nineteen-thirties was due to the fact that the neoclassical theory could not account for the persistent unemployment of that decade. A generation later, persistent inflation even with less than full employment was equally decisive in ending Keynes’s supremacy. If and when macroeconomics produces a good theory of the business cycle, its responsiveness to environmental changes will diminish sharply
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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