If 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. ]]>