摘要：In his 2003 Presidential Address to the American Eco- nomic Association, Robert Lucas stated: Macroeconomics was born as a distinct fi eld in the 1940’s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and expertise that we hoped would prevent the recurrence of that economic disaster. My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all prac- tical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades. There remain important gains in welfare from better fi scal policies, but I argue that these are gains from providing people with better incentives to work and to save, not from better fi ne-tuning of spending fl ows. Taking U.S. performance over the past 50 years as a benchmark, the potential for welfare gains from better long-run, supply-side policies exceeds by far the potential from further improvements in short-run de- mand management.
