Five years ago, macroeconomics texts reflected confidence in the great moderation, which began in 1983 and ended in 2007. The dominant paradigm was the new classical model, which predicts that economic downturns are self-correcting. The guiding principle of monetary policy was the Taylor Rule, which, though not conceived in the tradition of the new classical economics, served the country well until it was abandoned in the last decade. The current economy is, by comparison, afflicted with persistent, low levels of employment that seem to invalidate the new classical model. The Taylor rule has been abandoned for one round after another of quantitative easing, and the once-dominant Keynesian model has been brought back to life for the purpose of giving intellectual cover to fiscal-stimulus remedies.