The new heavyweight macro critics
I got tired of lambasting macroeconomics a while ago, and the "macro wars" mostly died down in the blogosphere around when the recovery from the Great Recession kicked in. But recently, there have been a number of respected macroeconomists posting big, comprehensive criticisms of the way academic macro gets done. Some of these criticisms are more forceful than anything we bloggers blogged about back in the day! Anyway, I thought I'd link to a couple here. First, there's Paul Romer's latest, " The Trouble With Macroeconomics ". The title is an analogy to Lee Smolin's book " The Trouble With Physics ". Romer basically says that macro (meaning business-cycle theory) has become like the critics' harshest depictions of string theory - a community of believers, dogmatically following the ideas of revered elders and ignoring the data. The elders he singles out are Bob Lucas, Ed Prescott, and Tom Sargent. Romer says that it's obvious that m...