Past tense

An "IMF Staff Position Note" dated 12 Feb 2010: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy by Olivier Blanchard, Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, and Paolo Mauro. (PDF, 19 pages)

I thought the table of contents was interesting, in particular headings II thru IV:

I got to page 7 before I had to stop reading and start writing.

The "What We Thought We Knew" section is all past tense:

1. Stable and low inflation was presented as the primary, if not exclusive, mandate of central banks...
2. There was an increasing consensus that inflation should not only be stable, but very low...
3. Monetary policy increasingly focused on the use of one instrument, the policy interest rate...

and so on, until we come to "The Great Moderation". Here, the text starts in the past tense:

6. Increased confidence that a coherent macro framework had been achieved was surely reinforced by the “Great moderation,”...
   

Halfway into it, however, they offer their current support for past analysis:

But the reaction of advanced economies to largely similar oil price increases in the 1970s and the 2000s supports the improved-policy view. Evidence suggests that more solid anchoring of inflation expectations, plausibly due to clearer signals and behavior by central banks, played an important role in reducing the effects of these shocks on the economy.

I thought that was funny. In context, the change in perspective stands out sharply -- unless you still support the past analysis, perhaps. But if you start your story by saying

The crisis clearly forces us to question our earlier assessment.

then you ought to follow Descartes and doubt everything. You don't get to keep the parts you like and rebuild from there. That's not how it works. Science is a method.