Mark Thoma recently wrote a piece on the failures of macroeconomics and the need for new thinking in macroeconomics. His main criticisms are as follows:
- Existing macroeconomic models failed to give warning about the financial crisis.
- The models failed to give us policy guidance.
- There is too much emphasis on representative agents.
- Macroeconomists did not think questions about financial markets were worth asking.
- During the Great Moderation, economists didn’t spend enough time thinking about why things were going well.
- In 2003, Robert Lucas proclaimed that depression-prevention policy had been solved and this sentiment was shared by others of importance within the profession thereby making it more difficult to get work on such topics published.
I should note that Thoma also criticizes the critics. He argues that the scorn leveled at dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models is misplaced. These models and techniques were developed to answer specific questions. Thus, we should…
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