'Needed: New Economic Frameworks for a Disappointing New Normal'

Brad DeLong ends a post on the need for "New Economic Frameworks for a Disappointing New Normal" with:

... Our government, here in the U.S. at least, has been starved of proper funding for infrastructure of all kinds since the election of Ronald Reagan. Our confidence in our institutions’ ability to manage aggregate demand properly is in shreds–and for the good reason of demonstrated incompetence and large-scale failure. Our political system now has a bias toward austerity and idle potential workers rather than toward expansion and inflation. Our political system now has a bias away from desirable borrow-and-invest. And the equity return premium is back to immediate post-Great Depression levels–and we also have an enormous and costly hypertrophy of the financial sector that is, as best as we can tell, delivering no social value in exchange for its extra size.

We badly need a new framework for thinking about policy-relevant macroeconomics given that our new normal is as different from the late-1970s as that era’s normal was different from the 1920s, and as that era’s normal was different from the 1870s.

But I do not have one to offer.