Three intense weeks at The Mount Washington Hotel in the New Hampshire resort of Bretton Woods (and this, remember, was before the widespread introduction of air conditioning) created the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and a relatively stable system of exchange rates that lasted 30 years.
John Maynard Keynes - the economist who led the British delegation and suffered a minor heart attack racing up the hotel's stairs - added genius and an other-worldly glamour to the mix.
The reason why many reach for the rose-tinted spectacles when recalling Bretton Woods is because it marked a rare moment of international co-operation. It also played a role in ushering in three decades of heady economic growth in the US and a resurgent Germany. Though Keynes was unhappy with parts of the agreement, he was determined not to waste a crisis that makes the past three years appear a blissful stroll in comparison.
It was in a similar spirit that more than 200 economists and policy-makers past and present gathered in the same hotel last weekend. In a more cerebral version of television's The Krypton Factor, delegates were invited to think about why more economists didn't spot trouble brewing and how economics should change as a result.
The invitations were issued by the Institute of New Economic Thinking, a group funded by George Soros, the billionaire speculator turned philanthropist, and the Center for International Governance Innovation, bankrolled by Jim Balsillie, co-founder of the company behind the BlackBerry.
Those fingerprints led some in the America's populist Tea Party movement to brand the gathering a scurrilous attempt by foreigners - Balsillie is Canadian - to undermine US capitalism. That accusation was wide of the mark but there did appear to be just one delegate representing Wall Street banks and the conference would have benefited from more being there.
As Larry Summers, President Barack Obama's former economic adviser, observed, anger at the banks does not amount to an economic policy. So how much new economic thinking got done?
The biggest obstacle was that the present kept intruding on the future. The setting was a constant reminder that when historians come to write about the crisis, the distance between 2008 and 2011 will be measured in months, not years; pages, not chapters.
The fires burning in the autumn of 2008 have been extinguished. But policy-makers - whether at the Bank of England, the US Treasury or the European Central Bank - are still firmly in the trenches.
It was reflected in the disappointingly predictable subjects chosen for some panel discussions: Europe's debt crisis, the rebalancing of the global economy and how to regulate the world's biggest banks. And it wasn't just the ghosts of Keynes and Harry Dexter White, the US's chief negotiator in 1944, reminding everyone of their proximity to the autumn of 2008.
It's that, in some important ways, the world is similar to that of 2007. Bill White, who as chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements rang the bell in 2004 on the dangers posed by low interest rates and the imbalances between China and the US, pointed out that they're both still with us.
We've had nothing resembling a second Bretton Woods since the crisis, and, given the global nature of capital and investment flows today, some doubt it's possible. Barry Eichengreen, an expert on the Great Depression, reminded everyone that the central achievement so far has been in averting a second one. The natural impulse, whether in policy-making or economic thought, is to revert to what worked before as memories of the crisis recede.
There were some voices at the conference who laid out new directions for economics. Ken Rogoff urged economists to collaborate more with historians and the messy reality they try to explain. It's an approach used by Rogoff in This Time It's Different, his new book with Carmen Reinhart, who trawled through ancient archives to show that rather than aberrations in otherwise stable economic systems, financial crises are common. Summers argued economists should start taking psychological concepts such as confidence and self-fulfilling prophecies seriously.
Three days at a Bretton Woods hotel did not remake the world. And, despite some Tea Party fears, it was never going to. But forcing the economics profession to questions key assumptions about human behaviour has to be encouraged. One of the strongest lessons of the crisis is that an unquestioning consensus is never right for all that long.