In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession, there was a lot of talk about the failure of economics and the need for a new paradigm. That was the context in which Paul Krugman wrote what became a famous essay on saltwater versus freshwater economics (“How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?”); the filmmaker Charles Ferguson, in his documentary “Inside Job,” unmasked several prominent economists as highly paid Wall Street consultants; and George Soros set up the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which was intended to finance research that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy.

It was an exciting time to be involved in economics. For my own part, I wrote a book about market failures and economic theory, seeking to elucidate how seemingly rational behavior at the individual level can scale up into collective madness. (That’s where the name of this blog came from.) And, in 2010, I went to Hyde Park, the spiritual home of free-market thinkers, to talk to some high priests of the Chicago School, the most eminent of whom was Gary Becker. He died on Saturday, at the age of eighty-three. In a post on Monday morning, I put up my interview with Becker in full, but here I want to draw attention to one of his answers. It came in reply to a question about whether we would see a historic transformation in economics to match the one in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when Keynesianism came to the fore. This is what Becker said:

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.… 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.

Four years later, it is looking more and more like Becker was right. At the level of policymaking, following an initial spurt of stimulus spending, the liberal moment quickly faded. On both sides of the Atlantic, Keynesian gave way to austerity policies and a conservative backlash. This was particularly obvious in Europe, where a currency crisis gave the upper hand to budget-cutters, but it was also evident in the United States, where the Tea Party had its coming-out party and fiscal stimulus gave way to fiscal drag. Liberals and progressives, far from celebrating the onset of a new New Deal, were forced to defend basic social-welfare policies such as unemployment benefits and food stamps.

As Krugman pointed out in a column last week entitled “Why Economics Failed,” this right-wing backlash was hardly spontaneous. “Powerful political factions find that bad economic analysis serves their objectives,” Krugman wrote. “Most obviously, people whose real goal is dismantling the social safety net have found promoting deficit panic an effective way to push their agenda.”

This strategy was particularly effective in the United Kingdom, where George Osborne’s efforts to rein in welfare spending and reduce the size of the government were widely regarded as unavoidable. But something similar happened in Europe, where Germany and its allies seized upon a euro crisis to force countries on the periphery to adopt conservative reforms, and in the United States, where for a time even the Obama Administration began using the language of austerity.

Inside of economics, too, Becker’s prediction proved prescient. If you get a degree in the subject today, the stuff you learn is pretty much the same as what was being taught before the financial crisis. Some of the better universities offer courses about the crisis—Krugman teaches one at Princeton, for instance—but the basic curriculum and textbooks are largely unchanged. Despite protests from students in several countries, about the only serious effort I’ve seen to reform the curriculum is the CORE project in the United Kingdom, which is sponsored by I.N.E.T., run by Wendy Carlin, of University College London, and supported by various government officials. (Last year, I gave a talk at a workshop marking the launch of CORE.)

In the making of economic policy, too, the changes have been incremental rather than revolutionary. Institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Federal Reserve are more open to arguments questioning deregulation, capital mobility, and rising inequality than they used to be. But the theoretical models that these institutions rely on haven’t changed very much. If you read the minutes from Federal Open Market Committee meetings, you will find the discussion couched in terms of inflation targeting and interest-rate rules—the same framework that Fed policymakers were using when they failed to spot the housing and credit bubbles. The situation at the European Central Bank is even more stark. The institution still relies on a forecasting model that doesn’t explicitly include a financial sector.

To some extent, this inertia is inevitable. In economics, progress has always been gradual. Some years ago, in a study of how American economists reacted to the Great Depression, Barnard’s Perry Mehrling questioned the common perception that there was a sudden and mass conversion to Keynesianism. The reality, Mehrling discovered, was that most economists continued to teach what they had always taught. For Keynesianism to take the ascendancy, it needed a new generation of economists to mature.