AN ECONOMIC HISTORY DISSERTATION SEEKING A WRITER.  In The Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore finds some provocative quotes from Defenders of the Keynesian Faith.

The Godfather of the neo-Keynesians, Paul Samuelson, was the lead critic of the supposed follies of Reaganomics. He wrote in a 1980 Newsweek column that to slay the inflation monster would take "five to ten years of austerity," with unemployment of 8% or 9% and real output of "barely 1 or 2 percent." Reaganomics was routinely ridiculed in the media, especially in the 1982 recession. That was the year MIT economist Lester Thurow famously said, "The engines of economic growth have shut down here and across the globe, and they are likely to stay that way for years to come."

The economy would soon take flight for more than 80 consecutive months. Then the Reagan critics declared what they once thought couldn't work was actually a textbook Keynesian expansion fueled by budget deficits of $200 billion a year, or about 4%-5% of GDP.

Robert Reich, now at the University of California, Berkeley, explained that "The recession of 1981-82 was so severe that the bounce back has been vigorous." Paul Krugman wrote in 2004 that the Reagan boom was really nothing special because: "You see, rapid growth is normal when an economy is bouncing back from a deep slump."

Mr. Krugman was, for once, at least partly right. How could Reagan not look good after four years of Jimmy Carter's economic malpractice?

The current recession, or reset, or what have you, might be objectively different from the aftermath of the Great Society that culminated with Whip Inflation Now and malaise.  Some of the microfoundations are different, for instance I was in the middle of researching technology diffusion in steel production at the same time that the chin-pullers were bemoaning the decline and fall of Big Steel.  The sense I had was of an extremely lively corpse, as each closure of an inefficiently small or mislocated traditional steel plant seemed to be accompanied by startups of three to five electric furnace steel plants, the minimills.  That source of creative destruction is probably dated; perhaps we should be looking at new oil extraction technologies or improved manufacturing methods for oil-country goods.

Mr Moore's point, however, is that Our President's economic initiatives (and it is difficult to view the first few months, with solid Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, as anything but full-on Keynesian spending, the quibbling over shovel-readiness or not) and perhaps he is providing intellectual ammunition applicable to the contemporary reality of prolonged unemployment in the eight to nine percent range and real economic growth in the neighborhood of one percent.

There is something that is genuinely different this time. It isn't the nature of the crisis Mr. Obama inherited, but the nature of his policy prescriptions. Reagan applied tax cuts and other policies that, yes, took the deficit to unchartered peacetime highs.

But that borrowing financed a remarkable and prolonged economic expansion and a victory against the Evil Empire in the Cold War. What exactly have Mr. Obama's deficits gotten us?

Thus the research opportunity. If the microfoundations are different, the effectiveness of a policy is likely to be different.