Over at Russ Roberts podcast interview with Tyler Cowen
Cowen: "I've met many journalists who understand microeconomics. I've hardly met any journalists who understand macroeconomics."
Me: do any economists understand macroeconomics? Is there a consensus on what causes business cycles (let alone the ability to predict)? Is there a consensus on the essentials for growth? To the degree there are popular theories, how do they compare to the popular ideas from 25 years ago?
Cowen: "I've met many journalists who understand microeconomics. I've hardly met any journalists who understand macroeconomics."
Me: do any economists understand macroeconomics? Is there a consensus on what causes business cycles (let alone the ability to predict)? Is there a consensus on the essentials for growth? To the degree there are popular theories, how do they compare to the popular ideas from 25 years ago?
HedgeFundGuy - am 2007-03-13 14:57
Steve (guest) meinte am 13. Mar, 17:30:
Paul Krugman give some good popular accounts of current macroeconomics, though since he has his political biases, I am not sure what the weak points are in his pieces. See his lengthy obit of Milton Friedman in the New York Review of Books, or his book, Peddling Prosperity.
HedgeFundGuy antwortete am 13. Mar, 20:53:
just joking
It was a rhetorical question. I don't think macroeconomists know the big 2 issues of macro: growth and cycles, what causes them. Sure, they agree on certain extreme influences: hyperinflation, no property rights. But generally a macroeconomics should be put in the closet, and treated as a sub-specialty like Game Theory, International Trade, Labor economics. This whole Micro/Macro taxonomy isn't helpful way to approach economics.
Douglas Knight (guest) meinte am 14. Mar, 19:00:
There's more to macro than business cycles. Sure, macro specialists should show more humility, but journalists probably need humility even more! Macro teaches us about a lot of things that governments cannot accomplish simply by fiat and these are very useful lessons.
Acad Ronin (guest) meinte am 15. Mar, 01:28:
cycles
What cycles? There is evidence consistent with GNP/GDP following a unit root process. I saw a study perhaps 20-30 years ago that found that the time between recessions followed a memory less distribution, the exponential I believe. The so called business cycle is just one damn thing after another.
Hedgehog (guest) antwortete am 15. Mar, 05:36:
There is more to it...
If we lived in a univariate world, where the only thing we could see were GNP/GDP, I would tend to agree that recessions are unpredictable. In contrast, we are likely to have some degree of predictability for components of a multivariate process even though, when viewed in isolation, those components behave like random walks. Think of cointegration as an extreme example.
