BOSTON: The deepening economic downturn has been hard on a lot of people, but

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it has been hard in a particular way for economists.

With very few exceptions, economists did not see the crisis coming. Some warned of a housing bubble, but almost none foresaw the resulting cataclysm. An entire field of experts dedicated to studying the behavior of markets failed to anticipate what may prove to be the biggest economic collapse of our lifetime. And now that we are in the middle of it, many frankly admit that they are not sure how to prevent things from getting worse.

As a result, there is a sense among some economists that as they try to figure out how to fix the economy, they are also trying to fix their own profession.

The discussion has played out in blogs and opinion pieces, in congressional testimony, at conferences and in working papers. A field that has increasingly been defined, at least in the public eye, by quirky studies explaining the economics of our everyday lives has turned decisively, in the past couple months, to more traditional economic turf.

At economics powerhouses like Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, faculty lunch discussions that once might have centered on theoretical questions and the finer points of Bayesian analysis are now given over to dissecting bailout plans. Long-held ideas — about the stability of the business cycle, the resilience of markets and the power of monetary policy — are being challenged.

”Everyone that I know in economics, and particularly in the world of academic finance and academic macroeconomics, is going back to the drawing board,” said David Laibson, a Harvard economist. “There are very, very, very few economists who can be proud.”

A few suggest, as well, that there are deeper problems in the discipline. Economists are asking aloud whether the field has grown too specialisd, too abstract — and too divorced from the way real-world economies actually function. Te analytical tools of the trade offer little help in a crisis, and have little to say about the sort of collapses that led to this one.

“You can’t just say, ‘I have a model for tremors that works great — I just can’t explain earthquakes,’” said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economist who has studied financial crises.

Historically, periods of severe economic distress have shaken up economics and helped drive its evolution. And in the midst of the current crash, there is an urgent search for approaches and models that might better illuminate ways to speed the recovery and forecast future meltdowns and that might help us better understand the unruly flow of money.

The question of how well economists can model crises takes on an even greater importance because of the central role economic experts will play in Barack Obama’s administration — not only at the Federal Reserve, the Council of Economic Advisers and the Treasury, but in the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a newly formed body created by the president-elect and headed by the former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker.

“In my lifetime as an economist I’ve never seen economists so engaged by what’s going on,” said Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago.

This is something of a change. The topics economists study often have little to do with the average person’s economic life. As in almost any academic field, practical relevance sometimes has little to do with judgments about what questions most interesting and rewarding.

This divergence was exacerbated, many economists say, during the span of almost uninterrupted economic growth that began in the late 1980s, a period when many practical questions in the making of economic policy came to be seen as having been settled. For years, leading economic figures like Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan argued that the US had more or less brought the business cycle to heel.

Partly as a result, many bright young economists turned to questions that were quirkier, or more purely mathematical. To the wider public, the most visible ramification of this was the boom in papers and books about the economics of everyday life.

For those who stayed on more traditional economic turf, however, the trend was toward narrower and more abstract questions. Some economists have suggested that this focus may account for the failure of so many to see the warning signs of the financial crisis and to predict the size and scope of its fallout.

Others see a broader problem, in that the sort of behavior that has been seen in everyone from home buyers to investment bankers in recent months is hard to fit into economists’ analytical tools. The models used by macroeconomists do a poor job of describing the messiness of an actual market in flux.

As a result, economists end up oversimplifying such situations when they model them — or simply avoid studying them at all.

“We have a very restrictive set of language and tools, and we tend to work on the problems that are easily addressed with those tools,” said Jeremy Stein, a financial economist at Harvard. “Sometimes that means we focus on silly questions and ignore greater ones.”