Do you remember the winter of debt?

In late 2010 and early 2011, the U.S. economy had barely begun to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Around 9 percent of the labor force was still unemployed; long-term unemployment was especially severe, with more than 6 million Americans having been out of work for 6 months or more. You might have expected the continuing employment crisis to be the focus of most economic policy discussion.

But no: Washington was obsessed with debt. The Simpson-Bowles report was the talk of the town. Paul Ryan’s impassioned (and, of course, hypocritical) denunciations of federal debt won him media adulation and awards. And between the capital’s debt obsession, the Republican takeover of the House, and a hard right turn in state governments, America was about to embark on a period of cutbacks in government spending unprecedented in the face of high unemployment.

Some of us protested bitterly against this policy turn, arguing that a period of mass unemployment was no time for fiscal austerity. And we were mostly right. Why only “mostly”? Because it’s becoming increasingly doubtful whether there’s any right time for fiscal austerity. The obsession with debt is looking foolish even at full employment.

That’s the message I take from Olivier Blanchard’s presidential address to the American Economic Association. To be fair, Blanchard — one of the world’s leading macroeconomists, formerly the extremely influential chief economist of the I.M.F. — was cautious in his pronouncements, and certainly didn’t go all MMT and say that debt never matters. But his analysis nonetheless makes the Fix the Debt fixation (yes, they’re still out there) look even worse than before.