Has economics run out of big new ideas?

At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, held this year in New Orleans, wonks discussed everything from inflation and technological progress to the economics of crime and the energy transition. Yet those looking for big breakthroughs would have left unsatisfied. Most new work focused on rigorous analysis of data or painstaking theoretical modelling. As one attendee noted, such modelling often fails to produce surprising results, since it tends to reflect the assumptions that go into it.