Applied appropriately and with a healthy dose of common sense, economics would have prepared us for the financial crisis and pointed us in the right direction to fix what caused it. But the economics we need is of the “seminar room” variety, not the “rule-of-thumb” kind.
如果能够结合必要的常识合理地应用，经济学可以让我们对金融危机未雨绸缪，并向我们指出修正危机祸根的正确方向。但是，我们需要的经济学是“讨论班”式的，不是“经验法则”式的。这是一种明白自身局限并承认正确做法取决于具体环境的经济学。