The Trouble with Macroeconomics

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JamesR
Posts: 947
Joined: Sun Apr 21, 2013 9:08 pm

The Trouble with Macroeconomics

Post by JamesR »

https://ccl.yale.edu/sites/default/file ... nomics.pdf

A nice academic paper on the subject.

Loner
Posts: 221
Joined: Wed Jan 04, 2017 2:26 pm

Re: The Trouble with Macroeconomics

Post by Loner »

Thanks for sharing.

There's definitely some BS going on in economics. I remember asking or witnessing other students ask about "stochastic shocks", and what they were, etc., and such questions only generated anger and defensiveness (cue cognitive dissonance). From the article above:
when it came time for me to ask a question, I said (not even imagining that the concept wasn’t specific to this particular piece of thesis research) "What are these technology shocks?"
Ed tensed up physically like he had just taken a bullet. After a very awkward four or five seconds he growled "They’re that traffic out there." (We were in a room with a view of some afternoon congestion on a bridge that collapsed a couple decades later.)
Human capital theory is also the stuff of sects. Signaling theory has no place in classes (they never had in mine, and mentioning it only prompted, again, anger), and nearly no place in research, and yet, it seems obvious to anyone who has spent some time working that it explains to a large degree why workers get degrees. To quote Alasdair MacIntyre, suchs beliefs in human capital theory are "so unquestionably false that no one but a professional social scientist dominated by the conventional philosophy of science would ever have been tempted to believe them". It probably does not help that most economics professors have little working experience out of teaching exactly what they learned, to the point of re-using slides they got when they were students. Bryan Caplan has a great book about signaling, but I don't think academia will make more of it than a discussion piece.

Austrian theories also received no attention whatsoever in classes. I think it's because the austrians where math-light, and most economists seem to care mostly about making their model appear (mathematically) complicated.

There's good stuff in economics, you just need to search for it.

BRUTE
Posts: 3797
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2015 5:20 pm

Re: The Trouble with Macroeconomics

Post by BRUTE »

+1 Bryan Caplan
+1 Austrians

public choice is cool, as is game theory. lots of good stuff out of the Chicago school in general, although they're a bit more math heavy than Austrians.

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