Haldane isn’t the only prominent nonacademic economist to think there are profound problems in macroeconomics. Paul Romer is a highly regarded macroeconomist who recently became chief economist at the World Bank. (It was Romer who is credited with having coined, in 2004, the famous slogan that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”) Last winter he, too, issued a lacerating critique of his field, titled “The Trouble With Macroeconomics.” His argument focuses on the question of “identification,” which is shorthand in the field for how economists identify the cause of an event. Identification is a huge deal for economics, because if you can’t tell if x, y or z caused something, you don’t know which of those variables to study or measure or change. The omission of finance and the role of money from economic models is the biggest weakness in the field, Romer believes. It is hard for noneconomists to get our heads around the fact that the dominant macroeconomic models (including the ones used by central banks) made no allowance for how money works — especially not for fluctuations in how much of it is around. Such an oversight seems weird, and entirely counterintuitive. But that’s what happened, and it played a big role in macroeconomists’ ability to, as Romer puts it, “dismiss mere facts.”

The Bank of England and the World Bank are two of the most important noncommercial banks in the world. It is striking, and exhilarating and scary too, that the chief economists of these two institutions each thinks that their trade is in crisis. Not so long ago, leading macroeconomists thought that the main part of their work was basically over. The Nobel winner Robert Lucas claimed as much in his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 2003. Macroeconomics, he said, “has succeeded: Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved.” That now looks wildly hubristic. Maybe the field is roughly where physics was at the end of the 19th century, when some scientists thought that their own field’s main problems had been solved, within a Newtonian framework that is now known to be inadequate to describe reality. Maybe, like physics in the 20th century, macroeconomics is about to have a heroic period. If it does, it will begin in the work of people like Romer and Haldane, who are unflinchingly willing to talk about its huge recent failures. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.