Ken Houghton notes that Stanford Professor and “Taylor Rule” founder John Taylor is blogging. (No RSS or Atom feed yet.) His charts are better than this one looks, though his data is clearly GIGO. (See the link at his post.) This blog was included as one of the 100 Best Blogs for Econ Students by […]
Robert Waldmann Brad DeLong just posted a very interesting Draft Henry George lecture. It contains ideas which I haven’t found written down before by Brad or by Krugman. I strongly recommend reading it (for one thing I don’t know how to cut and paste from it). People who have read the draft lecture are invited […]
Via Brad DeLong, Eric Falkenstein praises Macroeconomics with faint damns: Macroeconomics is the triumph of hope over experience, and has been no more successful than sociology. Insulting our betters will not put economists in good stead. As Paul Krugman frequently notes, “Economics is…not quite as hard as sociology.”* But Falkenstein makes up for this lapse, […]
John Quiggin finally makes explicit What Everyone Knows: that the clusterfuck that has been made of Macroeconomics is due largely to an attempt to leverage (insufficiently robust) Microeconomic Theory: the search for a macroeconomic theory founded on (roughly) neoclassical micro, which has been the main direction of macro research for 40 years or so, was […]
To often, we talk about models as if they are reality, instead of reflecting a reality that was approximated. At least forty economists, including at least three ‘Nobel’ Prize winners, know that: A rising tide lifts all boats only when labor and management bargain on relatively equal terms.
John Quiggin makes the broad case (link fixed). If you are then stuck with trying to present a Grand Unified Field Theory, you will inevitably lose (or, at best, reduce) the importance of all the agglomerations that follow from the presumption that the Rational Actor is the mean performer—ignoring that no one, including the economists […]
Our findings do not provide much support for the usefulness of monetary aggregates in forecasting inflation. See more at the St. Louis Fed. Did building realistic macroeconomic models just get a touch more difficult?
Dear Barry: The need for posts such as this one recurs because the large majority of economists are idiots. (Multiple exceptions noted—but not enough to change the truth of the initial statement.) As the regulatory reform report notes (quoted by PK at the last link above): In fact, enforcement of CRA was weakened during the […]
Via Eszter, there is one thing that is very clear from this graphic (duplicated below because I can’t figure out how to embed it): There is an excess of home-based internet capacity in the United States, for which people are definitionally paying too much. The question is whether this is a problem. If you argue […]
Come on, guys, somebody take it to the Next Step. Matt Y comes closer than anyone else to getting to the truth of the problem with Macroeconomics. Following Justin FoxSteven Levitt’s summary, Matt asks the next question: So why should it be that “in the current regime, if [macro models] are not meticulously constructed from […]