FT Alphaville went trawling through the New York Times archives to look at what people were saying about monetary policy in 1929-33, and produced a wonderful piece that’s both deeply reassuring and deeply frustrating.

The thing that’s both reassuring and frustrating is how much it sounds just like the discussions and debates we have today.

OK, the reassuring part: as a card-carrying model-building economist, my justification for existence relies on the belief that the issues and fundamental stories in economics are fairly stable over time. Not completely stable — I don’t think you want to apply modern Keynesian theory to the Roman Empire under Diocletian — but stable enough that, say, major financial crises generations apart share many of the same features, that a liquidity trap in the 1930s is recognizably the same kind of animal as a liquidity trap in the 21st century.

An alternative view would be that everything depends on the specifics, that our modern service-dominated economy, with globalized manufacturing and the Internet and all that, is nothing like the economy of our grandfathers, and all the rules are different. And over long enough stretches that is true — as I said, Diocletian’s economy, or indeed any economy dominated by agriculture, probably was completely different. But Keynes’s and FDR’s economy, it turns out, was enough like ours that the same stylized models still apply.

Now the disturbing part: since we’ve seen this before, since we have models that are good enough to make sense of both the past and the present, it’s a huge failure of economics as a practical discipline that we’re hashing over the same debates our grandfathers had (and making many of the same mistakes). Some of this reflects the refusal of policy makers to listen to what we know; but regular readers won’t be surprised when I say that a lot of it reflects the deliberate forgetting of many economists, and the resulting lack of any clear professional guidance.

And so, having refused to learn from history, we are indeed doomed to repeat it.