Secular Stagnation and Retiring Baby Boomers: Can Economists Get Anything Right?

Suppose our leading physicists told us that fire will either lead to high temperatures that will cause burns or very low temperatures that would lead to hypothermia and frostbite, they couldn't be sure. This would be pretty much the state of macroeconomic debate in the United States and the world.

For decades we have heard endless accounts of how the retirement of the baby boomers was going to devastate the economy. The story was that the cost of their Medicare and Social Security would be an...